Woman Life Freedom E-Book

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 294

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Jina Mahsa Amini's death at the hands of Iran's Morality Police on 16 September 2022 sparked widespread protests across the country. Women took to the streets, uncovering their hair, burning headscarves and chanting 'Woman Life Freedom' – 'Zan Zendegi Azadi' in Persian and 'Jin Jîyan Azadî' in Kurdish – in mass demonstrations. An explosion of creative resistance followed as art and photography shared online went viral and people around the world saw what was really going on in Iran. Woman Life Freedom captures this historic moment in artwork and first-person accounts. This striking collection goes behind the scenes at forbidden fashion shows; records the sound of dissent in Iran where it is illegal for women to sing unaccompanied in public; and walks the streets of Tehran with 'The Smarties' – Gen Z women who colour and show their hair in defiance of the authorities, despite the potentially devastating consequences. Extolling the power of art, writing and body politics – both female and queer – this collection is a universal rallying call and a celebration of the women the regime has tried and failed to silence. This is what protest looks like.

Leseprobe

WOMAN

LIFE

FREEDOM

Voices and Art from the

Women’s Protests in Iran

Edited by Malu Halasa

Contents

Introduction

iv

1.

The Girl of Revolution Avenue

1

Anonymous

2.

Queering of a Revolution

6

Alexander Cyrus Poulikakos

3.

The Smarties

10

Shiva Khademi

4.

‘Jin Jîyan Azadî’: The Kurdish Heart of Iran’s Female-led Uprising

24

Kamin Mohammadi

5.

Braving Tehran’s Roundabout, Maidan Valiasr

31

Farnaz Haeri

6.

Rebel Rebel

34

Soheila Sokhanvari

7.

In Her Voice, We Are All Together

48

Niloofar Rasooli

8.

Seven Winters in Tehran

52

Steffi Niederzoll

9.

High Fashion

60

Tahmineh Monzavi

10.

Big Laleh, Little Laleh

66

Shokouh Moghimi

11.

Revolution of the Anonymous

76

Alexander Cyrus Poulikakos and

Niloofar Rasooli

12.

A Revolution Made by Art

84

Pamela Karimi

13.

Graffiti Stencils

100

Khiaban Tribune

14.

‘Fighting VPN Criminalisation Should Be Big Tech’s Top Priority’,

Activists Say

112

Ashley Belanger

15.

Graphic Designers Take Action

124

Iranian Women of Graphic Design

16.

Protest Music in Iran

146

Clive Bell

17.

Keeping the Revolution Alive

154

Roshi Rouzbehani

18.

Be Our Voice

160

Fari Bradley

19.

California Dreaming

164

Marzieh Saffarian

20.

A Beautiful, Tragic Rosette

166

Milad Ahmadi

21.

Don’t Be a Stooge for the Regime

170

Malu Halasa

22.

Drawing the News

182

Mana Neyestani

23.

The One Who Must Walk on Foot

196

Habibe Jafarian

24.

Fragmentation

200

Tasalla

Tabasom

25.

On the Pain of Others, Once Again

204

Sara Mokhavat

26.

Lessons from My Grandmother

207

Vida Zarkeshan

27.

The Last Days

210

Hengameh Golestan

28.

A Changing Dreamscape

218

Mehri Rahimzadeh

29.

In the Time of Eros

228

Vali Mahlouji

30.

Hoor-al-Azim

236

Maryam Haidari

31.

From Hair to Hugs,

Times Are Changing

239

Anonymous

About the Contributors, Translators and Editors

242

Credits

250

Acknowledgements

252

Index

253

IV

Introduction

On 13 September 2022, twenty-two-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini was

detained outside a metro station in Tehran by Iran’s Morality Police.

Despite her attire – a headscarf and robe – she was accused of

breaking the law, which requires women to cover their hair with a

hijab and their arms and legs with loose clothing. The young Kurdish-

Iranian was beaten inside a police van. Three days later, she died in

hospital. The authorities blamed her death on a heart attack, even

though hospital sources said her wounds were indicative of a brain

injury sustained as a result of trauma to the head.

