Disjecta membra
Winner: The Conger Beasley Jr Award for Nonfiction
Selected by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Siavash Saadlou
“We will visit Behesht-e-Zahra today to honor the martyrs,” the principal said to our classroom one day. We were in middle school, where everyone knew one another, after having spent five years of elementary school together. We all attended schools specifically built for boys whose fathers had died or been maimed in the war, but I wasn’t thinking about martyrs that morning; I was thinking about The Matrix. The movie had come out the year before. Bootleg CDs had only just started circulating in Tehran, but you had to know someone who knew someone to get your hands on the uncensored version. Thanks to my friend Mehdi, I had managed to watch the movie at a low volume on his computer in his bedroom. His parents had no idea; if they did, Mehdi would have been in deep trouble.
Mehdi’s dad had lost both legs in the war. Sometimes, as Mehdi and I sat cross-legged on the floor in the living room, watching cartoons on television, his dad’s groaning would be heard from the bedroom. “God, my feet are itching,” he would whimper, “they’re killing me.” Mehdi’s mom would then rush to the bedroom with a pill in hand, whispering in Persian, Dardet be joonam May your pain be mine to bear. Mehdi would just shake his head and turn up the TV volume. When I asked Mehdi how his dad’s feet could be itching while he had no feet, Mehdi didn’t have an answer. Neither of us knew about phantom pain.
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Mehdi and I didn’t understand a single word of English as we watched The Matrix. There were no subtitles, no translation. We didn’t know what was being said, but we didn’t need to. The slowmotion bullets, the gravity-defying leaps, the way Neo moved—it spoke a language we could understand. Mehdi and I spent weeks reenacting the scenes, flinging ourselves backward in exaggerated slow motion, pretending that we, too, could withstand gravity. I wondered if Neo would have been able to dodge shrapnel, to curve his body away from the fragments as they barreled toward him, to morph his body into incongruous shapes that could not be hit.
Shrapnel can travel at up to 3,000 feet per second, nearly three times the speed of sound. When an explosive shell detonates, its casing breaks into metal fragments, each fragment an independent lethal projectile. A bullet follows a predictable trajectory, but shrapnel’s behavior is chaotic and capricious; it disperses in all directions, penetrating deep in the flesh. It can sever arteries or puncture the lungs, forcing its way into organs beyond the initial point of impact. The shockwave alone can rupture eardrums and cause internal bleeding before the body even registers what is happening.
My dad was killed from shrapnel wounds in July 1988, ninety days after I was born. He died during Operation Mersad, the final military clash between Iran and Iraq which happened after both sides had agreed to a ceasefire following eight years of war. For years, I wanted to believe, without realizing it, that he had died a few months before his twenty-fifth birthday, and not his twentyfourth. It was as though that extra year rendered his premature death more justifiable because twenty-five felt closer to thirty than twenty-four. I have outlived him by thirteen years and counting now, so when people ask me how exactly he died on occasion, I feel obliged to explain the entire process of how shrapnel works, as if to say, Can you feel the pain? Can you feel how young he was?
Shrapnel shells don’t necessarily kill. I learned this on the first day of school from Hamid. I was standing alone in a corner of the schoolyard when he told me his name out of the blue and shot a smile in my direction. His sharp facial features made him seem older than his actual age: a thin scar extended from his left temple to his jaw, and the ridge on his nose appeared like it had been broken and then realigned. His smile showed a subtle asymmetry because one side of his mouth rose higher than the other which created a somewhat knowing expression.
“Was your dad a martyr or is he a jaan-baaz?” he asked matterof-factly.
“He was a martyr,” I said.
Hamid told me his dad had lost an arm while serving as an RPG operator in the south. I loved the sound of “RPG” when he uttered it as I repeated after him; it was the coolest, most satisfying set of letters to leave my callow mouth, my first taste of a foreign language without knowing the meaning.
“My dad is a jaan-baaz,” Hamid said, then tried to break down the word. “Jaan means life, of course, and baaz comes from baazi to play; together, jaan-baaz means someone who plays with his own life.”
Later, I learned that baaz doesn’t come from baazi but from bakhtan: to lose.
