Some condemn the speculation that the suicide had political motives. Others deny that it had to do with love.
The father speaks. He denies her relationship with the young man. Not love. Not lovers. Just friendship, he says. A short while, he says.
On her blog, she writes of the man. Of their love and of their longings.
The father says he does not want to deny the words on her blog, he wants to deny the rumors.
His voice trembles. He cries.
He speaks of her spirits, emotional and fragile. Of her listening to and being pained by the pain of others, by the conditions of society. Of her studying and working. Of her friends calling her “Mom.” Of her visiting the elderly. Of her supporting orphans. Of her feeling that she did not belong. Of her telling him she felt exhausted.
He calls her and her suicide nonpolitical. Calls the timing of the two suicides a coincidence. Says she had grown so sensitive that her suicide could have been prompted by the news of any other’s suicide.
He denies her arrest.
His voice trembles. He cries.
He speaks of him and her mother being at work that morning, of her colleagues calling an hour later to say she had not shown up to work, of her mother returning home, hearing calming music, finding her body, the message on the mirror:
“No wailing.
No crying.
I will be eternal.
I love you all.”
In her last blog post, a week before her suicide, she writes of her beloved:
“I swear to our Thursdays …
Today is Thursday.
Come my love,
Let’s dance
On Thursdays …”
Many posts are addressed to him.
Whispers of love, for love.
Of him, for him.
She calls him, she misses him, she aches for him.
“I am done,” she writes at the end of the post before the last. The post is written in red ink.
A YouTube link to an Astor Piazzolla tango called “Oblivion.” A YouTube link to a black-and-white video of an orchestra performing an Eleni Karaindrou composition. Several YouTube links to videos not available anymore.
Her blog is still alive. Up in the virtual world. Visited and quoted more than ever immediately after the suicide.
The ceremonies of the seventh and fortieth nights following her death are held in private.
A UK article calls them the modern-day Romeo and Juliet. A blog suggests commemorating the day of her suicide, the seventh day of the seventh month of the Persian calendar, as the new St. Valentine’s Day in Iran.
And she grabs him, and he grabs her, and he pulls her toward him impatiently but gently and puts his mouth over hers, and she throws her arms around him and moves her fingers through his hair and his beard, and their tongues meet in the vortex of the front hallway, and they begin shedding their clothes as they feel their way to the bedroom while clinging to each other. It all takes only a second, but it’s a second that will forever be their first, a second that is not just a second but is a second and a breath, a breath, a giggle, a breath, a breath, a sigh, another breath, and the sound of phones falling to the floor next to her bed, and another breath, and another breath, and a pause as she throws the bedcover to one side and the two of them, now completely naked, get into bed. He touches her wetness and asks in a whisper, what shall we do with these bodies? and she takes his hand and guides him inside her as the moon continues to grow a bit more full or a bit less full, fooling around in its universe while watching over the fools the two of them are.
Why should we tell the story of the dead? Why should we research these deaths? Why should we resurrect the dead? Should we? Can we?
Are the dead really gone? Are the dead more present than the living, their ghosts forever hovering, casting shadows, haunting the living responsible for or indifferent to or helpless against their displacement?
If these deaths have already been researched and documented, why another documentation? If the stories of these bodies have already been told, why tell them again? What is it about translating them anew? What is it about relating to them anew? What is the raison d’être for these narratives? What is their use?
Is the new context important? The voice? The style?
Will retelling them in the form of art, in the body of a story, change the meaning, the transferring, the impact?
Why these men and women? Why not others? How many were they—those killed during or after the 2009 protests? What about the counted and uncounted dead killed during the 1980s? Why not the ones assassinated during the Chain murders in 1998 and earlier—writers, translators, poets, activists? Why not their stories? Why not their stories too?
What about others? Were there others? Who were the others, before them, after them?
Re: the dream world.
“Dreams yield no more than fragments of reproductions” of experiences; they include only “loosely associated elements”; they are “lacking in intelligibility and orderliness” (Freud 2010).
Thinking “predominantly in visual images” (Freud 2010), they enjoy “plasticity” and “symbolic multiplicity” (Notley 2014).
They are “a glimpse of something incognito” (Carson 2006).
I do not speak the language of dreams, but I will not turn away from their story, their world.
The dream world gains materiality out of the documentation of my dreams, from December 2011 to January 2014. The dreams are documented either in Persian or English, whichever language imposes itself on my body and the page. The dreams are dreamt in different cities around the world but mainly in Tehran and Denver.
corpse (23)
the government accepts
responsibility
for only a few of the corpses
The rain, they say, cleanses the city of soot, makes the air clean and fresh, but that only happens later, later when the rain has stopped, and even then the freshness in the air lasts only a few hours until the cars join forces on the ground to pollute the air once again, to remind us all of their powers, of the battle between the down below and the up above. And down below in the city, wet, they are, and muddy: the alleys, the highways, the gutters, the sewage channels.
