In the Heart of the Cat

»I see the lifeless body of a young woman. The colours of an intensive care unit, pale blue, turquoise-green, ice-grey. Blood stuck to her ear. Instagram conceals nothing. Regardless of how many filters are placed on the pictures, anybody who wants can see the brutal reality. I read: Jina Mahsa Amini was beaten into a coma with a baton by the morality police. Now she is dead. I read her name again, Jina, Jina with a »J«. I have never heard of anyone with the same name as me.« 

When Jina Mahsa Amini is murdered by the morality police in Tehran in 2022 and the world’s first ever women-led revolution breaks out in Iran, the narrator of In the Heart of the Cat, also called Jina, is confronted by images that take her back to some of her deepest memories of Iran, a place that could have been her homeland had the 1979 Islamic Revolution not robbed her of fundamental human rights and made her into a nomad. The tumultuous events sparked by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini and the courageous actions of the women and girls of Iran, who risk life and limb to resist the regime responsible for Amini’s murderer, leads Jina to delve into her own family history, which is deeply intertwined with the political vicissitudes of life in Iran.

In the Heart of the Cat brings together three generations of Iranian women to explore a political history and present it in an utterly personal way. First there is her mother, born in the early 1940s, who grew up in a democratic Iran and left during the rule of the Shah with little more than a suitcase and her first-born child Roya, Jina’s older sister. Roya was born in the Iran of the Shah in the 1960s, before moving with her mother to Europe, going to school in Germany, Switzerland, and France, then to university, before returning to the Islamic Republic in the 1990s with her husband. And then there is Nika, Roya’s daughter, Jina’s niece, who is born under Islamic rule in 1999. On the day of Jina Mahsa Amini’s death, Nika was in the process of enrolling at the University of Tehran, before getting swept up in the protests. Lastly, there is the narrator, Jina. Born in Germany in the 1970s, though she grew up with the language and culture of her ancestors, it wasn’t until she visited Roya in Tehran for the first time in the year 2000 that she got to know Iran firsthand, an experience that caused her to question her preconceptions about identity, nationality, belonging, and freedom, and helped her to understand her connection to this country and what it means to be an Iranian woman. But when Jina Mahsa Amini is murdered and Iranian women around the world hit the streets chanting Woman, Life, Freedom, Jina, her sister Roya, and her niece Nika are faced with a life-changing decision: fight or hide?

Written in glittering prose enriched by both the poetic force of the Persian language and the warmth of family bonds and rituals that only grow brighter against the dark backdrop of loss and trauma, this book is ultimately a story of unshakeable dignity and empowerment, of taking ownership of one’s own history and of history as such. In In the Heart of the Cat, Jina Khayyer radically and emphatically redefines for herself what is woman, what is life, what is freedom.

»Through the stories of three generations of Iranian women, Jina Khayyer questions the notions of exile, inheritance and emancipation. Without Manichaeism and with a powerful breath, she gives life to the Iranian women of yesterday and today, caught up as they are in the follies of History.« Leïla Slimani