That morning on the bus to Behesht-e-Zahra, I was still replaying The Matrix in my head when Hamid’s voice broke into my thoughts. He started singing a limerick from the back of the bus, and the rest of the boys joined in, clapping along and singing the chorus in unison:
Mama would say, “Don’t go to war. Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.”
“If you go to war, don’t go alone. Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.”
“If you go to the front, don’t join the demolition team.” Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.
“If you join the demolition, don’t step on a mine.” Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.
“If you step on a mine, don’t fly up in the air.” Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.
“If you fly up in the air, come back down.” Come back, come back, come back, come back.
“If you come back to the ground, come back whole.” Come back, come back, come back, come back.
I stared out the window, thinking of how bodies twisted in the air in The Matrix, the way time seemed to stretch in the moments before impact. I wished my dad could have dodged all the bullets and shrapnel and mortar, just so he could stay alive. But it wasn’t the bullet-dodging scene that stayed with me most; it was the moment Neo died. After he is shot, Trinity kneels beside his lifeless body and whispers something to him. Then she kisses him, and Neo comes back. That moment haunted me. I wondered if anything could’ve done the same for my dad. Was there a moment when belief or love might have changed the laws of fate?
Once we arrived at the cemetery, endless rows of graves emerged in front of us, like a sea of white marble. I could see the names of fallen soldiers, some faces looking too young to be dead. Instead of leading us through the graves, though, our principal directed us toward a nondescript building. Inside, the smell of mildew hung strongly in the room as we were shepherded towards a small theater. It felt cramped, the walls pressing in on us as we filed into the seats. I found myself sitting in the very front row,
so close to the screen that I could see the cracks in the projector lens. The lights dimmed, then came a soft mechanical click, and suddenly, the room was enveloped in darkness.
The film began without prelude. No titles, no introduction, just raw footage from the Iran-Iraq War. A heap of bodies, tangled and limp, was stacked like discarded rags. A soldier lay slumped in a dugout, his bearded face smeared with blood, mouth gaping as flies traced the outline of his lips. In another scene, a circle of Iraqi soldiers stood triumphantly over a boy whose bowels had spilled beside him. Stray boots, scattered on the dirt, trailed small, red stains behind them. Elsewhere, a soldier’s right hand was frozen midair, crimson drying in his palm. Small puddles of water had become thick with flesh—bodies dissolving into the soil where human and earth wedded in ruin. Sometimes, the dead arranged themselves into patterns like an eerie geometry of loss. Then the frame shifted: Iranian prisoners of war were being ushered toward captivity, their spines curved as they sat in silence. Some looked not much older than us watching. The film cut again, this time to Iran, where a few men unfolded a white cloth that unveiled a smattering of bones and a lone skull at some ceremony. Then, a woman wearing a black chador stepped forward, a text appearing on the screen: Wife of the Martyr. She lowered herself onto the ground, touching the smaller bones first, her lips brushing against them like they were religious totems. Then she lifted the skull, pressing it against her face, kissing it with tenderness. She was smiling— wildly, deliriously—until her grief broke free in the shape of mad laughter. I remembered my mom telling me she had never seen my dad’s face after he had died: “I wasn’t called to identify the body. Your uncle was.” And then, the footage cut to another woman, who looked older than the first one. A line of text appeared on the screen: Mother of the Martyr. She was wailing, cradling the skull from before in her bosom as if her son had just fallen asleep in her
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arms. She stroked the surface of the skull gently, her sobbing voice murmuring the questions of a thousand lost afternoons: My son, how was your day, sweetheart? Did you have a good game outside? Are you hungry?
When the lights flickered back on, I turned around to look at my classmates. The boys around me, some who had walked through the school hallways with an air of unshakable bravado, even those who had every so often called me a “pansy” or a “weakling,” were now slumped in their seats, their eyes swollen from crying.
I was thirteen when 9/11 happened. The moment played out on state-run television like an apocalyptic movie. The images were relentless, their repetition at once numbing and overwhelming: a plane cutting through the clear blue sky, slamming into the building—a bright orange fireball, and then, almost in slow motion, the steel and glass collapsing inward, folding like paper. The smoke billowed from the towers like a dark cloud creeping across the sky, staining the perfect blue in a way that felt like a violation of nature itself. The images mixed. One explosion bled into another, one collapsing building indistinguishable from the next.
