Dear readers, 

The second piece that I wrote for the Nass was a piece about the summer I spent in Iran visiting my relatives before my freshman year at Princeton. It struck me even then as a country on the edge of disaster; it has now toppled off of the tightrope. The US-Israeli war on Iran does not come as a surprise. I wonder, in the last two years of political havoc, how the Nass might reflect a larger American reality, though we so often think of ourselves as isolated and particular. 

I must ask how, in the face of war perpetrated by the very country we live in, we are able to conduct our campus lives, thinking of love and homework and jobs. I have not made my mind up yet whether this is a good or a bad thing: whether it is a testament to the human capacity to survive, or the human capacity to ignore what is not immediately in front of us. These days, I tend to turn towards the latter. 

I could write here of my devastation. Of the specific limbo of death and waiting-for-death. Of my aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins in Iran, of the way their houses shake and their lives which we have decided, explicitly or implicitly, are worth less than ours. 

The Palestinian poet Marwan Makoul said: 

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political

I must listen to the birds

and in order to hear the birds

the warplanes must be silent.

There are no warplanes here, Nass. We have sent them elsewhere. What will you write in this silence? 

With love,
Narges Anzali, Co-Managing Editor