The writer Aliyeh Ataei grew up in the border area between Iran and Afghanistan. With surprising ease she tells of a life that threatens to splinter between war, suffering and disbelief.
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Every day we see pictures and hear news from the war. The further away the suffering, the duller what goes through the minds of the person seems daily news and social media audiences are buzzing. Aliyeh Ataei talks about what war, what even a single bomb, even a single shot at a person, actually means. “Once the first bullet has been fired, the effect continues for the next ten or more generations,” writes the Iranian writer in In the land of the forgotten, her collection of now translated autofictional stories. Today Ataei lives in Paris, but Ataei spent a large part of her life in the Iranian border area with Afghanistan, where her family fled when their homeland was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1979. Then the Taliban came to power, then the USA invaded, then parts fell to the “Islamic State”, and now the Taliban are in power again. But we’re not there yet.
