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.
To watch a house burning with great intensity in the midst of a conflagration can be both terrifying and awe inspiring. Like any experience in which nature shows us its great and sweeping force, we as humans stand humbled. In like manner, fire, with its alacrity and great force in consuming all that it comes into contact with is often a most appropriate political and social metaphor.
Similarly, events that are unfolding on a daily basis in Iran, seem much like this house on fire. In which the cries for freedom are heard with more and more intensity. And just as in what seems like vestiges from more barbaric epochs of humanities evolution, despotism, rule based on terror and fear, physical and psychological torture and repression across vast sections of the society, is also sweeping across the nation.
But for one who is standing and watching this fire consume and devastate, helplessness and sorrow can take over. And earlier last week in Toronto, a group of several hundred Iranians, caught in the crossfire of these two conflagrations, came to pay their tributes to the Iranian journalist Siamak Pourzand. A man whose life – can be seen as emblematic of the kinds of struggles being waged for freedom in that country. Pourzand was a journalist and man of great letters, the first Iranian journalist in Hollywood, and a man with several decades of variegated and eminent experience, who had among his close friends some of the great poets and authors of modern Iran.
A man whose wife, Mehrangiz Kar is a famed human right activist. Siamak Pourzand endured years of imprisonment, torture – physical and psychological, most recently a ten year sentence of house arrest, and barred from leaving the country, the culmination of which was a decision to end his life last week.
His story of triumph and stoicism, of trial and enduring love, and the words and reminiscences shared by his family and loved ones have affected myself and so many of those around me in a way that would not seem commensurate for a man that most of us had never met. But as a friend of mine pointed out, his story is the story of a generation of Iranians subjected to direct abuses of the Islamic regime in Tehran. It is the conceptual impact that has shaken so many of us to the core. That one final loud thud of wood, that the fire has expelled from its vicious flames.
Pourzand’s daughters painted an intimate picture of a man gentle and inspired. Of how he adjured his daughters to know the histories of those executed prisoners of consciousness. A man who, when informed by a nurse that his wife had had a third daughter, kissed the ground and proclaimed his gratitude for having been blessed with another daughter. This all in a nation, where by the dictates of the government, women are marginalized and oppressed in gruesome and horrifying ways. And from the depictions given it seems that Pourzand, in a both tender and heart breaking utterance, told one of his daughters, “While I am not left with any material possessions by which to pass on to you, I do leave you with a great gift, Iran.”
And that very thing which was his most cherished possession, a nation with a long and glorious past has been and adulterated to such a degree that an eighty year old man of great letters, was pushed to such an act. What then remains for our generation to salvage from this frame of ashes?
As we were leaving the memorial, I was urged by a friend to channel this sorrowful energy towards human rights and cultural pursuits, which is one important way in which to remain strong in this place of great cultural, social, and political transition. But to also interrogate our own prejudices, beliefs that might be a subconscious part of our individual and collective consciousness. And ultimately, to take the work of rebuilding the Iranian nation with leaps of optimism and determination. And in a final sweeping way, to see the possibility and inevitability of the rising Phoenix which will then ascend from her own flames.
