The Sun Planters is a play by Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch to be published by Asemana Books (September 11, 2026).
Cover Art: Paradise Khanmalek
ISBN: 978-1-997503-42-2
Language: English
The Sun Planters is a powerful and formally inventive play that explores memory, resistance, and intergenerational inheritance within the Iranian diaspora. Moving across decades and continents, it follows Ravi, a young queer Iranian researcher, as she uncovers the forgotten political life of her late uncle—an anti-imperialist student activist in the 1960s. Blending archival documents, poetry, history, and theatrical imagination, the play challenges official narratives while illuminating the intimate connections between family, revolution, and remembrance. Both deeply personal and profoundly political, The Sun Planters is a moving meditation on the stories we inherit, the silences we carry, and the enduring possibilities of collective liberation.
Endorsements
The Sun Planters stages a dream-like series of intergenerational encounters with Iranian leftist legacies in the United States that is historical and surrealist at the same time. Drawing from material and ephemeral fragments—including family stories, childhood memories, news articles, poetry, and activist leaflets—the play recreates a time and place when Third World solidarities flowed between Iran, Palestine, and Berkeley, CA. Far from a romanticized account, the play shows how the consequences of the left’s “failures” cast a shadow that defines the characters’ lives and losses. But this is not the end of the story, as new generations of activists continue to try, in their own ways, to make the past into a usable and revisable resource for the ongoing project of dismantling oppression. With grief, humor and grace, Khanmalek creates a world in which the past and present touch, in which transgressive desires for human liberation, and for queer intimacies, might still nourish our imaginations and fuel new forms of revolutionary futurity.
Manijeh Moradian, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States
This brings to life the unsung vision of Iranian students who helped forge an era of deep internationalism in the US. It’s a story that inspires us to understand this personal and collective history as a blueprint for new fronts of struggle.
Lara Kiswani, Executive Director of the Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC)
The Sun Planters, in Khanmalek’s words, is a “quantum ceremony” that “collapses space and time.” Linking 1960s Iranian activism in Berkeley with contemporary activism, bringing together ancestor and descendent into a provocative parallel existence, the play evokes connection and collision, breaking down the walls of time and place along with form–letters, leaflets, archival text, speeches, and conversations flow into another. We learn about Iranian revolutionary dreams and how those dreams parallel those of today. I delighted in how the play, like a volcano “exploding the narrative,” activates us as readers and audiences–to contemplate our own potential.
Aimee Suzara, poet, playwright, and performer, author of birth language
