The poem does not stop before an execution squad", writes the Persian poet.
To go by metro to the National Library of Iran, with its Garden of Books and its House of Poems, you need to take line 1 and get off at Shahid Haqqani, a station operating since 1380 of the Persian calendar, in 2001 AD.
At six o'clock in the afternoon on September 13, 2022, a 22-year-old girl came out of this subway entrance. She was accompanied by her brother, Kiaresh, 17 years old. They came from the Kurdish provinces of northwestern Iran, and she took advantage of the fact that classes had not yet started at the university to visit relatives in Tehran.
An Islamic-oriented patrol stopped her near the subway entrance. He accused her of not wearing the hijab properly. The sensuality of women's hair must be covered up, as if men's hair were not also sensual.
The guidance patrol guided the girl, indeed, towards the darkness. First they slapped her. Then they beat him with a club on his hands and feet. They sprayed his brother's face with pepper spray. They forced them into a van and took them to the police station on Carrer Vezarat. During the journey, she was hit on the head with the club and lost consciousness.
"He's doing a trick," said one of the moral police.
Once at the police station, it was at least another hour and a half before she was taken to Kasra Hospital where, after three days in a coma, she was officially declared dead. Exactly one year ago.
As in hundreds of cities around the world, the Iranian Community Association of Catalonia will remember her today in a rally at six in the afternoon in Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona.
"Call out her name", asks the global mobilization network - "Woman, Life, Freedom" -, and too often they only call out Mahsa Amini, forgetting her Kurdish name, Jina, forbidden in the official Persian documentation. While she was being tortured, Jina asked for help in the language that came out of her heart: Kurdish. Because languages, before communicating with others, serve to cry.
"The Iranians have the solution from within. We just give them a voice", says Anahita while drinking a coffee in the Eixample. The daughter of an Iranian and a Catalan, she was four years old when she went into exile with her family in 1980, first to Italy and then to Barcelona. "I have only been back to Iran once, in 2001, for emotional tourism. Those were the years of the open-minded Khatami, and I saw a vibrant country. Three times my hijab fell off and three times I was noticed."
Elham joins us at the café, who was born in Iran in 1968 and was almost twelve years old when, also in 1980, he went into exile with his family in the Catalan capital. "I have never returned. For fear, why lie - he says -. When I was 17 they phoned home. They were from the Iranian embassy. I was subjected to a third degree. I ended up shaking. Faced with the idea of returning to Iran, I always ask myself: "What if...?".
"My parents' generation aspired to change, but what arrived had nothing to do with what they wanted - adds Elham-. It is a medium and long term struggle. slow Young people now know very well what they could have."
"They have instilled Islam in us as if it were a cultural, national, identity thing, and it is not", he laments.
"Iran is fascinating - says Anahita-. He never respects conventional theories. It is a very refined country and culture is in our DNA".
"The fight goes far beyond women", he says. And far beyond Iran: "The Afghan community in Catalonia is small, but it accompanies us".
"Leaving Iran and coming to Barcelona lowered our standard of living - remembers Elham-. My friends would call me from Tehran to tell me that they had taken out their driver's license and bought a car, things that I couldn't afford here. But I was free in Barcelona and they were not in Tehran. Our parents paid a very high price for freedom."
"My father told us every day that the regime would change and that we could return - remembers Anahita-. The Iran he kept in his mind was not what I found. Shiraz is bigger than Barcelona and I saw it covered in pollution. I didn't blame him. Iranians have a penchant for poetry."
Persian lyricism permeated my first foreign coverage as a journalist. It was in 1989, at Khomeini's funeral, with the regime's television ecstatically repeating the scene of the Ayatollah's body swinging like a shepherd's crook on the entangled human mass that cradled him. In slow motion, the Islamic screens broadcast the images over and over again, with the adagietto from the Fifth Symphony in the background: Mahler has this, it serves the torso of an ephebe in Venice and the corpse of an old man in Tehran.
In the country of the Persians, as in the rest of the world, poetry, memory and reality attract and despise each other. But there is something that - despite the four decades of separation and the thousands of kilometers of distance - unites Elham and Anahita with the country that gave them life: the right that, if you want, the wind caress the hair
"Iranian women have the most beautiful hair in the world. If the woman wins, they will lose control of Iran," says Elham. "If they let Iran flourish..." sighs Anahita.
The House of Poems in Tehran is a house without poetry where only official poets enter between avenues patrolled by the same police (men and women) who murdered Jina Mahsa Amini a year ago today - in the name of morality.
From exile, the poet Moshen Emadí summarizes the Iranian moment:
"The poem does not stop before an execution squad. / Nor does the execution squad, / in the poem, know where to aim”.
