Nowruz is the "life" in Woman, Life, Freedom

Or how I celebrate this particularly bittersweet Iranian new year and the arrival of spring far from Iran

I have wept in blazing solitude with you

For the sake of the living

And have sung the most beautiful of songs

In the darkest of graveyards

For the dead of this year

Were the most loving of the living.

Ahmad Shamlou

Translated by Niloufar Talebi 

Ever since arriving in Italy more than 15 years ago, I have struggled with the arrival of spring. Not the season, the budding of trees and warmer temperatures, happening ever sooner each year. But the precise day of its beginning; the spring equinox, usually happening on March 20th, which marks Nowruz (aka Norouz), the Iranic  holiday celebrating the new year.

Holidays in general can be hard for many people for all sorts of reasons, but when you’re an immigrant a pain lurks at the bottom of your stomach during the holidays even if everything else in your life is fine. 

My ache during spring is very similar to my ache during Christmas. I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas. I don’t have Christmas memories or traditions I can share with those around me, and most importantly I’m often not included in the Christmas celebrations of those around me, especially in Italy where Christmas is strictly a family tradition. 

But I’ve come to love Christmas, even if it doesn’t love me back much. I have taken the trouble to learn about it, even if there are still many things I don’t know about it.

Nowruz, however, is a different story. Like all Iranians and Afghans, both at home and in the large diaspora, I grew up knowing and cherishing everything about this ancient holiday. How it celebrates the reawakening of earth with meticulous respect for nature, how it occurs at the beginning of the zodiac, the precise moment of vernal equinox. And how to set the Haft Seen table — with 7 edible elements beginning with S in farsi, each symbolizing health, beauty, greenness and abundance of agriculture, sunrise, wisdom and old age and love.

But what makes me ache with nostalgia about Nowruz isn’t really any of these. It’s that Nowruz, like Christmas, is so much about the atmosphere, the vibe, the mood. While the heralds of Christmas are the little lights and tinsels and holly, with the smell of gingerbread cookies, cinnamon, chocolate and mulled wine, Norouz arrives with waves upon waves of flowers. Fresh sprouts of grains, bowls of goldfish sparkling in mirrors, toasted nuts in saffron and lemon, the sound of traditional musical instruments and that very specific smell of Haft Seen table; a combo of vinegar, sumac and sweet wheat pudding, samanu. 

Artwork by Maryam Tafsiri

None of this exists out of Iran. Late March days are usually dull, with some exceptional sunny days, but it’s mostly chilly and rainy (Marzo pazzerello as they say in Italy, crazy March). People go around, doing their jobs, planning important projects for April and May. It’s difficult to take time off in the middle of all this normality to celebrate something this special. We in the diaspora usually gather for meals and parties anyway, our jobs and western commitments permitting. 

What we do outside Iran sometimes is quite different from what we used to do for Nowruz inside Iran. There, we would’ve spent days on eid-didani, visiting the elders of the family on days on end, munching on Nowruz sweets and ajil (mixture of nuts and dry fruits). Here we throw parties and dance. Or at least we used to, as far as I know. I haven’t been to one of these for years now. They were big parties, held in event venues or clubs, with lots of over-dressed strangers, all dancing to loud Iranian pop music until early morning. Sure, the dancing was fun, fabulous, as we need to let that energy to dance to Iranian pop music out of our system at least once a year. But truth be told, at its heart Nowruz is not an extrovert holiday like New Year’s Eve. There’s something intimate and domestic about it. Just like the Iranian architecture where the good stuff is saved for the indoors. 

Nowruz, which literally means “the new day”, is when a new year begins, less than 4 months after the “normal” new year has begun. It is a new chance at starting afresh. Here there could be a debate whether there’s in fact anything “normal” for a year to begin in the dark and cold heart of winter. My normal new year, although as unrecognized and unacknowledged as the rest of our traditions, remains the beginning of spring

 At the beginning of 2023 I made a whole case against making resolutions, but I think it’s a good moment to look at what happened last year.

