THE FIRE: Voices of a Generation in Iran, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, by Cecilia Sala; translated by Oonagh Stransky
Only 30 years old, the Italian journalist Cecilia Sala has been a firsthand witness to some of the bloodiest conflicts and revolutions to have galvanized the world in recent years. On Dec. 19, 2024, she was arrested while reporting in Tehran, for ill-defined violations of the “laws of the Islamic Republic,” and spent three weeks in solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious Evin prison before she was finally released.
Marie Colvin, the fearless American war reporter who was killed in Syria in 2012 at the age of 56, used to say that her calling was to write about “humanity in extremis.” As Sala makes clear in “The Fire” — a journey through the social and political turmoil in Iran, Ukraine and Afghanistan — she is a worthy successor to that noble pursuit. Her dispatches are as immersive and original as they are anthropologically probing.
I confess that when I started to read “The Fire” and realized that it did not include a personal account of her imprisonment, I was disappointed; by the end of the book, I was filled with admiration.
Though Sala does not shy away from placing herself in the story during hair-raising moments — she describes, for instance, how she walked out of a train station in Kyiv in March 2022, waving a white flag fashioned out of a hotel bidet towel — she knows that the book is decidedly not about her.
Instead, Sala cedes the stage to her subjects: a 30-something kindergarten teacher who attends a training camp that simulates trench warfare; a young hacker infiltrating the Russian defense system in order to encourage soldier desertion; a female mayor in Afghanistan, who took office at the age of 26. As Sala puts it, her “chief protagonist is one specific generation.”
What Sala finds traveling among her peers is a cohort brimming with a potent mix of disaffection and national pride. As the Woman, Life, Freedom movement engulfs Iran in 2022, she rides a night train with a friend she calls Nabila, a gay kickboxing champion who supports the Islamic Republic generally, but not its draconian policy on head scarves. For Nabila, the death of a 22-year-old woman who was apprehended for going unveiled in public is “a collective humiliation and an immense offense to God.”
Sala intersperses these fascinating mini-profiles with facts about life in the countries she visits that make them come alive in ways that ordinary newspaper journalism rarely does. The majority of math and science students in Iran are women, Sala writes — a direct inverse of global trends. With not enough jobs in government for this overeducated group, young Iranians are left to tinker among themselves to make money, creating a whole parallel universe of streaming and gig economy apps. The result is a generation that feels fractured from their elders and ready to tear down the old system.
Sala is also a keen observer of the way her subjects digest the violence that surrounds them. A month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she follows a 28-year-old former model through the underground clubs of Kyiv, shouting over the music to ask her about the imminent threat from Russia. “I hope there will be war,” her guide explains as she sips a gin and tonic, adding that she doesn’t want to leave the task of dealing with Putin “to the next generation.”
Sala’s recounting of her chosen countries’ histories can be confusing. She occasionally jumps around between time periods and political events, trying to cram in too much information. But the intimacy and fast-paced style of her present-day scenes, rendered in Oonagh Stransky’s lucid translation from the Italian, more than make up for what “The Fire” lacks in narrative cohesion.
Perhaps by dint of her youth, but no doubt also because of her journalistic skill and tenacity, Sala finds herself at the heart of some of the most sensitive subjects in the places she goes. In Afghanistan in 2021, she reports on a WhatsApp group where women in their 20s offer real-time instructions to teenage girls on how to stay safe as they protest Taliban rule: “Wear a surgical mask, keep your veil on your head and wear dark sunglasses.”
As “The Fire” suggests, the women of Afghanistan have dug in for a long fight. Toward the end of the book, Sala reminds us of a dictum attributed to the Taliban, whose militants reportedly liked to tell Western soldiers: “You have the clocks but we have the time.” The inspiring young people that Sala encounters in these war-torn regions have both the clocks and the time. Their elders would be better off heeding their call for freedom.
THE FIRE: Voices of a Generation in Iran, Ukraine, and Afghanistan | By Cecilia Sala | Translated by Oonagh Stransky | Europa Editions | 191 pp. | Paperback, $18
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