What stuck with me wasn’t the destruction, though. A few days after the attacks, sometime before the new school year started, Mehdi invited me over to his house. “You have to see this,” he said quietly. In his bedroom, with the door locked and the volume low, he opened a video file he’d gotten from his older cousin. Tiny specks, barely visible in the footage, were throwing themselves from the burning towers. At first, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. But then it hit me; those specks were people, human beings, choosing to fall rather than burn.
Sitting on the edge of the couch in our living room, I had watched as the anchors delivered the breaking news with distinct delight in their tone. “America’s global arrogance is what led to this moment,” one commentator said. Then another voice chimed in: “America got what it deserved.”
The first day of school came two weeks after the September 11 attacks. In the schoolyard, groups of boys talked in hushed tones about the footage. I spotted Mehdi and joined him and a few of our other friends who posited theories they had heard from their relatives. One boy claimed his uncle knew a man who had prophesied the attacks, saying that he knew America’s “greed” would be its undoing sooner or later. Another swore that the hijackers must have been trained by Americans themselves. Somebody else said that he had heard from his uncle that 9/11 was an act of “divine justice” for all the evil America had done.
Inside the classroom, most boys leaned over their desks, debating as to how America would retaliate. Even those who were normally reticent began to engage, their voices intoning. The first class of the day happened to be Islamic Principles. Mr. Amiri entered the room, his broad-shouldered frame casting a commanding presence. A neatly trimmed beard framed his face, reinforcing his composed authority, and he carried himself with measured steps. He set a book down on the desk, then surveyed the room. Behind square-framed glasses, his dark eyes darted sharply across the classroom, taking in each face with exacting scrutiny.
“I see the attacks on America are still on your minds,” he said. “Good. They should be.” He adjusted his glasses, then clasped his hands behind his back. “Last month,” he continued, “we saw what happens when arrogance meets justice. America has paid the price for its own sins.” He let the words settle before continuing. “But for those who die for a greater cause, death is not a punishment; it
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is the highest honor. The men who rammed the airplanes into the Twin Towers should be called martyrs.”
His words floated over us with assuredness. Until that moment, I had always kept my head down, like everyone else, listening without protest, pretending to agree with everything said. But something in me clenched at the way he said martyrs. I thought of my dad. He had died defending our homeland, not flying planes into buildings. And now Mr. Amiri was putting him in the same breath as the hijackers. The words pressed at my throat as my stomach twisted. I had never talked back to a teacher before, but I couldn’t stay quiet. My hand rose, almost on its own.
“Yes?” said Mr. Amiri, his voice already irritated.
“Sir, how can our fathers and the airplane hijackers be the same?” I asked.
“What did you say?”
The whole classroom sank into silence as Mr. Amiri’s eyes narrowed on me.
“The ones who blew up the towers,” I said, my voice shaking. “You called them martyrs. But . . . they weren’t defending their homeland. Our fathers were fighting for Iran.”
Mr. Amiri picked up the wooden ruler that sat on every classroom desk, and he held a tight grip on it.
“Come stand here in front of the chalkboard,” he commanded. I slowly rose from my desk at the back of the class and dragged my feet towards where Mr. Amiri stood, my eyes dropped to the floor. I didn’t dare look him in the eye because I knew doing so would only make matters worse.
“What’s your last name?” Mr. Amiri asked.
“Saadlou, sir.”
At schools in Iran, every student had to identify themselves by their last name. At our school, this felt as though we didn’t exist if it weren’t for the death of our fathers.
“Hold out your hand,” he ordered. “This one is for your father, Mr. Saadlou.”
I slowly extended my hand, my palm wide open. The first strike came hard and fast. The sharp crack of wood against the flesh sent a wave of pain shooting up my arm. I kept my hand steady, though my body recoiled inside. I bit down hard on my lip, tasting the metallic tang of blood. The second strike landed harder, the sting sharper. My palm burned, and the welt rose instantly, red against my skin. The class remained dead silent. No one dared to move. The third blow struck with precision, hitting the same spot. Mr. Amiri leaned in close. His breath was hot against my cheek as he spoke, his voice a harsh whisper.
