I was ten when my teacher accused me and my father of lying. 

It was 1982. The year prior, my family, like many others, had escaped the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution and left Iran. What had started as a popular uprising against the injustices of the Western-backed monarchy spiralled into the creation of an unyielding Islamic republic. Political opponents were persecuted and imprisoned. Veils were forced onto women’s heads in the previously secular country; resistance was penalized with lashes to the back. The country’s implementation of Sharia-inspired laws declared a woman’s worth as half of a man’s. In the months after the revolution, I lay awake at night thinking of people lost to the darkness of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, and the gashes that would be left on the skin from a lash.

My family immigrated to Madrid. I was an outsider at ...