An artistic demonstration in the virtual world for human
rights in Iran
Amir Soltani*
I
remember the day I became a human rights activist. I was 12 years old.
My father picked me up from school. He bought me an ice-cream.
And, then gently broke the news of the executions. Among the dead
was the grandfather of one of my closest friends. Shot dead with 13
bullets, without a trial, he was executed on the rooftop of the Alavi School,
Ayatollah Khomeini's temporary residence. I threw the ice-cream out of the car
window. It was the only thing I could do, an act of impotence- a moment
of rage.
Only
days earlier, my friend had reassured me that her grandfather would be freed.
It was only a matter of time. I got home, opened the newspaper, and
there he was, a face staring not so much at us, but at death itself. My
friend vanished, and for years, I was left holding onto the questions. I knew
that those 13 bullets weren't lodged in her grandfather; they were buried
and bleeding in her, every single one of them.
There
were other casualties. My father was one of them. He had failed my friend
and me. He had not intervened. He had not interrupted the execution; the
executions. If we could not stop death- those 13 bullets- with the force
of our faith and family, then how could my father claim to be a man? How could
we claim to have a faith? And how could I grow up to become my father?
And how could I accept his faith when it did so little to guard the price of my
friendships?
That
execution was my first encounter with death, with the charge of all the
commandments, history and emotions priced into the trajectory of those 13
bullets. All of them etched as trauma in the fabric and foundation of
time. But, then, an even deeper failure surfaced: the revolution was followed
by war. And again, I escaped the brush with war. I was sent to a
school in England,
but there was no escaping the carnage of the Iran-Iraq war.
Even
in England, thousands of
miles away from the Middle East, the pages of
every newspaper were soaked in the blood of an entire generation of Iranian and
Iraqi boys. World War I, Wilfred Owen poems seemed to echo through time.
The killing fields had shifted from Europe to the Middle
East, but our mentality, framed as it was into a machinery of
serial killing and mass murder had not changed. The front lines literally
converted the flesh of boys into the face of tribes and territories.
Blood was sucked into the ground. Oil pumped out of the ground.
In Iran's largest
cemetery, ‘Zahra's Paradise’, a fountain of
blood (artificial) symbolized the sacrifice gushing out of the boys. All
that remained of the kids mangled in war was row after row of intact images
staring back at the world. Their death- absence- was priced into
everything, into the fabric of time and language, into tribe and territory, and
yes, into me.
Land
was not the only nexus for converting the blood of children into the price of
property. There was money to be made out of every corner of the morgue:
merchants could speculate in the price of oil, the movements of gold, the sale
of arms. Virtually every industry, commodity and economy could be revived
by speculating in the death of Iran
and Iraq's
children just as they were in the wars that had torn other nations and continents
apart.
Still,
it seemed to me then, and now, especially now, thirty or so years later, when
one has the benefit of hindsight, when one sees the children of so many other
nations being plunged into the abyss of war, that we are far from abolishing the
scourge of war. From Syria
to Afghanistan and the United States to Russia,
generations of kids are being drawn into the killing fields of the Middle East. There is no end to the Great Game, no
end to speculation in the carcass of the living and the dead.
Nothing stops kids from being recycled into the price of oil and
arms, the face of matter and markets, and the idols of tribe and territory
erected above the morgue of time. Their only function, then as now, is to get
exchanged into the price of cancerous currencies and gangrenous economies that
convert flesh into money and pain into the profits by turning time into an
instrument for insuring rates of death and debt.
All
these tribes and territories, created in the image of man, have turned into
shadows and shrines of death. And so in this century, as in centuries
past, they are nothing but corpses and coffins that recycle kids into and out
of the mints and morgues of time. There is no end to the assault on the temple
of life, love and law that should protect all of God's children as one.
There are no walls, no barriers, no laws and no mirrors guarding the
price of their flesh or faith. Kids, of course, don't know that their titles,
tribes and territories will betray them, and that the only way out of war is by
shedding all the death priced into their earthly skin.
And
so I am still the 12 year old human rights activist; still impotent before
death; still raging against war; still searching for a way to stop 13
bullets from shattering my friend's world; still hoping against hope that one
day I will grow up to be a real man; still wondering if one can turn time
around so that it ceases to be a measure and mirror guarding the image of
tribes and territories born and bound to death.