“When I say the hijackers were martyrs,” he hissed, “you do not question it.”
The ruler hit again, the fourth blow harder than before. Each strike dug deeper, as if Mr. Amiri was trying to beat the curiosity out of my mind. Pain exploded up my arm, but I held firm. My fingers twitched involuntarily. Another blow landed, and it felt like my bones might shatter. All along, my classmates remained motionless and pokerfaced.
“Return to your seat,” Mr. Amiri ordered.
When the bell finally rang, and everyone dashed out of the classroom, the boys shifted back into their usual routine: laughing, chatting, eating, as if the morning’s events had already faded from memory. Outside, the cool breeze felt like a shock against my face, but the heat from the beating still clung to my skin.
The state-run television continued to air the 9/11 footage for weeks on end. Again and again, the Twin Towers’ collapse was vaunted as a triumphant spectacle. The planes flew through
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the sky, the towers fell into dust, the hijackers received martyr status. I kept thinking about the sight of people leaping from the burning towers—desperate souls whose existence had narrowed down to moments of terror between burning alive or plunging to their deaths.
The laws of physics say that time is not absolute. It bends under force, stretches with gravity. In the final seconds before impact, as the world rushed up to meet them, did time hold its breath? Did a single heartbeat feel infinite, suspended between sky and earth? Or did they fall in an instant, their descent already determined, their fates sealed the moment they stepped off the edge? Maybe grief—which comes from the Latin gravis, meaning heavy— follows the same rules. Some moments stretch unbearably, lasting far beyond their allotted time. Others vanish so quickly, like a body plummeting through the air, that they are gone before we even register their weight.
What I know of my dad exists only in fragments—a scattered anatomy of memory: a letter here, a photograph there, a story retold at the dinner table, its details rendered trite by repetition. They don’t add up to a whole, only to something like the remnants of a ruined manuscript: torn pages, disjointed sentences, pieces pulled from different times and places. In classical texts, scholars called such remnants disjecta membra: scattered limbs. That’s what I have: not a life in full, but a body in parts.
I’ve imagined my dad’s final moments endlessly: what he saw, whether he heard the blast coming, whether he believed, even for an instant, that he might survive. Physics says kinetic energy equals ½mv². A tiny object moving fast enough can tear through flesh, alter destiny. Shrapnel obeys that law. War, however, obeys nothing. No formula explains why one man falls and another is spared. Maybe that’s the cruelest thing: not the violence, but the randomness. And maybe memory, like shrapnel, travels faster than reason. It embeds itself deep, long after the moment has passed.
During our visit to Behesht-e-Zahra, as we stood among endless rows of gravestones, people never discussed life and surviving. We were told that the martyrs were the “chosen ones” since their deaths fulfilled a “divine purpose.” Physics, however, has no place for destiny, no equation for martyrdom. The only laws that governed those deaths were the ones that dictated how explosions unfold, how pressure waves propagate, how matter behaves under violent force. Like a chaotic system, war doesn’t move in straight lines. One man survives because the wind carries a fragment a fraction of a degree away, while another dies because the angle of the impact was just slightly different. When remembering the grieving mother holding her son’s skull, I can’t help but question whether martyrdom served as a mechanism to rationalize senseless death through tragedy. All those macabre images—the severed limbs, the spilled viscera, the vacant-eyed corpses frozen mid-scream, the pornography of pain—were meant to sanctify sacrifice and glorify suffering as honor. My dad’s death was an explosion that sent ripples through time, through my mother, through me, through my sister. My mother still gets traumatized talking about him. My sister, now grown up and a mother of two, has been heavily dependent on anti-depressant medications for years. And me? Every few years, I google the name Mahmoud Saadlou, hoping to find something of my dad that I haven’t seen before: a photo, a sound bite, a trace of him that may have escaped the machinery of state martyrdom. I’m trying to prove that he existed outside the narrative I’d been handed, outside the word “martyr,” outside the white, marble gravestone.