Kamran Ashtary

Hope, Votes & Bullets

A new book featuring essays, blog posts, and illustrations, collected and edited by Kamran Ashtary, Tori Egherman, and Hamid Tehrani, by people inside and outside Iran whose lives were changed by the 2009 election in Iran. Coming out in the Fall of 2010.

On June 12, 2009, election officials in Iran announced that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been reelected by a landslide. Before doing so, however, they made sure that the mobile network was turned off and that internet access was limited. No one expected a fair count of the vote, but no Iranian expected to hear that the first term president had gained such a commanding victory. By the end of the evening, people all over Iran had taken to their rooftops to shout out their despair.

On the 15th, three million took to Tehran’s streets to join a silent protest. Their unity and public expression surprised and invigorating those on the streets and those watching all over the world. Hope, Votes & Bullets tells a very personal story of change, despair, and protest from people in Iran and outside who somehow found their lives consumed by the possibility of a new future for the nation.

From the forward by Scott Lucas of Enduring America:

...[A]s I write this, irony rebounds and sadness turns back to hope. For I read these edicts from those analysts and journalists who try to define, once and for all, what has happened. Then I read the contributions in this book, contributions which come not from anointed experts or the by-lined professionals, and I realize that the story of “what has happened” is in these essays.

And it is not just “what has happened” but “what may happen.” There are no proclamations of the final outcome in these pages, no ringing of the bell to say that all is complete. Instead, the victory is in the process, the pursuit of the “gradual.” As long as the search for rights is persistent in these words of sorrow or hope, then rights cannot be denied. As long as the vision of fairness is offered in these reflections, then others have not succeeding in making us – inside or outside Iran – blind.

The power of the vote may have been taken away on 12 June 2009. Some may try to pronounce that Iranians – repressed by their Government, bedazzled by false hopes of Twitter – are reduced to the powerless. But As long as the power to express is put in the simple but effective phrases by these authors, then the power of expression remains.

A marathon, not a sprint.

Want to know when the book will be published? Contact us, and we will send you an email.