I had just emigrated. I was alone, confused, and emotionally adrift. I had found a job that was new and exciting to me, but also filled with anxiety and both physical and emotional exhaustion. I had finally managed to rent a small, beautiful, sunlit studio apartment of my own—a place that belonged entirely to me, whose only key could be found in my bag. A dream I had thought about for years had finally come true at the age of thirty-three.
A dear friend had come from Iran to Washington, D.C., for a group painting exhibition. I invited my artist friend over one evening to be a guest in my first home. We drank tea, ate chocolate sponge cake, and talked about Iran and America, and about the differences between life in the two countries. I was still bewildered myself, and the only thing I was certain of was that I no longer wanted to live in Iran.
Suddenly, I remembered that I had recently received a new CD by a singer with a distinctive voice who was trying to find his own style. I put the CD into my laptop, and the songs began to play until they reached “Toranj.” My friend said, “Turn it up.” We listened to it several times, each time louder than before. As we both looked out the window at the sunset and the night slowly enveloping the city, we sat there captivated and spellbound by “Toranj” by Mohsen Namjoo, saying nothing, simply listening.
Twenty years have passed since then, and the happy memories that my friends and I have of our beloved artists are collapsing and shattering, one after another.
A happy memory is more than a sweet image of the past. On an individual level, happy memories remind us that if life is not good in the present, it was not always this way. On a collective level, they remind a nation that its history is not merely a collection of defeats, wars, repression, and mourning; there have also been moments of happiness.
A society’s memory can be made up of the smallest and seemingly most insignificant things: a beautiful, tree-lined street where people used to walk; a movie theater where they saw their first film; a song they used to sing together; an actor they were in love with; festivals, cafés, schools, alleyways, universities, restaurants, tastes, clothes, smells, foods, and even jokes that were once popular among people.
Perhaps that is why happy memories are part of a nation’s historical identity. They give warmth and life to people’s collective past. Official history may tell us which government came to power in a particular year or what war took place, but collective memory tells us how people lived through that history and what flowed through their everyday lives. Which song was popular? What clothes were fashionable? Which restaurant was the place to be? What tastes and sensibilities did people have?
But this becomes far more significant when that memory is destroyed, humiliated, and turned into a source of regret.
I remember seeing an interview with Akbar Abdi years ago in which he was using extremely vulgar language. In an instant, all my happy childhood memories of his delightful performances passed before my eyes like a film, and I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth.
And for some time now, recalling my teenage years—most of which I remember through the voice of the famous singer Dariush Eghbali—has ceased to give me a pleasant feeling. Instead, it has become painful.
Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czech-born writer who, of course, came to regard himself primarily as a French writer, wrote a famous sentence in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
But the horrifying part is that sometimes it is the people themselves who attempt to erase that historical memory—although, in most cases, this too has its roots in power.
Akbar Abdi distanced himself from the people as he moved closer to the authoritarian power ruling Iran. Dariush, by indirectly playing into the hands of those in power in Iran, distanced himself from the memories of at least some of his audience. And Mohsen Namjoo, despite all the innovation he once brought to fusion music and the blending of Iranian and Western musical traditions, collapsed in the minds of many of his listeners and admirers after stories of his sexual harassment and verbal and behavioral abuse of women became public.
This was when powerful and courageous women came forward and became the narrators of their own stories—women who were not afraid, women for whom nothing could ease their inner suffering except exposing what had been done to them. That was when Mohsen Namjoo was finished, for me and for many of his listeners.
Even before the repulsive audio recording of him was released, filled with his reactionary, misogynistic pronouncements, including the statement: “Every breath I take is worth six months of these women’s [the whistleblowers’] lives.”
A man who, for years, had increasingly little to offer musically also abandoned his radical positions on the Islamic Republic, and on religion in general, following the killing of thousands of innocent Iranians on January 8 and 9, 2026, and the forty-day war between Iran and the United States. By siding with the Islamic Republic, he effectively cleared the way for his return to Iran.
Mohsen Namjoo, who had been declared an apostate for insulting Islamic sanctities and had faced a judicial case, returned to Iran under a program run by the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance called the “Return of Artists to Iran” program. He returned to an Iran that is no longer anything like the country he left.
Over the past twenty years, the blood of thousands of young people, children, and elderly people has been spilled across its streets. As Shahrnush Parsipur, the renowned Iranian writer who remained in exile and died of heartbreak, once put it: “That blood does not sink into the earth. It flows through the city, and anyone who sees that flowing blood understands that the innocent has been killed.”
Now, following the release of a video by Azadeh Akhlaghi, Namjoo’s wife, a renowned photographer based in New York, more details about this return have come to light.
According to her account, without telling his wife, he left their home in New York wearing nothing but a pair of slippers and went out to have a few pages printed. She did not hear from him for six days and learned of his departure for Iran only after seeing a video of him on social media.
At the same time, Namjoo had apparently been planning his return to Iran while a group was organizing several of his concerts in Canada and the United States and had already sold tickets to audiences.
Mohsen Namjoo, facing a case involving an alleged attempted rape, secretly took refuge in the arms of the Islamic Republic, without a passport and amid suspicions of fraud concerning ticket sales for several concerts, and without the slightest empathy or solidarity toward his life partner—all so that, as he himself put it, he could spend the rest of his life with his brothers and sisters.
Totalitarian governments try to alienate people from their own identities, strip them of their happy memories, and draw artists toward their own ideology. In doing so, they seek to manufacture legitimacy for themselves and restore some measure of respectability. Yet all these efforts are ultimately doomed to fail, as history has shown.
Perhaps Mohsen Namjoo may try, through his anti-war pose, his ability to hold a G3 rifle, and the publication of a photograph of “three happy brothers standing together,” to construct an official narrative of normality in today’s Iranian society—to turn a blind eye to the killings, executions, repression, and disastrous state of human rights in Iran, and even to ignore the poverty, misery, and broken backs of the majority of the population. But the collective memory of a people is too powerful to believe such a narrative.
At one point in Azadeh Akhlaghi’s remarks addressed to Namjoo, we hear her say: “I had imagined that when Iran became free, you and I would return to Iran together. We would travel all across Iran in a Jeep, and you would sing for people in the squares of its cities.”
It reminded me that for more than twenty years, I too have been unjustly and unfairly exiled, without any legally or judicially defensible reason, unable to return to my homeland.
I have been absent from every celebration and every mourning. When my father fell ill and passed away very quickly, I could not be there beside him in his final days, nor could I visit his grave afterward. My mother became ill and has spent years bedridden, suffering and in pain, to the point where she no longer even speaks. And I have been denied the most basic human right: the chance to see the person dearest to me in all the world, even for a single week.
And there are thousands upon thousands of other Iranians whose circumstances are similar to mine. We all dream of returning to our motherland. But at what cost? At the cost of abandoning our dignity and turning a blind eye to the bloodiest and darkest chapter in Iran’s contemporary history?
For a large part of the Iranian diaspora, the answer is unequivocally no. Because they are the keepers of a history whose darkest stains they will remember. And that is why remembering itself is a historical act.
© 2026. Phoenix Review