In Malmö, inverted tulips meet war’s ugly divisions

A search for the Bakhtiari laleh-ye vazhgoon in early March Malmö turns into a day of grief, political fracture, and sleepless dread—ending with a child’s simple question about whether a school will be bombed.

In early March, in central Malmö, Sweden, the errand began as a kind of vow.

I walked into plant shops and market stalls looking for a specific flower: the laleh-ye vazhgoon, the inverted tulip. It is a reddish mountain bloom that grows in the Zagros, in the ancestral lands of the Bakhtiari. A flower of grief and mourning.

By the time I sat down on a bench on Södra Förstadsgatan, my feet were still throbbing. Almost four hours had passed. I hadn’t dressed for the weather. I told myself I’d only “pop out for a minute. ” and now I was sitting with the strange. bodily ache that arrives when you’ve been unable to do anything practical while your country is relentlessly bombed.

The season, though, refused to cooperate. March in Sweden isn’t the time for inverted tulips. I ended up settling for ordinary red tulips.

On the way back to the apartment—spotless, shaped by obsessive cleaning—I ran into a small group of Iranians. They were easy to recognize from where I stood: they were draped in the Lion and Sun flag. a banner of monarchist fervor. A man in his early thirties recognized me and asked if I wanted to tag along. I shook my head.

The atmosphere around that refusal came back to me like a bruise. In the lead-up to war. the diaspora splintered: monarchists rallied in support of the bombing campaign. brandishing “Make Iran Great Again” signs and waving the ancien régime flag alongside those of the USA and Israel. People danced in the streets as Iranian schools, hospitals, and cultural landmarks were reduced to rubble.

No, it was wrong to call it a “splintering.” The outbreak of war exposed faultlines that were already there. For years, you had ignored your cousin’s displaced nationalism and imperial nostalgia to keep peace in a group chat. Then you couldn’t hold your tongue when your friends started ventriloquizing the people cut down in the streets in January. “There are no voiceless people. ” you said. “only those silenced or ignored. ” and “sovereignty resides in people. not kings.” You were accused of having Iranian blood on your hands for the effort.

Back on the sidewalk, I didn’t have the energy for another round of the same argument. We half-heartedly played the taroof game: he repeatedly insisted I join them; I repeatedly declined, saying I was too tired. I wasn’t exhausted because of the walking day—though it had eaten into my body—but because of the accumulation of days and nights of barely sleeping or eating. glued to a computer screen. staring at undelivered messages on my phone.

When he asked why I was looking for inverted tulips, I told him I ended up with ordinary ones—why this mattered, and why it had to be that way. In remembrance of at least 175 people—nearly all of them children—murdered in the American bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab.

A middle-aged woman standing beside him cut in. She asked which side I was on.

I exhaled and said I was on the side of the children.

Then she took the flowers out of my hand and threw them into the street.

“This is a time for celebration,” she said, bouncing her shoulders to imaginary music.

A man who appeared to be her husband seemed ashamed and ushered her away while she kept asking him what he thought he was doing.

I relayed the incident later, catching myself at a loss for words. It felt violent—the encounter. the refusal. the sudden act that turned mourning into something performed—but it was also obscene to name that violence out loud when the war itself was the larger machinery grinding everything into fear. How do you describe an abyss between celebration and mourning without sounding like you’re trying to make the tragedy smaller?.

A few days after that, at a Möllan café, an acquaintance visiting from London asked why I was searching for inverted tulips. I explained the Bakhtiari custom by showing photos of Koohrang on my phone, and with them, the history of the place I was born.

As part of a modernization project. then-ruler Reza Shah suppressed the Bakhtiari in various ways. I said—not least because Bakhtiari ancestral lands were where the burgeoning oil industry took hold. and the profits were siphoned off to English banks. But the Bakhtiari weren’t targeted alone. To build a modern Iranian state, Reza Shah promoted a single language, a single history, a single identity. The systematic targeting of diverse peoples, I said, wasn’t incidental—it was foundational.

