Women in Iran are united to spread revolution. I know what it's like to be one of them
With their hands linked together, Iranian women of every age and background have taken to the streets and online to spread revolution.
Their protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini who was killed in custody after being arrested by Tehran's morality police.
I am watching it unfold from the relative safety of Australia, but I know what it's like to be one of them.
When I go online, I see the backdrop to my childhood, the streets of Iran, broken and bleeding. I see the same horrors that caused me to flee Iran repeated anew.
Although I am in another country, my breath is ragged even though this time there is no tear gas to hurt me. I am imagining my fellow protesters holding a napkin drenched in vinegar over my mouth to help me breathe after being gassed and beaten.
My generation grew up forced to repeat dehumanising chants like, "The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader" or "God protect Khomeini's movement, reduce from our lives and add to his life" every day at school. It ruined so many childhoods.
But the product of these 43 years of brainwashing is a global shout of "Woman, Life, Freedom": a revolutionary manifesto that stands for intersectionality, for the right to life and humanity, and demands the distortion of the Islamic Republic as a terrorist regime.
Now schoolgirls are burning pictures of the supreme leader taken from their books, kicking out a senior education ministry official from their school in Karaj and removing their mandatory hijabs.
Memories are like a physical pain
I was a teacher in Tehran at a prestigious university, advocating for women and children on death row and directing an art therapy project in an orphanage, but I fled persecution with nothing but my daughter Minerva and a bag in 2010.
My brother, too, left Tehran. I still can't forget the sound of his screams when the Islamists dragged him to the ground, into a van and then to their jail when he was a young photojournalist.
When he was released, his body had been crushed by their flogging, his assets confiscated or frozen.
Now he's based in London and works for the BBC.
I can't forget the teenage dissidents who chose to end their life rather than buckle beneath the jackboot of the regime.
I can't forget the voices of my students and classmates that scar the land like shrapnel.
I can't forget the sound of kissing was banned, how love, happiness and dancing were forbidden.
Each memory slams into me with physical pain. Worse still, these crimes are being repeated, re-traumatising Iran and the Iranian diaspora.
Many Iranians see no future under the regime except the possibility of more surveillance, disadvantage, discrimination, and poverty.Often the unknown frightens us. But for Iranian people, state violence is infused in their daily life and is not an unfamiliar component. Their courage is the antidote to the dreadful desperation to survive.
My people have come to realise that for more than 43 years, they have been living on death row, on a gradual death, where the imagination of any prosperity and freedom was impossibleMemories of growing up in Iran keep flooding back to me.
From the age of six or seven, we were forced to live invisibly.
I remember the veiled body of our childhoods and being forced to go to school wearing only four regulation colours: black, brown, grey, and navy.
Since the Shia Islamists seized power in 1979 there have been many protests against the compulsory hijab.more here-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-09/iran-protest-women-standing-up-for-rights... 
Forum
Pages: 1
Hijab, a symbol of oppression. (Read 9502 times)
