Nowruz — the Iranian New Year with pre‑Islamic roots — is usually marked by large, joyous gatherings across Iran and the diaspora. This year, however, many Iranians abroad have wrestled with how to observe a celebratory holiday while mourning and fearing for loved ones back home.
Jasmine Nourisamie, a president of the Persian Cultural Society at New York University, said the community is “connected to someone who has either been killed, imprisoned, tortured, raped, disappeared — we all know someone, and it was very much a period of mourning, and it still is.” After the regime’s mass killing of protesters in January, activists on social media urged subdued observances; several organizations canceled events.
Nourisamie ultimately chose a middle path. Instead of a typical party, her group’s event became a vigil — a space for people to gather, speak and mourn. “Usually Nowruz is all colorful dresses and bright pastel colors,” she said. “This year, everybody was wearing black.”
Others turned to celebration as resistance. Arya Ghavamian, a creator of Disco Tehran — a dance party that spotlights Iranian music — said dance floors can be more than frivolity. “The way we look at the space of the dance floor is really a place of resistance,” he said. Having lived under censorship in Iran, Ghavamian argued that refusing silence can be powerful: “When everything is pushing us to be silent — why stay silent and be silent?”
Disco Tehran highlights music from before the Islamic revolution and beyond; Ghavamian cites performers like Googoosh as part of that heritage. For him, Nowruz is continuity: “If everything disappears, this memory that flows through history with all of us, with our ancestry and our existence and all of that, that is home. For me personally, Nowruz is home.”
Other traditions persisted privately. In a Brooklyn apartment, Nozlee Samadzadeh assembled a haft sin, the Nowruz table of symbolic objects. Her display included purple hyacinths, fruit, a well‑worn book and a mirror atop a white, silver‑embroidered cloth. But even small rituals were affected: “It’s very traditional to call your family at the moment of the year passing, and right now it’s just not possible to make calls into Iran,” Samadzadeh said.
A near‑total internet blackout inside Iran has made communication unreliable; many in the diaspora cannot immediately confirm whether relatives are safe. Samadzadeh said she has been getting updates through long chains of relatives — a literal game of telephone — because direct calls often don’t go through.
So while some communities found solace in quiet remembrance, others reclaimed communal joy as a form of defiance. Families continued to call when they could, communities gathered to cry and remember, and friends still gathered on dance floors that, for some, doubled as spaces of cultural survival.