The year that passed was the first of a century. One Thousand Four Hundred and One. I spent the First Year away from Iran, as the previous 15 ones, but Iran expanded inside me perhaps further than any of the nearly 38 years of my life. 

It was the very last days of summer. A young woman was killed*, for the hideous crime of having left a few hair strands out of her compulsory hijab. And then the world was set on fire. I was set on fire, we were all set on a fire that has been burning and blazing and enlightening our lives as we knew it to the cry of zan, zendegi, azadi.

Woman, life, freedom,

Woman, life, freedom,

Woman, life, freedom. 

In the First Year, streets and neighborhoods and cities and the whole entire nation, together with those of us peppered around the world rose up in revolution. In the First Year, we brought our female bodies to the light, unscared, fed up and furious. Liberated. 

In the First Year we witnessed horrors that should be banned for the human experience on earth. We saw fathers dancing on the grave of the murdered sons while holding a cake for their birthday. We saw the bodies of children shot dead kept at home among blocks of ice retrieved from neighbors, so that the body wouldn’t be stolen before the burial. We saw boys and girls blinded by bullets shot in the eye, we saw bodies pierced with thousands of them. We saw little girls poisoned at schools, over and over and over and again. 

We witnessed so many other horrors, that no dystopian movie or novel has had the imagination to depict. And not just in the First Year, but also in the previous decades. 

And yes, I know we’re in the process of a revolution, and I know, with absolute certainty, with all the cells of my being, that in the end we will be victorious. Free. I know — I have said more than anyone — that Nowruz is precisely the “life” part in “Woman, life, freedom”, but now, right now, I want to acknowledge our exhaustion. My exhaustion. Our collective grief. The thought of some 600 empty seats at the Haft Seen tables this year.

And the rage, the helplessness, and the unbearable weight of responsibility and guilt of those of us outside Iran to be the voice of the murdered, the tortured and the grieving. To make the world give a damn, beyond cutting off a few strands of hair and feeling sorry for us as if we were another species, who by now must be used to our troublesome land in that embattled part of the world where our people live. “A resilient nation”. Resilience, a cruel joke disguised as a compliment. When there’s no other way and you’re not yet dead, you have no choice but to be resilient. Don’t dress this curse as a virtue.

In the First Year, like so many other Iranian women, in the words of a friend, “I became a woman all over again, and yet I liberated myself from being a woman”. 

Artwork by Simsagh

Tonight, next to the Haft Seen table adorned with symbols of health, beauty, greenness, sunrise, wisdom, old age and love, we welcome spring. The sun enters the first sign of the zodiac, Aries, at 00:54:27 on Tuesday March 21st in Tehran, which is at 22:24:27 on Monday, March 20th 2023 in Rome. No matter where we are, we take a moment to silently make a wish for the new year in our hearts. I know many of us will take a moment to pray for freedom, with the thought of all those empty seats, blinded eyes, imprisoned souls and tortured bodies sharp in our throats, like shards of glass. 

O turner of hearts and sight;

O master of day and night;

O changer  of year and state; 

Change our state to the best state.

This is an old Nowruz prayer in Arabic. Although it’s beautifully moving and majestically poetic, in recent years I’ve heard many Iranians refuse to read it because it’s in Arabic. I think it’s a missed opportunity and a misinformed nationalistic crap. My grandparents always read it, and so will I.  On every Nowruz as long as I’m alive. 

Tonight I’ll pray “Hawel halena ela ahsan elhal.” Change our state to the best state, and then, to make that prayer come true we’ll all chant:

JIN, JIAN, AZADI!

ZAN, ZENDEGI, AZADI.

WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM.

Nowruz mobarak!

*Mahsa Jina Amini

To end on a sweeter note, here’s a Nowruz recipe round up on Epicurious where you can find the first ever sneak peek at my book Pomegranates & Artichokes with a recipe for saffron and lemon toasted pistachios.