The London visitor didn’t seem satisfied. He asked again, “Who are the Bakhtiari?” Maybe, I thought, he wanted the kind of neat answer that fits on a form.

We are the indigenous peoples of the Zagros mountains in southwestern Iran, I said.

He didn’t know at the time, but the question wasn’t innocent.

In George Nathanial Curzon’s 1892 volume. Persia and the Persian Question. Curzon wrote of the Bakhtiari: “A people without a history. a literature. or even a tradition. presents a phenomenon in the face of which science stands abashed.” Curzon later became Viceroy of India. and he traveled throughout the region. arguing for Iran’s strategic importance as part of The Great Game against Russia.

Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, a British army officer and agent of the British East India Company, described the Bakhtiari as “the most dexterous and notorious thieves” and “the most wild and barbarous of all the inhabitants of Persia.”

At the café, two others were with us: two young scholars from Copenhagen who had crossed the Öresund Bridge for this meeting. We’d planned a joint seminar series months ago on decolonial legalities. Given the situation, I assumed my brief historical interlude would spark questions.

Instead, my colleagues offered only nods about my efforts scavenging in archives for a book I am writing. One suggested that now is a bad time to do this kind of research.

The current US-Israeli-led neocolonial strategy for Iran. as I described it. appears to involve splintering the country: supporting separatists. even with weaponry. to drive sectarianism. Khuzestan is centrally important in this endeavour because of its natural resources. For strategic purposes, then, it’s best to keep quiet about the Bakhtiari, at least for now. I couldn’t stop thinking about the familiar mechanism of invisibilizing indigenous peoples—how often there’s a “reason” offered just before the silence takes hold.

To break the tension, one of the Danes made a half-aborted joke. He said I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a secret American agent.

Twice within a week, I’d been accused of such things. The first time, I was accused of being an agent of the Islamic Republic after I condemned the illegal war. It wasn’t a joke, at any rate—not intended as one.

That night, caught between Iranian monarchists and Western anti-imperialists, I closed the door and pulled the drapes. I kept my phone notifications on anyway, in case the internet blackout ever ceased. The notifications kept coming from everywhere except the one place I wanted to hear from. Every vibration carried false hope.

One message arrived from an Inuit actor I met during the Suialaa Arts Festival. Before I opened it. I remembered the questions she had asked during that week: about Luri. about Bakhtiari customs and rituals. and about the realities of displacement. The message was a captionless photo of a bucket of red paint—something we both understood immediately.

Last October. talking about the Hans Egede statue in Nuuk. I’d felt an urge to deface it. but I hadn’t. because it wasn’t my statue to deface. The next day. she sent a voice note musing about how European countries rushed to the defense of Denmark’s sovereignty over Kalaallit Nunaat amid American threats. and how she was expected to choose between masters.

Sleep didn’t come. Another WhatsApp message finally cut through the mental fog. It was from my sister in New York.

Her 4-year-old niece had asked if their house was going to be bombed.

The child has no sense of territoriality. She hears adults talking in the kitchen about a school being bombed, and she doesn’t understand it’s in another country, halfway around the world. None of that matters. To a 4-year-old, a school is a school, a child is a child, a bomb is a bomb.

What do you say to a little girl with that fear?

“No, you are not going to be killed,” I was going to say.

But I caught myself, because it wouldn’t have been true. “I was going to say nobody wants to kill you,” I wrote, and then stopped.

There are ways a society learns what to say under pressure. There are also moments when language collapses under the weight of what children already know to be possible.

This article first appeared in Public Seminar and was published on 13 April 2026.

Malmö Sweden laleh-ye vazhgoon inverted tulip Bakhtiari Koohrang Iran Reza Shah cultural mourning diaspora politics Lion and Sun flag monarchist fervor Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school Minab Suialaa Arts Festival Hans Egede statue Nuuk Inuit actor decolonial legalities