“When Will the War End, You Tell Me?” An Autoethnography of Unending War in Qasr-e Shirin, Western Iran

This article uses an autoethnographic approach to narrate and analyze the experience of “unending war” in the border town of Qasr-e Shirin, Iran, across four generations of one family. The author, born in the midst of displacement and wounded in the March 2025 bombing of Tehran, shows how simple objects—a blanket, a family photograph, a doll, and a notebook—become “memory capital” and extend permanent precarity from the border to the center. Findings suggest that the concept of “postmemory” is insufficient to explain the third generation’s experience; for them, war was lived not as an intergenerational return of trauma but as direct bombing experience. The experience of successive traumas and unfinished wars has kept the people of Qasr-e Shirin forever in a “state of liminality”—not on a geographical border, but on a border that has become internalized, transforming Qasr-e Shirin into a trans-spatial, ontological condition of liminality.