The murky circumstances of her death reverberated with

ordinary Iranian women, who have been no strangers to the

tactics and threats of the

Gasht-e ershad

, the Morality Police,

also known as the Guidance Patrol. This 7,000-strong national

police force began issuing more warnings, fines and arrests after

hard-line president Ebrahim Raisi introduced a new ‘chastity and

hijab’ law in the summer, months before Jina was stopped. Now in

cities across Iran, CCTV surveillance cameras regularly identify

women ‘improperly’ dressed. Government offices and banks

deny entrance to these women. When the protests started,

not wearing a hijab on social media meant the ‘guilty’ faced a

mandatory prison sentence.

After Jina’s funeral, protests led by women spread to 139

cities in all of Iran’s thirty-one provinces. Videos on social media

showed women in the streets with their hair uncovered and, in

some cases, burning headscarves or cutting their own long hair

– traditionally a sign of mourning or to voice dissent. Men joined

the demonstrations. There was footage on Twitter and Instagram

of spontaneous night protests where people danced around

makeshift fires. The most popular anti-government chant – ‘

Zan,

Zendegi,

Azadi

’ in Persian, or in Kurdish ‘

Jin,

Jîyan,

Azadî

’, ‘Woman,

Life, Freedom’ – echoed in the mass uprising. However, the

movement quickly changed from one demanding women’s rights to

one demanding regime change. A nascent revolution was born.

V

VI

VII

VIII

roundabout. Forthright members of Iran’s Gen Z – ‘The Smarties’

– with their dyed hair and rejection of headscarves as early as

2019, stare out of portraits by the photographer Shiva Khademi.

Although the mandatory hijab is symbolic to the regime, the

revolution is much bigger than a piece of cloth. It is a fight for

the rights of women, men and children as well as the different

communities in the country. Alongside the Baha’i, the Arabs,

Baluch and Azeri, the Kurds are another discriminated minority

in Iran. The Iranian-Kurdish journalist Kamin Mohammadi

writes about Jina’s Kurdish identity and the importance of

their community in the women’s protests. The range of themes

in this collection shows the intersectional violence at play,

whether directed against the human body, queerness, clothing,

environment, diaspora, media and technology.

Just as social media has played an important part in

disseminating news and images, art’s role in this historic moment

has been indispensable. It has sustained the uprising in the public

eye and given it continued energy and potency. The centrality of

art is discussed in an interview with Dr Pamela Karimi, a historian

of art, architecture and visual culture of the modern Middle East.

She also makes telling observations on other pertinent topics,

such as feminism, the Western gaze and the positions artists have

long held within Iranian society.

Life in Iran has always elicited a strong reaction in the Iranian

diaspora. Since Roshi Rouzbehani left her country eleven years

ago, she has been a vocal advocate of Iranian women’s rights in

her editorial illustrations for

The

Guardian

and

The

New Yorker

.

The protest art featured in the anthology draws on traditional

iconography from calligraphy and tapestry to cutting-edge digital

illustration. The selection, curated by Emilia Sandoghdar, includes

established artists collected by the British Museum and the

Victoria and Albert Museum, alongside lesser-known artists, who

are equally passionate.

Just as the photographs taped onto city walls during the 1979

Islamic Revolution were an important way of conveying news of

the anti-Shah protests that rocked the country, so today graffiti

also spreads the word. Despite real threats to their lives, street

artists go out and brave government surveillance cameras and facial

IX

recognition technology to spray-paint the streets. The collective

Khiaban Tribune follows their efforts and dodges the same cameras

as this socialist youth group photograph and document graffiti in

Tehran.

The regime’s manipulation of technology has had real and

dangerous ramifications for dissent inside the country. When the

government closes the internet down and activities inside the

country are no longer visible to the rest of the world, people are

arrested or, worse yet, killed. In ‘“Fighting VPN Criminalisation

Should Be Big Tech’s Top Priority”, Activists Say’, Ashley Belanger

provides a full picture of the resistance by ordinary people behind

their computer screens in Iran, aided by tech-savvy activists

elsewhere.

