There is a line in the Tirgan 2027 theme that we keep returning to. Unity was never uniformity.

It reads like a slogan until you try to practise it.

Because the honest version of this community is that we do not agree. We don't agree on politics or religion. We don't agree on how much of the old country to keep, or how much of the new one to take. A grandmother in Toronto and her granddaughter in the same house are often not having the same conversation. Someone who left in 1979 and someone who left in 2023 can share a city, a language and a surname, and still be describing different countries.

That is not a flaw in the diaspora. That is the diaspora.

The festival manifesto puts it better than we can: one cannot preserve a river in a glass. A river is not pure. It picks things up. It drops things. It splits, it rejoins, it carries silt from places it has already left. The moment you remove it from all of that and seal it in glass, you have something clear, still, and dead.

Culture does not survive by being protected from change. It survives by moving.

So when we say unity, we don't mean everybody agreeing. We mean something harder and more useful: enough people paying attention to the same thing at the same time that it becomes possible to build something.

A festival is one way to do that. For a few days, several thousand people who would never otherwise be in a room are in a room. A woman who has not heard a live tar since she left hears one. A fourteen-year-old watches a crowd of adults who look like her family take an art form seriously, and quietly revises what she thinks is possible for herself. Someone meets the person who will later hire them, or marry them, or publish them.

None of that requires anyone to agree about anything.

In a time of fragmentation, to unite is an act of resilience. A refusal to be erased.

That is the argument behind Tirgan 2027, and it is why the theme is Unity Beyond Borders. The borders between countries, which is the obvious reading. But also the borders between generations who can't quite reach each other, between the ones who left and the ones who arrived, and between Iranians and the cities they now call home.

Our differences are not the obstacle to unity. They are the current. They are the thing that keeps the water moving.

And this publication only works the way the river does — by what flows into it. If you know something the rest of us should know, send it.