Until
then, I fantasize about a day when we will stop executions, and pray for a time
when we will reclaim our faith: pull our funds out of cycles of war in coffins
of debt and invest them back where they belong: in temples of love and life.
For
life to blossom and humanity to flourish, we need better stories, playful and
persuasive ways of imagining alternatives to killing, singular or serial.
God knows that we have buried enough kids in this earth- maybe it is time
to turn this tomb of time into what it was meant to be: the garden of paradise.
A Graphic
Novel
Zahra's Paradise was inspired by
promise of an Iranian Spring. Like millions of people around the world, I
was moved by the 2009 protests against the fraudulent presidential elections,
by the passion, dignity, courage and creativity of the Iranian people; by the
power of a simple question: "Where is my vote?" That question was
shaking the foundations of a theocracy founded on fear, fraud and force. We
were witnessing the birth pangs of a new Iran, the face of a new generation
that dared to realize its dream of freedom, a dream for equality, dignity and
justice for which Iranians have struggled since the constitutional revolution
of 1906.
And then came the Ayatollah's crackdown, and with it, the haunting image
of a beautiful young woman, Neda, dying on the streets of Tehran. And then a YouTube video of an
Iranian mother about to bury another protester, her son Sohrab, in ‘Zahra's
Paradise’, Tehran's
largest cemetery. On her face, one could feel the anguish and the sorrow of an
entire nation. She had been searching for her son all over Tehran- in the hospitals, morgues, prisons
and courts- without getting a single straight answer. She could not accept the
reality of her son's death. Her entire being revolted against the idea of
burying him at age 19. There, in Zahra's Paradise,
standing above her son's corpse, that mourning mother spoke, not only through
her own grief, but the grief of an entire nation, a grief that has singed the
hearts of women through all ages and across all nations. And there and then,
watching that YouTube video, I felt that enough was enough. We did not
have to accept the Ayatollah’s reality- the idea of Iran as a corpse and Islam as a
coffin- as our own. We did not have to bury the body and the dreams of
another generation of Iranian youth in dust and dirt. There had to be some way
of turning all that death back into life, some way of defying gravity and
turning time around. And for me, the way was by telling the story of a burial
in Zahra’s Paradise. And wondering where these
deaths in paradise- these cemeteries and burials- really take place: in the
cemetery or in our hearts?
A virtual campaign
The connections between art, protest, technology really opened up the
possibilities for a virtual campaign.
The idea behind Zahra's Paradise was to open a new front in the battle
for human rights in Iran,
and that was to leverage the power of the graphic novel as a medium for protest
and activism. A bit like the pamphlet during the French Revolution, the graphic
novel is the ultimate democratic medium: it is cheap, fast and accessible. In
terms of producing content, all you need to realize a vision is a pencil and a
bit of imagination.
In our case, we did not need that much imagination thanks to Iran’s
tech-savvy youth. In the 2009 protests, they had turned their cell phones and
blogs into instruments for citizen-journalism. The Iranian people were no
longer activists locked behind the Ayatollah's screens and stages but bloggers
who controlled the means of representation, and thus, the producers, editors
and distributors of their own reality. The Islamic Republic could not wipe out
that reality. Neda’s death was a fact witnessed by the entire world. So was
Sohrab’s funeral. Those facts appeared as fragment, glimpses into a mirror of
time that reflected the real face of the Iranian people. All we did was to
collect and combine these fragments into a single story: a stream of real
images, memories and moments formatted as a blog and presented as virtual
reality. So in terms of producing a campaign, Zahra’s Paradise was just part of
a continuum, an extension and expression of the protests in Iran.
Our publisher at ‘First Second’, Mark Siegel had the idea of serializing
Zahra's Paradise on the web. For free.
As he put it, the Internet was our minaret, and art, in the form of the
graphic novel, was our opportunity to intervene in history. And he was
right. The Internet was not only revolutionizing production of content
but also its consumption. All the traditional barriers to communication-time,
space and language- had collapsed. Zahra could exist in a virtual space that
the Islamic Republic could not censor. She could communicate freely. And she
could interact with a global audience in real time. Our readers were no longer
passive consumers of news but active participants in a global movement for
human rights in Iran.