A hassle, they are: to walk through, to jump over, to smell or try not to smell. And the patches of green and flowerbeds on the corners or along the highways, a joy, they are: to glance at, to breathe in, to walk past. All the while, she meanders between the cars, the buses, the motorbikes, the vans, the cars, the flower boys, the flower girls, the newspaper woman, the CD man, the cars, the pedestrians, the ambulance stuck in traffic, the traffic, which is a knot of metal and human bodies suspended in the countdown for a red light, and they count again and again and no space opens up for the cars or the ambulance, the ambulance, the ambulance. Is the person inside already dead or still alive? Is the person inside, who is alive, going to die in traffic or in the hospital? Isn’t the person staying alive going to die anyway, someday, somewhere? The rain pours down and washes the soot away.
Wet, she is, even though she carries an umbrella. Wet, she is, when she gets to the bus stop and waits for the bus, which opens its doors to her and the other passengers before even arriving at the stop and closes its doors and keeps on moving since everyone has already boarded before the stop, and the stop is empty, and the bus is not going to break for the no one who remains at the stop.
She stands in the not-yet-crowded aisle and lets a large group of women and kids coming through the back door take the few remaining seats and lets herself forget about the outside of the inside of this moving theater.
The women and kids are not from the north of the city; she can tell from the way they wear their veils and the way they carry themselves and their bags. The women and kids have traveled to the north of the city, perhaps to pay a visit to the mausoleum, because it is Wednesday, and the buried saint is more responsive to prayers, they say, on Wednesdays, especially on the last Wednesday of the m
onth. It is the last Wednesday of the month. The women and kids have paid a visit to the mausoleum that is tucked in the heart of the bazaar, have given the vendor at the corner of the courtyard some banknotes in exchange for bags of wheat and millet to throw for the pigeons of the mausoleum, have said a prayer or two and cried a little or a lot, have knotted a piece of cloth from an old flowery sheet or veil to the bars of the gold shrine in hopes that their prayers will be answered, and then they’ve headed back out to the bazaar. The women and kids scurry from one store to another, buy some walnuts or a small bag of fresh peppers or jars of homemade pickled vegetables, not because they don’t know how to pickle things at home or they don’t have time for it or they don’t do it, but perhaps for the pleasure of buying rather than toiling in the kitchen, or perhaps so they can taste them with the family and brag to themselves and to the husbands and the kids that their own pickles taste much better, that these ones were just a waste of money, and they glow inside with the joy of this realization and the joy of hearing the husbands and kids finally confess that of course there are none as good as theirs, and they buy a new set of tea glasses or some heavy-duty trash bags or new prayer beads or old-style bars of cedar soap or lace underwear from a women-only shop or tobacco for the hookah after minutes and minutes of bargaining with the salesperson, or perhaps they leave without buying anything because they did not agree with the salesperson’s final offer, leave only to stop before a street vendor and buy a plastic made-in-China tablecloth or a grater or a book of prayers or boxes of matches or a pack of six black socks for the husband or a skirt that they do not really need but buy simply because it is cheap, cheaper than the price a store would offer, because the vendor is a bargainer like the women, who enjoy the bargaining as much as or more than the purchase itself, the object they have needed or desired or not, which they now carry with them in plastic bags onto the bus.
What kinds of mausoleums are erected for today’s dead? For those celebrated by the regime? Those effaced by the regime?
Could archives in the digital realm be the mausoleums of today and tomorrow? Will they survive long enough? Will they survive at all?
The women and kids who are now the women and kids with bags filled with this and that settle in their seats, and the fat woman wearing a colorful veil sits down in a window seat and leaves a big plastic bag with several other bags inside it on the seat next to her, and the woman wearing a black veil, whose features are not dissimilar to the other’s but who is younger, finds a place across the aisle from her. They sit the kids down in the row in front of the woman in the black veil, and the kids instantly forget about everyone and everything around them apart from the Cheetos bag they are passing around and their soccer trading cards. The younger woman immediately takes out her cell phone and begins dialing and talking so loudly that not only the women around her but also the men in the front section and perhaps the driver, too, can hear, and while the men resume their own after-a-long-day-let’s-complain-about-the-hardships-of-life conversations a minute later, the women all keep silent or continue in lower voices and listen, or hear anyway, as the woman tells the listener on the other end of the line that tonight they should go with their families to visit a couple just back from a trip, discussing whether to buy the couple a gift or sweets and flowers, adding that they’ll figure that out when the woman on the bus gets home and calls the woman on the phone back again, in an hour or two, and as the woman in black says good-bye to the woman on the other end of the line, the women on the bus all echo the regards she sends to the beloved husband of the woman on the other end of the line, the kiss for the little devils at home. The woman sitting in the row behind the woman in the colorful veil smiles at this conversation, and her eyes and the eyes of the woman still standing in the aisle meet, and they smile at one another, and the woman in the colorful veil, as if she has only now become aware of the one still standing, begins to move her bags onto her lap and tells the one standing, come sit, my daughter, and finally, the one standing does. The woman in the colorful veil