Stories of war and the fight for freedom

Can 18 people fit into a four-seater car? It's a disturbing proposition, but for many smugglers on the Iranian-Afghan border, the answer is a resounding yes. 

What at first sounds like a sketch-show premise is, for the narrator, a stark reality. She is not one of the people being packed in, piled on top of one another in a car that reeks of human waste. She is there only to observe, to understand how those who cannot cross the border legally are forced to do it. Even so, the scene horrifies her, perhaps all the more because she has had it easy, crossing legally between Iran and Afghanistan her whole life.

The narrator is author Aliyeh Ataei, born in 1981. Her book, "Im Land der Vergessenen" ("In the Land of the Forgotten"), is now available in German, translated by Nuschin Maryam Mameghanian-Prenzlow and published by Luchterhand. It was originally published in Persian in 2021 by the renowned Tehran-based publishing house Cheshmeh, as were Ataei's previous books, and was named Book of the Year in Iran. 

To avoid misunderstandings, Ataei makes clear in the foreword, which is not included in the original Persian edition, that the nine stories in this collection are not fictional. Nor are they autofictional, but the pure truth, the author's own experiences and observations. 

She writes about herself and her family, about her childhood and young adult life caught between war and the fight for freedom. Her writing is highly authentic and direct, using clear, sober language better suited to her topic than metaphor-rich narrative prose. 

The Iran-born, Paris-based Ataei, whose family is originally from Afghanistan, writes: 

"Home was an abstract concept for me. Even here, sitting in this café waiting for a coffee, I fought to find some connection to Kabul. But I couldn't. It was as if home, for the exile, was nothing more than a form without content, something he is constantly trying to fill."

Across generations, for decades, Afghanistan has been a country at war, lurching from one occupation to another, its population under perpetual authoritarian rule. The brief period between the Taliban's removal from power and their return did little to change this.

And Iran? Around 3.5 million Afghan refugees live there, mostly in appalling conditions, facing poverty and constant racism. The government in Tehran is currently planning to deport more than half of them. 

And yet, at one point, Ataei describes Tehran, where she lived until she emigrated to Paris in 2023, as a city of freedom. Given the conditions in Iran, especially for women, this may seem surprising, but it makes sense when compared to what she recounts about Afghanistan. 

Women in the fight against authoritarianism

In contrast to this is the foreword, in which Ataei recounts how, during the "Women, Life, Freedom" protests, she would listen to the voices of women and gunfire from the streets and wonder whether the women demonstrating would still be alive tomorrow. She admires their courage and gives them a literary voice. 

Almost all of the stories follow the experiences of women, spanning from the early 1980s to about 2017. As well as exploring issues of identity, the stories show the many ways authoritarianism impacts the lives of women, and how they resist, even if only through small, private acts. 

The women's life freedom movement was triggered specifically by the murder of a young Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, by Iranian security forces. But if that had not happened, there would have been another trigger. 

Ataei's book also makes that clear: a society that systematically disadvantages women has no future and cannot survive in the long term because the resistance that builds up on countless levels will eventually become too great. 

"In the Land of the Forgotten" is one of those rare literary successes that shows how literature can act as a seismograph, anticipating and tracing what is simmering beneath the surface of a society. 

Aliyeh Ataei: "Im Land der Vergessenen"  
Translated from the Persian by Nuschin Maryam Mameghanian-Prenzlow
Luchterhand Verlag (Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe)
September 2025
192 pages