A Persian New Year Beginning with COVID-19

In her personal essay from the March 2020 lockdown, “A Persian New Year Beginning with COVID-19,” Iranian novelist Poupeh Missaghi writes about the pandemic’s influence on mental health by exploring her own psyche and memories. Having relocated to the United States in 2010, Missaghi reflects on how the trauma of growing up during war in Tehran intersects with her isolation in her Brooklyn apartment during the peak of the pandemic. Constant sirens recall the warning sirens from her childhood in Tehran, which once compelled her family to hide or flee the city. Missaghi lost her grandfather during Persian New Year in the first wave of the pandemic, and she witnessed the impact of his death on her father. For Missaghi, the stress of COVID-19 amplifies the stress of pre-pandemic life, which was already marked by wars, displacement, environmental destruction, and rising inequality.

A mass mourning of Orthodox Jews in New York during quarantine unexpectedly triggers a strong emotional response. It is the sound of police helicopters searching for participants of this mass gathering during COVID-19 that brings her back to her past, to the funeral of Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. A news reporter, commenting on the sound of the helicopter carrying his body, remarked, “the sound you hear is the sound of the carrier of death.” With her family fractured by conflict in their homeland and dispersed across the globe, the COVID-19 protocols are reminders to Missaghi that they have not truly escaped instability and death.