TRIGGER WARNING!!!!!
I’m an Iranian woman and I moved to Canada without my family several years ago. Sometimes my friends ask me about life in Iran or why I left. In the beginning, I’d sometimes feel embarrassed talking about the oppression I have lived through. These days, I’m more about it but I’m also very much conscious of how weird I sound when I talk about it and how awkward and uncomfortable most people get when I say things like “Yeah, I had to wear hijab since I was 7”, or “I was arrested once because I was holding hands with my boyfriend”, or “I’m having a bad day, they hanged an innocent man in my country today”. I don’t blame them; even I realized that these casual stories sound really weird when I first heard myself explaining them in English.
Sometimes people give me a look of disbelief/mistrust. I first recognized that look when I went to the first bar of my life in Canada; they asked for my ID and I handed them my passport that had a picture of me with Hijab in it. Sometimes they awkwardly change the topic. Sometimes they say dumb shit like “awwww, I get it… I once protested for the nurses!” – no Karen, you don’t get it, the police didn’t shoot you in the forehead, did they? Or “If people don’t like the regime, they should just change it!” – Let me write that down!! Sometimes they offer a hug or ask follow-up questions. I like the ones that ask more questions. In a way, hearing what they find surprising helps me process traumas that I have normalized for a lifetime. Helps me feel more comfortable with being the middle-eastern woman with bleak stories!
I usually spare the batshit crazy details, because I don’t want to make people too uncomfortable. But with everything that’s going on in Iran right now, I feel like the world needs to know! There is a civil war on the streets of Iran and one side doesn’t have guns! I can’t just sit on my butt and read tweets about how many were killed or disappeared today. The free world needs to know about the evil that people are fighting. You need to know that where I come from the police don’t protect people, but shoot them on the streets.
You should know that just in 3 days in 2019, Iran killed 1,500 protestors – that’s like half the population that died on 911. 3 Months later, they shut down a passenger plane with 2 missiles less than 3 minutes after takeoff killing all 176 people on board and lied to our faces and denied it for 3 straight days only to come out and say “it was just a human error”. To this day, it makes my chest ache to think about what went on in their minds in the 45 seconds after that first missile was shot.
You should know that in the 80s they executed 30,000 political prisoners in one summer– that’s over 10 times the 911 casualties. They would be taken to court sessions that were just a few minutes long where they’d be asked trick questions like “do you prefer to be in a cell with muslims, or non-muslims?” and then give a verdict on their lives. One of the main decision-makers in that massacre is the current president of Iran – the same guy that gave a speech in New York 2 weeks ago addressing the fuckin UN! Just to make sure that they got rid of any competing ideology, they also went around murdering or disappearing writers, activists and translators. They stabbed a poet/teacher named Hamid Hajizadeh and his 9-year-old son Karoun 47 times!! It’s the most gruesome murder case I’ve read in my life, so I’ll spare you the details…
You should know that the Islamic Republic forces rape virgin women on death row because according to their religion those who die virgin will end up in the paradise! Can’t let that happen! They believe they get thawab (spirtual reward / muslim points) by raping away their victims’ virginity! You should know that they convicted 16-year-old Atefeh Sahaaleh to crimes against chasity after she was raped by an ex-revolutionary guard for 3 years and they decided to let him walk away. She got mad that she removed her hijab in court and that made the judge so angry that he promised to hang her in public with his own hands and he delivered…
You should know that they arrested Taraneh Mousavi in 2009 protests and after three weeks an anonymous caller told her family that they can find her in a hospital because her anus and womb have been ruptured in “an unfortunate incident”… She wasn’t there but her burned corpse was identified days later and the police conveniently denied she ever existed.
You should know that they arrested Navid Afkari, an Iranian wrestler, and his two brothers in 2018 protests, framed him for murder and tortured him until he confessed to it; even though he had an alibi and there were no evidence or witnesses. When evidence for his torture was leaked, they literally tortured him more so he would publicly deny the tortures! There is a 48-page long Amnesty International report on his tortures that describes how on several occasions the security forces had kept his brother in an adjacent room so he could hear Navid being tortured and tell him “it’ll be your fault if he dies”. You should know that they hanged Navid in 2020 without informing his family or lawyer and his two brothers are still imprisoned…
You’ve probably seen videos of Iranian women dancing and burning their hijabs these days. That’s the pretty side – the one that makes you smile and think they’re brave… and keep scrolling. But you should also know that a lot of people have lost their loved ones to the protests in the past three weeks; most of them were teenagers. You should know that there were people who stole the corpses of their loved ones off the street and brought them home, because the evil we are fighting charges the family of the protestors it has killed a “bullet fee” that is about 50 times the monthly salary of an engineer!