03/06/2026
As bombs fall again on the people of Iran, Shahram Khosravi examines what it means for the defeated of the earth to face their serial losses with “an open face,” as counseled by his late father. What does it mean to understand defeat not as the end of critique but as its ethical point of departure, not as the end of struggle but its very condition?
“My father, a son of the Bakhtiari—the Indigenous people of the Zagros Mountains in Iran—could sense it long before it arrived: defeat. Or perhaps it never arrived at all, because it had always been there, woven into the soil and the air. Like his ancestors, he watched as their land, and the future promised by it, were stripped away. It was the Bakhtiaris’ misfortune that French and British expeditions, wandering through their mountains in the late nineteenth century, found oil shimmering beneath their feet. ...
One of the few things of my father that remains with me is a letter he sent in late 1987, while I was crossing borders—one after another, illegally—trying to outrun the Iran-Iraq War. It is hardly a letter; more a brief warning. The last two sentences read:
‘Life, in general, is about defeat. Learn to face your defeats with an open face.’
But how does one prepare for a defeat not yet arrived? For people like him—whose land, whose name, whose time have been taken—defeat is no stranger. It arrives like a season. It is expected. He, an Indigenous man, wanted to ready me, an undocumented migrant, for the rhythm of loss that returns, again and again, through generations. Another defeat is on its way. Learn to meet it with an open face.”
Link in bio and below.
