The following piece was written by Donna Hakimian, a researcher and historian focusing on modern Iran and human rights. Ms. Hakimian obtained her MA in Women’s Studies from the University of Toronto. She also holds a BA in Religious and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill University.
The experience of living as an Iranian in exile is a perplexing one. It is an exile that has left me far from, and robbed me from knowing my homeland, but it is also a process that has placed a heavy pen in my hand. A pen and a blank page to write whatever I please with no fear of reproach, imprisonment, or torture. What to say and how to convey the imprisonment, real or symbolic, of millions of Iranians becomes an important question.
Through dozens of hours during my graduate research I spent in the past several years recording and interviewing former Iranian prisoners of conscience, I subsequently learnt the most profound lessons about human dignity, freedom, and how obsession with political power and control can have dire consequences on a nation’s human rights standards. While the majority of these individuals were imprisoned several decades ago, the semiotic that hits the newsreel from today’s Iran paints a picture of an eerily similar atmosphere.
The individuals I worked with were each arrested and imprisoned under unique circumstances, for the majority of them was related to their religious conviction, their political affiliation, or for being an ethnic minority, such as a Kurd or Baluch -or more generally anything that the Iranian government might have perceived as a threat to their control of power.
In recent years, as the world has witnessed, students, merely for posting an opinion on a blog, exactly as I am doing right now, or a young musician or painter expressing themselves might also warrant harassment and arrest. As we have also seen as of late, human rights activists, such as the jailed lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, or the jailed filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who are among many dozens of jailed Iranian professionals, are being symbolically suffocated from independent expression.
The persistent implementation of psychological and physical terror on individuals and communities in post-revolutionary Iran go far beyond the fears of a nascent government seeking to consolidate power. Rather it shows a deep-rooted disdain for creative expression, independent social movements and diversity as a whole.
The Iranian people, particularly the youth, women groups, and students among others, have responded clearly, as the world witnessed two summers ago. While there might now not be thousands of people flooding the streets as they did in the summer of 2009, a larger and deeper rooted questioning of the norms and practices of current Iranian society is taking shape. These developments make Iran a very interesting and important country to watch in the months and years to come.
I end with one of the greatest lessons I have learned from Iranian prisoners I have interviewed; that power does not lay in the hands of those who implement laws and control the government – true power is in the hands of every Iranian man, woman and student wrongfully imprisoned, those who stand up against persecution and fight for the rights of their fellow citizens.
And while there are many millions of Iranians that might never see inside a prison cell, the systematic forms of censorship, incitement of hatred against ethnic and religious minorities, and a disdain for all things perceived as “un-Iranian”, run the same risk of damaging the spirits and minds of a generation. It is then that pen and the freedom of expression which it carries that becomes so vital. And for those currently pursuing democracy in Iran, it is you who are forging the way for creative resilience and construction of a new Iranian identity.
