1. We are the daheh shasti (the [13]60s, the sixties [1980s])

2. generation. We are now scattered around the world. We wear

3. colorful clothes but our insides are all black, dark, and depressed

4. ... we want to extract this bitterness from life and show it to

5. you the way Gholam Hossein Sa’edi did. We are the

6. most screwed up generation.

7. We are the Khāmushi generation, born and raised under those

8. periods of khāmushi [lights turned off, silenced, asphyxiated].

9. We have had no voice. We want to have a voice.

10. –Radio Khāmushi podcast, Tehran, spring 2009

I. Introduction: The Topological Twist and the Traumatic Self

In January 2009, the Ministry of Health of the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a statement that there was too much sadness in the country and that new programs in engineering happiness should be introduced. Of the three differently culturally marked generations born since the 1979 Islamic revolution, a central one, “the 1360s (1980s) generation,” calls itself the “khamushi or silenced generation” or “the ‘lights out’ generation,” stemming from its experiences of the bombings of Iran’s cities during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–8) huddled in darkened basements and bomb shelters. Now in their thirties, many are successful professionals. Many have left Iran, but still suffer the psychological effects, manifested in nightmares and other symptoms of generational and transgenerational emotional repressions. Many other well-educated adults are unemployed in Iran (Behrouzan, 2010a). The 2009 underground podcast serial Radio Khamushi is one of the media that voice this generational experience. Blogs are another of the media used as affective spaces in which shared traumas can be retrospectively recognized and shared, shattering the suffering in isolation and fear of public articulation.

The phenomenological description of melancholia we use in our title is from a much older discursive time, from the famous Persian physician Ali ibn al-Majusi (d. 982–4), whose medical textbook was studied in Europe as the Liber Regalis or Regalis Dispositio and is technically about one particular kind of melancholia but illustrates a poetic power that both articulates the disjunction between public face and private feeling, repeated in the epigram from Radio Khamushi, and draws upon a rich nexus of continuing symbols that every Iranian knows.