Today, media outlets beyond Tehran’s control, from websites

to satellite channels and dissident radio stations, deliver unfiltered

news and views to millions of Iranians at home. News can be

transmitted in other ways too. For the book, the editorial cartoons

of Mana Neyestani provide a potted history of the women’s

←

The death of Jina Mahsa

Amini in ‘Morality Patrol’

custody in Tehran sparked

a wave of grief and anger

across the country and in

cyberspace. Protests in the

immediate aftermath were

attended by a cross-section

of society and by women and

girls taking a stand against

the state’s misogynistic

social prescriptions by

removing and burning their

hijabs in public. Mana

Neyestani, ‘Mahsa’s Legacy’,

IranWire

, 19 September 2022.

X

protests since Jina’s murder. When Neyestani was living in Iran,

the authorities told the cartoonist that it would be better if he

concentrated on drawing for children. A conversation he drew

between a cockroach and a child landed him in jail. He fled the

country as soon as he was able to.

To understand Iran’s present, one must be cognisant of its

past. The artist Soheila Sokhanvari’s portraits of the country’s

pre-revolutionary feminist icons give an indication of what women

lost (and what they were blamed for), once the new Islamic

Republic of Iran seized power. Those women, cultural movers and

shakers of their time – film stars, musicians, dancers and poets

– were left to fend for themselves. By contrast, Niloofar Rasooli’s

essay about the death of protestor Ghazaleh Chalabi, ‘In Her Voice,

We Are All Together’, demonstrates the power of today’s collective

action.

A Q&A with Steffi Niederzoll, the director of the documentary,

Seven Winters in Tehran

, reveals the shocking legal status of women

in that religious society. Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed for the

murder of a man who attempted to rape her. In addition to women

protecting themselves or walking unencumbered and unveiled in

public, other seemingly innocuous global activities that thousands

do every day have also been outlawed by Iran’s Shi’a clergy. Women

there have long lived bifurcated lives, one public, the other private.

In ‘High Fashion’, for instance, photographer Tahmineh Monzavi

documents illegal, clandestine runway shows in Tehran.

International luxury fashion has also shed light on injustice

in Iran. Milad Ahmadi paid homage to those killed during the

demonstrations by writing their names on a rosette, designed

by Amir Taghi and worn by actress Sepideh Moafi on the red

carpet of the 2023 Golden Globes Awards. Marzieh Saffarian’s

pop art collages, available on clothing and in prints sold by Urban

Outfitters, propose a sunnier future for Iranian women.

For music critic Clive Bell, inspirational music like ‘Baraye’

by Shervin Hajipour – performed the world over, even in the

White House – has provided the soundtrack of dissent. Radio

broadcaster and sound artist Fari Bradley became a full-time

activist after she received a phone call from Iran, with the

instruction: ‘Be our voice’.

XI

The experiences of queer artist Tasalla Tabasom growing up

in Tehran were multi-faceted and divided, as she reveals in her

essay ‘Fragmentation’, about her art of the human body. However,

for some, the pressure of living in the country was too much to

bear. In her memoir piece, the poet Shokouh Moghimi writes about

her sister’s suicide and madness in ‘Big Laleh, Little Laleh’. These

women and others don’t want our pity. Iran’s foremost nonfiction

essayist Habibe Jafarian describes the resilience of her mother

in ‘The One Who Must Walk on Foot.’ It is a difficult path to follow,

confirms filmmaker Sara Mokhavat in her essay, ‘On the Pain of

Others, Once Again’.

Sometimes in a religiously conservative society, it is traditional

women who upend their families for the sake of the daughters they

love and want to educate. Vida Zarkeshan recalls the hard-won

lessons of her grandmother passed down through the female

generations of their family. Meanwhile the doyenne of Iranian

photography, Hengameh Golestan, captures the strength and

outrage of the first women who demonstrated en masse against

compulsory veiling in 1979, after the Islamists came to power.

In Golestan’s black and white imagery, the women are rightfully

resentful. They had fought against the Shah and lost even more

freedoms under the mullahs. A year later, Golestan went to the

Ministry of Islamic Guidance to apply for a permit to cover the

Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). Officials told her the frontline was

no place for a woman. They said she should stay home and make

‘pickles and jams’ for the men at the front.

As society decays, ecology also falls victim to ideology. Maryam

Haidari tells of the environmental degradation of the traditional

wetlands named Hoor-al-Azim, which have meant so much to

her Iranian-Arab

family

from Khuzestan

.

