The question that’s been keeping me awake at night is from an Iranian teenager.
I hear her singing in my head. Her voice is high and warbling, like a theremin. In a constant state of tension and becoming. The voice of a new world. Behind my eyelids I see her there, on the outdoor stage, her face bursting with mirth and nerves. The threat of her awkward joy. The defiance of her raven hair in the sunlight. She is a daughter of the revolution but she is also its mother. She was buried on her seventeenth birthday. Her mother held her photo to the sky, the sky that was bleeding and screaming her name. “Today was your birthday, my love. Today I have to congratulate your becoming a martyr, Nika. Congratulations on becoming a martyr.”
In the dark, she’s singing to me in another language but I understand. I understand mostly by looking into my friend Payam’s eyes. He is wrecked with love for his people. His heart is ripped open. His heart is there, in the fists of elementary school girls refusing to be indoctrinated, in the eyes of grandmothers removing their hijabs in public for the first time, in the innocent blood of the dead. He was born in Iran. He was a child in Iran. He can still smell the bombs. Nika is singing a love song.
***
Nika, like many of her brave peers, was killed for protesting the murder of Mahsa Amini and the oppression of all Iranian women. Mahsa Amini was not political. She wasn’t on a mission to be the spark of the blaze, she was a 22-year-old Kurdish woman on a mission to exist. Mahsa wasn’t her chosen name, it was her forced name. She was not only persecuted as a woman, she was persecuted as a Kurd; her Kurdish name was banned.
In The Art of Freedom, women’s rights activist, Havin Guneser, writes:
“In Kurdish, the root of the word life is 'Jin.' Jin means woman, while jîn means alive and jiyan means life. The root word is the same. And that's why we say Jin, Jiyan, Azadi. Azadi means freedom. And given that the Sumerian word for freedom is Amargi, which means 'returning to the mother,' the three words are so interconnected and make perfect sense: women, life, freedom. As women become free, it is inevitable that life itself return to its magic and enchantment. Thus, the slogan, Jin, Jiyan, Azadi.”
Her name was Jina.
***
The level of dissent in Iran is profound. It is a rupture in the ground. Bright young minds, a free woman—the future, is what the tyrants of the IRGC are flailing to annihilate. They are shooting teenagers. Imprisoning and bludgeoning them. They are detaining young women protesters to “re-educate” them. The re-education process involves beating and raping them, sometimes until they die. This is happening. The morality police can’t get it through their repulsive skulls that the bodies of these women are impossible to desecrate. Their bodies are sanctified. The collective voice is the impenetrable force: “Woman, life, freedom.” and a personal favorite, courtesy of students at Amirkabir University in Tehran, “We are free women, you are the whores.”
It is a shattering of the structure. A literal women’s movement, in that it has to do with the unrestricted motion of their bodies. Their human right to inhabit their own bodies. The Islamic regime is grasping to control a narrative that is no longer controllable, like the heroic rebels of Iran. Like the children’s minds, even as they are being slaughtered.
There is a clip of a little boy speaking. He is adorable, and shouldn’t have to be superior at the art of gallows humor but he is. He makes crusty comedians seem instantly fledgling. He is maybe nine years old. The brilliant filmmaker, Ana Lily Amirpour, translates his message: “Khamenei kills young boys and girls. Recently, he’s killing children too. So, if he wants to kill children, he can come and kill me—and then he can be the king for two more days.”
***
There are too many martyrs freshly buried in Iran’s soil. Barbaric oppressors are trying everything to bury the truth. To bury their beautiful faces, their sovereign courage, their clarion voices. Their murders, and what they died fighting for: freedom in a future they will never see. They are trying to bury their revolution. And this is Nika’s question, sung into my ear, in skylark vibrato from in between worlds: “Will you let them or will you sing?”
Jin, Jiyan, Azadi,
Fiona Landers