A café in Copenhagen: Persian, protests, and who is heard in the public space

Last week, I worked from a café in Copenhagen, my laptop open in front of me and the sound of the milk frother in the background. Two women and a baby sat down at the table next to me, passing her from mother to grandmother in the natural and precise choreography of those who belong to one another.

She was all life and light, smiling at the world, and she reminded me so much of Adam that my eyes kept drifting from the screen to her.

“Azizam,” (sweetheart) I said when I suddenly noticed that their conversation was in Persian. I abandoned the formalities in favor of curiosity: “How are you?” I asked, referring to everything happening in the wave of protests in Iran.

The grandmother fled to Denmark a few decades ago, her daughter was born here, and the baby on her lap is already a second generation outside the homeland.

“We have family there and we worry,” said the daughter, who was about my age.

“I grew up here. Danish school, Danish friends, Danish husband. I speak Danish better than Persian, but I don’t feel Danish. I’m going crazy over them. For weeks, while the regime was killing and slaughtering people, the Danes were silent. It didn’t fit their pro-Palestinian narrative, and even in the news, they hardly talked about it. If it were about Gaza or Israel, it would have been front-page news.

My Danish friends don’t understand anything. When I try to explain what this regime really is, they call me Islamophobic. The Danes take democracy for granted. They’ve lost the ability to imagine a world without freedom.”

Silence That Feels Familiar

What she said sounded painfully familiar to me. I knew that silence well from leftist circles, where Israeli suffering simply doesn’t fit into the moral framework of the conversation. In the weeks following October 7th, I found myself searching among colleagues, students who studied with me, professors who taught me, and people I admired for even a hint of condemnation. I scrolled through profiles looking for something to hold onto. Nothing. All eyes were on Gaza, and everything else became blind spots.

During those weeks, I couldn’t detach from my phone. I obsessively shared testimonies and videos from Israel in every group and space I was in, as if just seeing one more video or testimony would finally make someone notice. But the more I shared, the more I was pushed away. Not because they had nothing to say. On the contrary. They talked a lot about pain, about empathy, about justice, just not about ours.