Growing up in Iran in the early 1980s, I often heard a nationalist song on the radio and television, in the beautiful voice of the Iranian singer Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, claiming that tulips grow from the blood of martyrs. The memorable verse reads:

از خون جوانان وطن لاله دمیده

Tulips rise from the blood of the nation’s youth.

What an evocative image! A tulip blushed with the red blood of the martyred.

I have in my possession a stamp collection from my grandfather. Within the album are three stamps dating to 1979, the year of the revolution. The year 1979 also happened to be the International Year of the Child. These stamps commemorate children and are among the first images that circulated, along with the saliva on their backs, across the new nation. Stick figures with raised arms appear on these stamps, each colored by a child’s creative scrawl. Of the...

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