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Sandra Lynn Hutchison of Orono teaches journalism in the Baha’i Institute of Higher Education. She is the founder and editor of elixir-journal.org and recently translated “A Tale of Love,” a volume of poems by Iranian prisoner of conscience Mahvash Sabet with a foreword by Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi.
When Human Rights Day comes around each year, I think of Sheyda — and of the bookstore in northern Iran that changed her life.
“When the bombs fell on Iran on June 12, everything stopped … and changed; people I spoke to could no longer see their way to a better future.” So wrote Sheyda in an article for a journalism class I was teaching in the Baha’i Institute of Higher Education, an online university established after the Iranian regime banned Baha’i students — whom it labels infidels — from attending public universities.
Sheyda wanted to write about the resilience of her Gen Z peers. But between rising prices, water scarcity, and the recent war, she told me, they had no space left for hope.
Sheyda disappeared for a couple of weeks, but when she returned to class, I noticed a change. She had started working in a bookstore, she told me, and was speaking every day with book lovers of every kind. One customer was reading the poetry of Hafez, another Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights.” The security guard was delving into the Greek philosophers and a chemistry student into Anne Frank’s diary.
One day, Sheyda told me, the owner of the bookstore showed her a book with an unusual title — “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.” She could borrow it, he said. On her coffee break, Sheyda opened the book and began to read. What does it mean to feel, to exist, to be aware of time and mortality? the author asked. Naming our emotions afresh, he claimed, could change our perception of reality.
As Sheyda walked home that night, with “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” in her purse, she asked herself: Can you really do that? Could the way you name your emotions change how you see the world? She thought of all the people who had passed through the bookstore that day, mostly Gen Z kids looking for books on every subject you could imagine — poetry, philosophy, physics, astronomy, ecology.
Sheyda remembered her conversations with them and decided to use them in the article she was writing for my class, an article she knew could never be published, no matter how good it was. To express with honesty the feelings of her generation could land her in jail.
As a Baha’i, she was already at risk of arrest simply for practicing her religion. Even her persistent sadness about this — her own obscure sorrow — could not be expressed for fear of reprisal.
When she sent me her article, Sheyda told me she was submitting it for a grade only. She wouldn’t try to publish it. It was heartbreaking, she said, but she couldn’t take the chance. All around her Baha’is were being arrested for crimes fabricated by the regime. Her cousin had been detained and other Baha’is arrested in Birjand, Kerman, Tehran, and Karaj.
Sheyda was heartbroken, but that wasn’t all she was feeling. Something had changed — and it was because of the bookstore. When she thought about the people who passed through the bookstore every day — freely talking, exchanging ideas, reading, smiling — she felt a quiet excitement growing within her, she said.
They were doing what the Baha’is in Iran had been doing for years, she explained: practicing constructive resilience, responding to repression not with protest but with positive action. Sometimes, she said, it took her breath away to think about the world the people in the bookstore were creating together.
And the other night, she told me, when she was walking home from the bookstore, she had made an important decision: she would name the feelings of uncertainty she carried within her “hope.”