Under circumstances

like these, the imagination becomes a place of both refuge and

defiance. The photographs in the series ‘A Changing Dreamscape’

reveal Mehri Rahimzadeh as one of the most intriguing

photographers of her day. She also pushes the boundaries in her

commercial work, all shot in Iran, with magazine covers showing

pregnancy tests and women’s hair.

It is against this varied, surprising, remarkable backdrop that

the women’s revolution has taken place. Vali Mahlouji’s essay ‘In the

XII

Time of Eros’ examines how totalitarian states curtail and control

the human body. Simple ancient arts, such as dancing, singing,

even a brief kiss in the street, which dare to envision a different

way of life, have perhaps already defeated the mighty Islamic state.

Another letter from the anonymous writer who opens the book

closes it with the thought that, hope against hope, there might be

no going back.

Homecoming

A friend of mine recently returned from Iran. He had been visiting

his family in one of the smaller cities. Around the dining room

table, his brother talked about the traffic surveillance cameras and

the drivers who transport unveiled women in their cars. First, a

warning comes via the car owner’s mobile phone. The second time,

a fine is threatened. The third time, you could end up in court, with

the car confiscated. He and his wife, the parents of three girls,

expressed concerns about sending their daughters back to school

after the Nowruz break for Persian New Year. Too many schoolgirls

had been poisoned.

My friend told me he worried about ‘the future of smart girls

in a country like Iran.’ He said he took his nine-year-old niece into

the city for a day out. She was testing a pen he wanted to buy her

in a stationery shop. He watched her write three words on a pad of

paper: ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’.

She looked up at him and said, ‘I want everyone to see this.’

Malu Halasa

London, May 2023

1

The Girl of

Revolution Avenue

Letter from Tehran

Anonymous

Dearest __________,

In the heart of Tehran, on Revolution Avenue and a stone’s throw

from the University of Tehran, there is an electricity substation

that found itself suddenly in the spotlight almost exactly five years

ago. This box has a lot to do with the upheavals that have beset

Iran in recent months. On 27 December 2017, a young woman

named Vida Movahed climbed up the large grey gadget, took off

her white hijab, stuck it on a wooden stick and waved it in the air as

a sign of protest. She drew an immediate crowd, and in under ten

minutes was arrested by security officers and taken away.

Movahed came to be known as the Girl of Revolution Avenue.

She was subsequently sentenced in court to a year’s imprisonment

for her act of defiance. A few days after her arrest, workers from

the national power company were sent to solder a triangular

metal piece on top of the rectangular box so that no other woman

would be tempted to climb up there and become the next Girl of

Revolution Avenue. It was a superficial solution to a deep socio-

political divide within the country.

Five years on, if you were to stand at the counter inside the

France Pastry Shop, one of Tehran’s oldest cafés, and look outside

at the substation that Movahed climbed up, the very first thing

you’d notice is that a significant number of women who pass by are

not wearing the hijab.

2

By now, the world knows the story of Mahsa Amini whose

death, following her arrest by the Morality Police in September

2022, impelled the youth of Iran to take to the streets, catching

the entire country off guard. In the subsequent months, much

has been written and said – especially outside Iran – about a

momentous reckoning taking place in the life of the Islamic

Republic. There is an element of wishful thinking here (as often

happens with regard to Iran), but there is also a good deal of

truth. Iran is a complicated nation, and people in Tehran joke that

every six months this sprawling plateau of so many identities and

languages transforms into a different country altogether.

And yet the Islamic Republic endures.

The change which has occurred in recent months is certainly

acute. Walking through the capital will reveal that a significant

portion of the female population willingly continues to wear the

hijab and does so insistently. However, a visible number of women

also walk the streets with their heads entirely uncovered. This

shift is unprecedented in the life of the Islamic Republic. Women

with a variety of hairstyles and colours go about their business

boldly, without revealing, at least on the surface, any fear of the

security forces occupying the corners of the major thoroughfares.

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement that evolved following

Amini’s death, and the appearance of women on the streets of Iran

not wearing the hijab, is not unlike a sprint relay, with the baton

first passed on the day Movahed climbed the substation. A lot of

women whose basic motto is now ‘a normal life’ do not necessarily

know what happened on Revolution Avenue five years ago – and

how fateful it turned out to be. The same goes for the young men

who go out of their way to show solidarity by waving victory signs

and smiling widely at the women who refuse to cover their heads.

