Why?
Part of me keeps wondering, asking myself, why I don’t just let this go, and take a break. I could be out, living obliviously, hanging with friends, dating, having a life. But I keep coming back to things like this. Why. I just watched this video, and this guy in it puts this so well.
http://www.kanoon-zendanian.org//Movies/witnesses.swf
There was part of the video, where what he said caught my attention, really stood out, and I had to go back and listen to it again, and then write it down, and now put it here.
This is what he says, near the middle of the video:
It seems to me that there are not enough and right words to describe the horrible scenes and sufferings. The condition, which many Iranians have been experienced during the last 25 years, had been created by the Islamic regime.
Only those who experienced those ordeals could sense the depth of this pain, degradation, and tribulation.
The experiences of imprisonment and torture will stay with the victim until the last breath.
Only survivors who tell and re-tell their story can endure their unbearable pain. By choosing to be silent, is nourishing a tumour, which will grow and destroy the victim from inside.
Silence means survival, and it means the permanent sheltering of injustice inside the victim. There is no tranquility in silence. If there is tranquility, it is in breaking the silence.
Why does this mean anything to me? I have never lived in Iran. Never been in their prisons, or experienced their torture. Why can’t I be silent?
This thread describes my connection. The hook that has taken me in. I am the one who posts down at the end of the first page, named Coyote.
http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/21782-letter-fayah.html
Here is the summary. Fayah is a protester, an young Iranian woman, who went out to protest on July 30th. That day, they mourned for Neda, a protester who was killed 40 days earlier. This is what Fayah wrote a friend of hers before she went out to protest. She has not been heard from since the day she went out to protest, by the way.
A letter from Fayah:
I love life. I love to laugh and be with my friends. There are so many books I want to read, movies I want to see, people I want to meet. I want to marry, to be a good wife and mother. I want to grow old with the people I love, to feel the sun on my face, to see the ocean, to travel.
My country is in a terrible state. People have no jobs. There is no money. People have no freedom. Women must hide themselves from the world, and we have no choices.
Our people–we are not terrorists. We hate terrorists. And that is what our government has become. They kill our people for no reason. They torture us in their prisons because we want freedom. They make our country look evil, they make our religion look evil.
We are fighting for our freedom, for our religion, for our country. If we do nothing while injustice abounds, we become unjust. We turn into the ones we hate.
I have to fight. I have to go back on the streets. I will make them kill me. I will join Neda, with my friends, and then maybe the world will hear us.
I never thought I would become a martyr, but it is needed. The more of us they kill, the smaller they become, the more strength the people will have. Maybe my death will mean nothing, but maybe it will buy my country freedom.
I am very sad that I will never be a mother, that I will never do the things I love, but I would rather die than do nothing and know that I am to blame for the tortures, the murder, the hatred.
Please tell the world how much we love life. That we are not terrorists. We just want to be free.
I read this, and I immediately knew exactly how she felt. It gave me a moment of clarity myself, where I could put exactly how I feel into words. So this is what I wrote.
I have been posting in this board as an unregistered since the day it was created, and I posted in this thread up above in post #6, but I want to be known for who I am here. This letter has been eating at me. I wish I could take this letter and scream it into everyone in the world’s ears with a bullhorn, and then crawl inside their heads and make sure they were listening, that they understand.
Yes, she is courageous, but this is not about courage. It is about the only choices that she has. Three. Join them and become like them, hide, or make the right choice and do what she is doing. There are no other choices. There is no other option.
And she has made the right one, no matter how terrible, how awful, the consequences may be.
I know how she feels. Personally. I am not Iranian. I have never grown up in a repressive country. But I know, because I have experienced the same evil. I can relate.
I want to explain. It may not sound the same at first, but it is very similar.
When I grew up, every day when my father would come home, he would beat the shit out of my mother, or my sister, or my brother. Every night I would have to listen to them scream and beg and cry through the wall, and see the marks the next day in the morning. My mother, all of us actually, could not do or think or act in any way that was not approved by our almighty father, and what he approved changed each day and each minute as his whims changed. You could not keep up. He threatened to kill us, tormented us, you get the picture. That’s all you need to know.
Now, I say this is similar, because what Iran is going through is the same thing, only on a national scale. What happened just inside my one house, with all the neighbors and school teachers and people at the hospital looking the other way and ignoring, this same thing is happening in Iran only everyone in the entire country has to endure it! It is the same thing only on a massive level, blown up a millions times larger.
The effects are the same. The results are the same. The pain, I can understand. The scale, I don’t even want to think about the scale.
No one should ever have to live through this. Evil has the same face, everywhere it rears its disgusting head. They take what is good – love for the family, religion, and pervert it and twist it into something that is so evil no human mind could ever grasp or comprehend it until it is too late and they are surrounded by it.
I hope she lives. I hope she can have a family, and children, and live a happy life. I have never married, never had children, because part of me has always been terrified that some seed planted in me when I was a child is still there and will grow. Mostly I doubt it, but just that chance, that suspicion, keeps me from even trying. I would rather die than become like my father was. He would have made a natural basiji or Iranian prison interrogator.
So I know how she feels. She has no choices. Become like them, hide, or resist – no matter what the price.
I pray she doesn’t have to pay the price. But if she does, she is to be honored, and no one should ever for a single millisecond think that what she did was not worth it. Nothing any human being can ever do is as courageous and right as what she is doing. I am proud of her.
I’d like to scream that in everyone’s ears with a bullhorn, too.
Now, as I write this, I don’t even want to go back and re-read what I wrote there. Saying it once is enough. Read it, and you know why I feel the same way.
There is a part of the video I posted to and talked about at the beginning of this post, where the Iranian prison survivors talk about a special punishment their government had for them that they called being put “in the grave”. They were put into small wooden boxes, and made to kneel inside of them for months, listening to verses from the Koran blasted into their ears from loudspeakers. Verses from the Koran, and also, as one of the people said very briefly, they would broadcast other prisoners “interviews”. I knew what she meant from the look in her eyes. Those “interviews” were mainly screams and pleading. They would put those people in little boxes and make them listen to other prisoners screaming over loudspeakers for months and months.
I had to listen to my mother scream through a wall my entire childhood. Or my sister. Or my brother. I know, in a small way, what they went through. I have had a taste, however small it may be in comparison. So I know how they feel. My torture was not all day, it was mainly at night, and I was not beaten, or all the other hell they had to go through. It was partial, in comparison to what they went through. But I have had a taste.
No one should ever have to feel this way. The man is right. Keeping it silent, that is keeping an injustice secret inside of you, letting it eat away at you. Anyone who has seen it, come near it, even had a taste of it, if there is a shred of humanity in them, they cannot see it happen again and not want to join in with those who are suffering, and scream for it to stop with them.
So if I seem weird, obsessed, at least try to understand why. I couldn’t be different no matter how much I wanted to be. I can’t see the looks in their faces, hear the inflictions in their voices, and not be hooked. Part of it. With them.
To forget is to let it happen again. To ignore is to let it keep happening. To look away is to murder by inaction.
Published by CoyoteDKM on August 17th, 2009 | Filed under Personal
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