talks over her to the woman in the black veil, who is not on the phone anymore, who, in response to the woman’s question about the phone call, tells them all about the couple who has returned from Karbala, to whom they must pay a visit, oh, pay a visit after this long day, oh, in this rain, which doesn’t seem to want to stop anytime soon, oh, get everyone ready and going. Suddenly she pauses and looks out, leaving the story unfinished, and asks, as if she has just remembered, about the stop where she needs to get off, asks how far away they are, how many stops, and when she is assured that she still has some time to travel on the moving stage, she calls out to her young boys, whose fingers are all orange from the Cheetos and who are swapping cards with one another, to sit together in one seat so the middle-aged woman who has just boarded can sit down, do, please, sit down, kids, come on, hurry up, move, move, make some room for the lady, and then the woman in the black veil moves to a window seat that has just opened up, and a college student who carries a laptop, backpack, and folder takes her seat, not even looking up from her texts for a second. When the bus driver calls out, over all the mumbling and chattering, the name of the stop the woman in black has asked for, she gets up and summons the boys, hurry, hurry, boys, get your things, let’s go, get going, walk, hurry up, shouting to the driver over the bodies of the men, don’t move yet, we haven’t gotten off, then taking her time in putting a kiss on the cheek of the woman in the colorful veil, who, it turns out, is her mother, the way she addresses her, tells her to take care, to take her medication on time, and not to forget to get off at the stop where she needs to get off, asks the woman sitting next to her mother, can you please make sure she gets off at the right stop? I appreciate it, may beautiful God grant all your wishes, and as she begins to move away toward the door, the woman still sitting behind the mother asks her to send everyone’s regards to the couple who has returned from pilgrimage, and the woman in the black veil and the woman in the colorful veil smile such carefree smiles that she, now sitting next to the mother, wonders where that comes from and how they nourish it, but she doesn’t want to ask and be given a sermon about faith and family, ask and be asked questions in turn: Is she married or not, does she have kids or not, does she study or not?
“the trickster is informer is infernal pass it on / the nomad leaves tracks / today came all the way inside / the prognosticator left some assonance / we are tangential are instrumental / my guts spilled out as testament / to the best & worst in women” (Waldman 1976).
A women-only space. Such spaces are often spoken of only in terms of the oppression and victimhood they inflict upon their inhabitants. But spaces of separation can also be sites for building connections, for reaching out, for reaching in, for seeing anew, for redefining, not just the self but also the collective.
How to shift the perspective and adjust the self toward the Other to imagine a new “we”?
To begin, one needs to “identify marginality as much more than a site of deprivation,” as “a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.” Marginality is “a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives” (hooks 1990).
Instead, she wants to shout out, ask the daughter in the black veil not to leave, please stay on for just a few more stops, let’s get off together at the square where I’m headed, where you should be headed, where all of us, women and men, should be headed, to the square where there once was a statue of a mother who grew fresh narcissus in her heart, for lovers to pluck while they held candles during vigils, a mother who kept growing the flowers so lovers could keep plucking them, a mother who, amid the city smog, breastfed the child she held in her arms with the scent of narcissus, whispering to her, the secrets are with the mothers, the mothers and the lovers, telling her the stories of each and every petal, the square where now, there is only the void of the mother and the child and her narcissus, the void into whose nothingness lovers stealth
ily stare, with candles or without candles, pausing only for a moment before continuing on their way, not even turning to look back, not knowing where to search, who to ask, how to find.
She wants to tell her, tell them, wants to hear herself speak about the statue that disappeared. The mother. The child. The narcissus in her heart, in her flesh. The lovers. No footprints or fingerprints left behind. No signs of who or how or when or why.
She wants to speak of the statue that disappeared after being threatened for months. Of ropes found around her neck, tied as if to execute her. Of the ropes that remained hanging. For a few days. Until they removed them. Cleaned the mother and the child. Made them shine. She wants to hear herself speak about the narcissus shattering in the statue’s heart, the flowers beginning to wither.
For a few days. Until some lovers removed the dead ones. Tended to the rest. About the mother who stayed standing. Holding on to her child. Giving birth to narcissus. For a while. Until she was not. Until she disappeared. Taking the child and the flowers with her. Leaving behind some narcissus petals that also disappeared shortly after, swept away by a gust of wind or the dustman or the lovers who arrived in time to collect them as souvenirs.
In an interview on March 11, 2010, Zahra Rahnavard, wife of the Green Movement leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi, is asked about the vandalism of one of her “most famous pieces,” “one of the most famous sculptures in Iran during the first two decades of the Islamic Republic” (Rahnavard 2011). The statue is of a woman. Ropes have been put around the woman’s neck. As if she is to be hanged. The woman is a mother. The statue is called Mother. The square in Tehran where the piece is located is called Mother Square.
Rahnavard responds, “For artists, their work is as close to them as their body. It comes from the heart. The artist puts all of his or her love into art, and it becomes the tale of all the untold stories, cries, secrets, morals, and dreams that the artist has. But when
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