In the busy Haft-e (‘Seventh’) Tir Square in the heart of the city,

a young woman not wearing the hijab articulates her view, saying:

‘I want to dress freely. My mother hardly ever removes her hijab,

but I’m not my mother. Respect for difference and diversity is what

makes life beautiful.’

And yet, on the other side of the equation, the Islamic Republic

has considered the hijab a red line, and an ideological foundation,

for the last forty years. Many within the regime consider losing

3

this fight synonymous with surrendering, and surrender has never

been part of the Islamic Republic’s playbook. But what to do when

so many young women in towns large and small across Iran are

rejecting the hijab? One strategic option – the one that the regime

seems to have adopted for the time being – is to do nothing.

This has led to scenes that would have been unimaginable in this

country half a year ago: young women (but not only the young)

passing directly in front of security police, who make no effort

to arrest them. And while in Friday prayers, and other platforms

connected to conservative factions, the cry for a harsh crackdown

continues unabated, the highest echelons of power appear to be

tacitly endorsing the maxim ‘live and let live’.

Young women and men of school and university age are the

flagbearers of the movement and paid a heavy toll during the

earlier street confrontations with the security forces. More

recently, prison terms and a handful of summary executions (not

to mention the winter chill) have brought a hiatus, for now, to the

streets of Tehran and other cities.

1

While the streets are quiet, the youth are still busy in the

virtual world, and Iran’s Generation Z is as internet savvy as youth

anywhere. The regime’s filtering and control of the virtual world

may be able to slow internet access, but it cannot put a stop to it

altogether. A teacher at a Tehran girls’ school says: ‘My students

stand up in the middle of class, shouting that they don’t want to

follow the lesson plan; they want to talk about the problems the

country faces. These kids are angry.’

‘Taking off my hijab is the least I can do,’ says a young woman,

who has not worn a headscarf for the past three months. She

continues: ‘The government must understand that even guns aren’t

1

Translator’s note: The connotation is dual: on the one hand the authorities

have laid off bothering people on the street, on the other hand incarcerations

and executions from the time of the violent demonstrations have subdued the

population from wanting to go out there again. The live-and-let-live basically

says this: do what you want, as long as you don’t go out there and start

demonstrating and turning violent towards the regime itself again, like you did

in the autumn. We don’t care if you don’t wear the hijab, or we’ll pretend for

now not to care. This approach of theirs is not really at variance with how a

dictatorship operates. It’s sticks and carrots.

4

enough to force women to cover their heads anymore. If one day I

have to go back to wearing the hijab, I’ll have betrayed Mahsa and all

the others who’ve already died for us. Every day, I spend hours on

YouTube and other websites. I see what’s going on outside Iran. Why

should there be such a divide between us and the rest of the world?

Why does the government have to control our private lives? Why

are Iranians so poor when our country has so much natural wealth?’

It’s a little past noon on Revolution Avenue, a weekday. I decide

to spend half an hour inside the France Pastry Shop, which is

more than enough time to get a sense of the women who pass by

the celebrated substation. In the thirty-minute interval, sixty-one

women pass by. Thirty-two of them have their heads completely

uncovered. Sixteen wear their headcovers reluctantly, the hair

easily showing. Thirteen either wear a full chador or the

maqnaa

(one-piece head covering) often worn by women in government

offices and schools.

Inside the café, the numbers are similarly telling – several

university-age women wearing no hijab are busy ordering hot

drinks and pastries. Leaning on the café’s window, a young couple

stares out at the pavement. The young woman, with no headscarf,

points to the platform and says, ‘You know, that’s exactly where

Vida took her hijab off for the first time ever and waved it on a

pole.’ As if on cue, at that moment a big black van, accompanied

by a force of twenty motorcycles belonging to the special anti-riot

police, passes the spot on Revolution Avenue.

Nowadays, Tehran’s streets are relatively calm – despite

the exaggerated and often out-of-context claims of imminent

revolution that opposition television channels tiresomely

broadcast into the country. As Generation Z will tell you, Woman,

Life, Freedom is on pause right now. They liken the movement to

an active volcano that erupts now and then, but whose eruptions

are far smaller than the major one which is expected to happen

some day. One of them says, ‘We’re the embers under the

smouldering ash; any day, we could catch on fire.’ The regime and

its shock troops need to get it into their heads once and for all

that Iran will never go back to how it used to be.

