For these ‘war children’ in London, grit and resilience come naturally
British Iranian artist Sara Shamsavari remembers the blackened windows at her first childhood home in Tehran, Iran. Born in the middle of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and just 2 years old at the onset of the Iran-Iraq War, Ms. Shamsavari says her first memories are rooted in uncertainty and dislocation.
Her mother, Farzad Amai Shamsavari, a psychologist, also remembers many sleepless nights in Ahvaz, near the Iraq border, where she taught at the university. She kept her young children, Sara and Sina, inside a closet for safety while her husband hid under a table as warplanes dropped bombs outside.
“I was going between the two [children] trying to reassure them all,” says Farzad.
She has lived a life of flux, change, and unpredictability steered
A British experience of war A “triumph for science”
