It was a regular school day in the winter of 1991. I was a middle schooler in Ahwaz, the capital of Khuzistan, an oil-rich province and an epicenter of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) in southwestern Iran. I was beginning to sense the taste of a more normal life: fewer food-ration lines, fewer scenes of mourning, no sharing of public space with soldiers and camouflaged military vehicles. The sky was gray and promising rain. In Khuzistan, rain is a blessing.
Then came the black rain: an oily substance that showered people, animals, plants and soil with toxic matter extracted from the oil fields beneath our feet and released into the air as Kuwaiti oil refineries were struck in the next war to engulf the region.
For people on the ground, war does not stop when it ends on paper. As a child raised amid war and displacement, uncertainty and subliminal anxiety felt natural to me. I also knew another war had begun: Iraq had invaded Kuwait. I could not make sense of it. Had our own war really ended? The black rain answered before analysis could: The misery had only shifted. Though local histories differ, fossil capitalism and the imperialism that sustains it have produced a regional trauma carried across borders in memory, bodies and ecosystems.
The larger systems of fossil capitalism and militarism depend on one another. In the Middle East, Western imperial powers helped engineer a geopolitical order built on instability, mistrust, extraction and armed dependency. The U.S. thrives on this vicious cycle: Governments across the region sell oil and buy weapons, while American power profits from both. At the same time, authoritarian regimes across the region, including Iran, are enabled by and thrive on anti-imperial sentiments reanimated by America’s direct and indirect military power.
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For many ordinary Americans, if they think about foreign policy at all, debates about U.S. involvement in the region can seem like distant matters of policy, strategy or national interest. For half a billion people living in the Middle East, and for millions in the diaspora like me, those same debates are not abstract. Wars kill, traumatize and radicalize. Just as the Iran-Iraq War enabled the brutal political suppression of oppositional groups in the name of national security, the current war has consolidated and radicalized the Iranian government’s support base, exposing ordinary people to the indiscriminate violence of war and to the militarization of the society.
The trauma I describe is living trauma, renewed through sound, vibration, toxic air and communal dread because the machinery producing the suffering is still in motion. Air and Water Show weekend in Chicago is a nightmare for me. The sound and vibration of every jet reverberates in my body, carrying with it the screams of orphaned children and mourning parents and the suffering of chemical attack survivors. As I write, American and Israeli bombs have turned my country into an apocalyptic landscape of death, destruction and ecocide.
The current bombardment does not create a new wound so much as reactivate the generational trauma and militarization that structure life in Iran and across the Middle East. On one of the first days of the war, an American missile hit a school, killing around 175 people, mostly children. Soon after, jets began bombing the country’s infrastructure, hitting Tehran the hardest. Israel attacked central fuel depots in a city where 10 million people breathe the air and drink the water. The children woke up, if they slept at all, breathing a toxic mix of nitrogen and sulfur: another generation learning through its lungs, skin and nerves what fossil war feels like.
The U.S.-Israeli war alliance has rained hell on homes, public infrastructure, schools, hospitals, markets and heritage sites, reminding us that this violence attacks not only bodies but also the social, historical and material worlds through which communities endure. And while the news of suffering remains centered on Tehran, every city is under attack.
Many Americans seem surprised by how messy the region’s relationship to the United States is: close economic and political alliances, irreconcilable political hostilities, anti-American protests in the region and diaspora communities attaching themselves to American power, all at once. These are all ways of coping with a shared historical trauma in which American imperialism has been deeply implicated.
As an Iranian American and a university professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, my way of coping is not to deny the harm America has done to my country and region. My role is to historicize that relationship and to give voice to the pain it has produced.
Recently driving to the university with my 9-year-old son, I was reminded that trauma is generational in more than one sense: What is inherited is not only fear but also the obligation to remember. My son, proud of his Iranian heritage and fully at home in his American birth, suddenly yelled, “Stop, Mom. Do you see that bird on the mural? It is the sankofa bird. African people believe that to go forward, you need to look at the past.” I told him, “How beautiful, and how true. It is not only African wisdom; it is a value shared across many cultures. And do you know why I chose to study and teach archaeology and history?” He answered, “Because to go forward, one needs to look at the past?”
As an immigrant, I have tried to find redemption from the unending geopolitical trauma of the Middle East by channeling rage, loss and grief into acts of construction. I have tried to make something life-giving out of forces organized around destruction: advocating for freedom, dialogue, community, solidarity and diversity; and speaking against genocide and ecocide, racism and fascism. But these past weeks have brought me to my knees.
I am struggling to breathe, to sleep, to focus. I hear screams, breathe toxic chemicals, feel shattered glass falling from the sky. And yet I look up and see an American friend and colleague in solidarity. It is in recognizing our shared histories of violence and distress that maybe — only maybe — something strong enough to confront the hatred that divides us may still grow.
With the arrival of Nowruz, I recite the final line of a common New Year’s prayer, longing that the forces of good may turn these feelings into something better and that, as the year begins anew, everyone’s circumstances will do the same: حول حالنا الی احسن الحال.
Mehrnoush Soroush is an assistant professor of landscape archaeology in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago and director of the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes at the university’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures.
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