Interestingly, the regime and its young people may have the

same objective in mind: not going back to what once was. Why else

5

would the sight of women not wearing the hijab have become so

commonplace here? One could argue that, rather than a volcano

awaiting a

‘

great eruption’, the Islamic Republic – after more than

four decades of practice – has not necessarily perfected, but rather

learned the art of allowing for seismic activity (sometimes even

tectonic in scale) in order to pre-empt something of far larger

magnitude.

This story is still unfolding.

Yours always,

A.

Translated from Persian

6

Queering of a

Revolution

On reappropriation

Alexander Cyrus Poulikakos

This revolution is an act of claiming. This revolution as an act itself

is reappropriating a term that has been tainted since the Islamic

Revolution in 1979. Just see how quickly the meaning of ‘

Enghelabi

’

(‘the revolutionary’) has metamorphosed from the image of a man

in a tie-less white-collar shirt into a young woman, unveiled. This is

performed through a queering of existing articulations, mirroring

and distorting languages of the regime. These languages veil

everyday life in public spaces and practices in order to impose an

ideological facade, an ultra-violence on anybody who enters public

life.

The regime has made use of the walls of the cities to spread

propaganda and impose its theocratic ideology through slogans

and imagery. Sieving through their facade in opposition, anonymous

authors spray their own slogans on the walls of the cities, exposing

unspoken truths, often by warping the governmental propaganda

words and weaving them anew. After being painted over by the

authorities, the newly blank wall is re-sprayed and reclaimed

by protestors with writings such as, ‘Blood can be erased with

nothing.’ The spilled blood is the pen of these anonymous authors.

These writings are shared over social media, predominantly

Instagram and Twitter, and serve as the unidentified collective

script that multiplies and calls on each other, creating recurrences

unrelated to physical boundaries and linear time.

Likewise, the authority’s instrumentalisation of the dead

has been reappropriated. Images of martyrs and the so-called

7

Supreme Leaders have been omnipresent on the walls of the cities

in Iran, in shops, schools and any form of public or semi-public

space. Their faces are installed to instill fear and surveillance and

to remind us of their permanent power. In this revolution, their

stoic permanence is being unspun and the pulsating blood of the

innocent they have shed is leaking through the cracks of lies. The

martyred faces of those who have been murdered for protesting,

with Jina Mahsa Amini as the conveyer, are replacing the icons

imposed by the government. The faces of the new revolutionaries

are sprayed over the walls of the cities anonymously and turned

into art, shared over social media. Jina and her fallen sisters have

become the true signifiers for the uprisings, omnipresent through

the directionless acceleration of flow and multiplication in the

digital realm. Therefore, a unity of places has become possible,

temporarily, without unity of time and physical space.

←

‘Blood can be erased

with nothing’, a wall

that had been repeatedly

painted over; writing

over writing. Anonymous,

Tehran. Image: Instagram

story by @1500tasvir, 27

October 2022.

8

9

In a country with an average age of thirty-two,

1

the power of

the young is at a climactic level. Gen Z is rupturing the enclosed

walls they live behind, to infinite openings. Through these digital

openings, a space and a language have been able to leak out of

Iran. A diasporic community of more than four million documented

people has been invited to join the streets of the

Enghelabi

in their

distant home, with further uprisings being sparked in Afghanistan.

Through the digital windows defying physical obedience and the

reigning forces of ultra-violence, the female body has become

a metaphysical thread burning down the walls of woman’s

oppression.

1

‘Iran Demographics Profile’, Index Mundi 2021.

←

Protesting schoolgirls

joining hands and singing

Shervin Hajipour’s social

media revolutionary anthem

‘Baraye’ (‘For’) as they

chant ‘

azadi

’ (‘freedom’),

on school grounds in Iran.

Shervin was arrested on 29

September 2022, two days

after the song was initially

posted on Instagram. Soon

afterwards the song was

removed from social media,

but not before it had been

heard and shared by millions.

Image: Instagram story still

by @golfarahani, 12 October

2022.