Defend Expression

Ali Sobati is an Iranian poet, translator, and literary activist based in Toronto. With over 20 years of work in Iran’s suppressed literary and academic circles, he has taught modern poetry, philosophy of literature, and critical theory across underground and alternative institutions. He is the co-editor and translator of Hairan: Poems of Hair and Freedom (Scotland Street Press, 2024) and author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Tree of Life: A Fragmented Elegy.

In 1994, at a moment when freedom of expression in Iran was no longer merely constrained but actively lethal, 134 Iranian writers issued a short, unusually concentrated manifesto titled We Are Writers. The text appeared at a historical juncture marked by surveillance, intimidation, and the systematic criminalization of independent thought. It was not simply a declaration of principle but an act of professional self-definition under threat, one that reasserted the public presence of the Iranian Writers’ Association as a collective body at a time when collectivity itself was treated as suspicion.

The manifesto’s historical gravity cannot be separated from the human cost that followed. Among its signatories was Reza Baraheni, a central figure in modern Iranian literary theory and dissent, later a PEN Canada chair, whose intellectual life bridged Iran and exile while insisting on the ethical inseparability of literature and freedom. Others paid with their lives. Mohammad Mokhtari, Mohammad-Ja‘far Pouyandeh, Ahmad Mir‘ala’i, and Ghaffar Hosseini, all signatories or close associates of the manifesto’s circle, were murdered by the state’s security apparatus during the chain killings of the late 1990s. The manifesto thus stands not only as a founding document in the modern history of Iranian freedom of expression, but as a ledger written against death.

Historically, We Are Writers also marks a decisive moment in the institutional memory of Iranian literary resistance. By publicly affirming the professional presence of writers as writers, not as political factions or ideological agents, the manifesto contributed to the historical registration of the Writers’ Association as a cultural formation whose legitimacy derived from its defense of expression itself. This was not an abstraction. It was a claim made in a climate where the cost of being collectively visible was disappearance, torture, or assassination. The text’s brevity is therefore deceptive. Its compression is the measure of its risk.

At the heart of the manifesto lies an insight that is at once ethical, political, and dialectical. “Our collective presence guarantees our individual independence,” the authors write. This sentence carries a conceptual weight disproportionate to its length. Against a state logic that equated collective organization with conspiracy, the manifesto asserts the opposite, that individuality in expression is not diminished but made possible through collective protection. Individual freedom of expression, in this view, is not an isolated attribute but a relation sustained through shared defense.

The manifesto insists on this interdependency with unusual precision. Each writer, it declares, bears responsibility only for what they themselves write and sign. Collective presence does not entail collective guilt. Yet this insistence on individual responsibility is inseparable from the necessity of acting together when “confronting obstacles to writing and thinking exceeds our individual capacity.” Freedom of expression here is neither purely individual nor merely collective. It emerges through their tension. The individual voice requires collective shielding, and the collective derives its legitimacy from the irreducible independence of each voice within it.

This dialectic is sharpened by what the manifesto refuses. It rejects the reduction of writers to assumed political affiliations, and it rejects the state’s habit of judging literary work according to the “expediencies of the day.” By doing so, it articulates a model of professional solidarity grounded not in ideological alignment but in a shared commitment to the conditions that make writing possible at all. The collective, in this formulation, exists not to unify opinions but to preserve the space in which disagreement, experimentation, and dissent can occur.

That such a position was articulated under conditions that would soon culminate in murder underscores its historical seriousness. The manifesto is not optimistic. It is exact. It names the danger of intrusion into private life, the misuse of moral and ideological accusations, and the degradation of criticism into surveillance. 

Today, the horizon imagined by We Are Writers appears increasingly difficult to inhabit. The field of authorship, both inside Iran and across the diaspora, has become deeply polarized. Political and ideological alignment now often precedes recognition, solidarity, or care. The possibility of remaining politically independent while benefiting from a collectively defended freedom of expression has grown fragile. What is at risk is not consensus but the very idea that freedom of expression is a shared condition, rather than a private possession or a partisan instrument.

This loss is rendered more acute by the present moment. Amid internet blackouts and communication sieges that conceal mass violence and erase witnesses, the legacy of the manifesto faces a renewed threat. Beyond the immediate horrors, what stands in jeopardy is the ethical infrastructure that once allowed writers to imagine freedom as something sustained together, even while thinking apart. The manifesto reminds us that freedom of expression survives neither through solitude nor through conformity, but through a fragile, costly interdependence. To forget this is to endanger not only lives, but the spirit of freedom itself.