Partnerships with human rights groups like Amnesty International, the
Boroumand Foundation and United4Iran also helped us connect the virtual to the
real. It is their work- work is the wrong word- their devotion that allowed us
to ground Zahra’s story- fiction- in fact. Over the past decade, the Boroumand
Foundation has created the Omid Memorial, a list of over 16,000 Iranians who
have been killed by the Islamic Republic. They have collected and documented
facts about the grizzliest of human rights violations, guarding the sanctity
and dignity of life by binding it to love, language and law. They generously
allowed us to publish that list at the end of Zahra’s Paradise.
The 2009 protests had also given birth to United4Iran, a human
rights group that knew how to wage a global grassroots campaign. Within a
matter of weeks, they had organized a Global Day of Action: protests in
solidarity with the Iranian people in over 120 cities around the world. The
sense of possibility, creativity and community was boundless as people from
every background and discipline joined their hands and hearts in calling for
the release of political prisoners and an end to human rights violations in Iran.
Fast forward to 2013, and virtually every piece for launching our
campaign was in place: we had Zahra, a mourning mother with a powerful story
and a deep commitment to human rights. We had a team of campaign wizards
in United4Iran- a network of activists and volunteers; we had a global
constituency of human rights and democracy activists; we had technology: cell
phones, blogs and the Internet; we had the Iranian people, especially women and
youth; and we had a crumbling and bumbling theocracy hiding behind the illusion
of democracy: an unelected body of 12 old men- the Council of Guardians-
rigging yet another fraudulent election in favour of another unelected old man,
the Supreme Leader, by treating the Iranian people as a virtual reality. It was
the perfect moment for a virtual storm.
Zahra’s Contribution
The regime has
become a threat to itself and to the Iranian people. Iran's
revolutionary establishment is falling apart. They are holding a former
prime minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and a former speaker of the parliament,
Mehdi Karroubi, under house arrest. And they disqualified Ali Akbar
Rafsanjani, the former president who literally crowned Ali Khamenei Supreme
Leader. So if anyone is in trouble, it is the Supreme Leader. We have
nothing to fear from standing for human rights, for our Iran, the Iran of love, life and laughter.
Zahra is about the power of imagination. She reminds the Iranian people
that they have every right to defy reality, especially when you consider that
the Islamic Republic itself is more than a fiction held together by fraud and
force. Zahra is about the power of the Iranian people to dream of another
future and to live in another Iran,
a democratic and joyful Iran
where their votes count and their lives matter. She is the only woman candidate
in the race- even though virtual- and the only candidate running on a human
rights platform.
Zahra is the only candidate challenging the legitimacy of a religious
politburo- 13 unelected old men- 12 on the Council of Guardians, and one
Supreme Leader- to rule a nation of 70 million where 70% of the population is
less than 35 years old. At a moment in Iranian history when the leaders are
dismissing the Iranian people as "dust and dirt", it made plenty of
sense for Zahra to enter the race as a virtual candidate. To Iran's leaders,
Zahra may be no more than an illusion speaking to dust and dirt, but her tears
are real. Who knows what magic lies buried in her tears and what miracles can
rise out of dust and dirt? After all, as Zahra knows only too well, Iran is a land
where, paradoxically, the virtual can be more powerful than the real.
Of course, It is
very hard for people inside Iran
to vote for Zahra. She is not on the ballot, but we have had hundreds of people
send us their photos in support of Zahra's call for “free and fair elections”.
And we have more hits on facebook and twitter than the other eight
presidential candidates, so we are definitely the frontrunner. More
importantly, the principles for which Zahra stands- human rights, abolition of
the death penalty, release of political prisoners, equality of women,
protection of students and scholars, respect for the will and the vote of the
Iranian people- have deep support inside and outside Iran. The principles are
what matters- we have staked our ground- and virtually everyone knows that we
can have a better Iran.
The truth is that
over the past thirty years, the Islamic Republic has forced millions of
Iranians to leave their country, but neither force nor fraud and neither time
nor distance can kill our love for Iran, its culture and its people.
What we are going through today is a bit like what France went
through in the Second World War. On the surface, the Ayatollah's appear in
power, but throughout the country, there is deep and growing resistance against
a dictatorship that has no grounding in Iranian history or culture.
* Iranian
artist, writer and human rights activist