Neda and Helplessness

My good friend Crispin called two days ago, her insides knotted up by the events in Iran. She’d obsessively watched Youtube videos and read reports, blogs, and even entire comment sections that flow for pages after articles. Something about it grabbed her and shook her and kept her looking. In a fit of helplessness she knitted a green wristband, the color of Mir Hussein Mousavi’s opposition campaign and now the color of reform and justice, maybe even a new revolution, in Iran. Empowering the color even more, green was Prophet Muhammad’s favorite color.

The night before, at a dinner party, Crispin wore the wristband, which clashed with her outfit. Another guest asked why she wore it, and she said it was to show solidarity with the protestors risking their lives in Iran. No one knew what she was talking about.

So she called me, her Middle East-knowledgeable friend. She probably knew more than me. My direct connections with anything Iranian are two friends (one a Brit, one an American) who have visited the country. Oh, and I walked by the only Shia mosque in Sharjah while working in the United Arab Emirates. I do pay attention, though, and I thought I stood rationally above Crispin’s helplessness. During the conversation – one of those that reveals more about you than you wanted – I realized I knew exactly how she felt.

It took a while for it to envelope me. For the first day or so after the election I was incredulous toward the reports that, for sure, the election was a fraud. Most likely, I thought, Western reporters attended a few too many rallies in the affluent boroughs of Tehran and got drunk on the hope that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would lose. Then I learned that Mousavi, the main opposition candidate and impetus for those gigantic campaign rallies, earned the same percentage of votes in his home district as he did everywhere else in the country – about thirty percent.

Well, my mind argued, who cares? Mousavi was president in the eighties, remember, during the war with Iraq when Iran’s army used kids as mine detectors, so how great would he be? Plus, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, would still be in charge. The elections showed that Iran’s pseudo-democracy, which allows unelected clerics to vet presidential candidates, was plain sham-democracy, but not much else. I agreed with the protestors going into the streets, and I wished that they might change their country, but I also agreed with President Obama’s stay-out-of-it response. The best way to discredit the protestors would have been to openly support them (read All The Shah’s Men for a great account of what caused Iran to hate America) and after Hungary’s revolt in 1956, the Prague Spring in 1968, and Iraq’s Shia uprising in 1991, I don’t think we should voice support for dissidents we have no will or way to help.

I mostly pondered this one question: When the protestors shouted, “Death to the dictator,” did they mean Ahmadinejad or Ayatollah Khamenei? It was a nice, clean intellectual exercise.

Then I watched Neda die.

In high school I had a teacher who told us two stories. In the first, he said he had never empathized much with the destruction of Native American culture until he found out he was, like, one-sixty-fourth Sioux. Then he took great offense. In the second, he told us that he had agreed with the war in Vietnam until one of his friends died there. The stories were supposed to show us that we can change our minds about major issues, but I always took them as examples of personal connections or heart-wrenching events forcing emotional instead of rational decisions. I wanted to despise genocide because it was genocide and an unjust war because it was an unjust war, not because of an anecdote.

Then I watched Neda die.

Neda Agha-Solton was killed by a single bullet fired by a member of the Basij, a militia group that supports Ahmadenijad. The cell phone video of her death lasts only forty seconds, but it changes everything. (The link is here and understand it is someone bleeding to death. Roger Cohen’s article is a good report of the event. The Guardian reported what has happened to her family here.) Before the video I had agreed and empathized with the people in the streets. I didn’t get what they were hoping for, though, when they said they wanted freedom; I didn’t understand the price they were willing to pay. I still believe the best thing my country can do is stay out, but now I am in solidarity with them, halfway around the world and helpless.

How do I connect this way with someone that far from me, in miles, culture, language, life? I don’t think it’s too much too say that, while watching Neda die and then watching and reading the reports about her life, I fell in love with her and that allowed the memory of her death to break my heart over and over. No single death has ever done that too me.

What makes Neda’s death resonate so forcefully is that, really, she wasn’t heroic or brave. She and her teacher left the sweltering heat of his car while they were stuck in gridlock. They walked around. They didn’t move with the intent of demonstrators or the violence of rioters. In the video that happened to capture them before the shooting, they aren’t even chanting or marching. Her teacher is pointing to events off camera; he could be telling her this was exactly what it was like in 1979. She was simply there, and then she was dead on the sidewalk. That could happen to me, to anyone. I may not have the courage to throw a Molotov cocktail at a roadblock or stand in front of a tank, but I do have the curiosity to mill around a crowd, to witness history. That day that was all Neda did. Her murder didn’t reveal her courage, it uncloaked a wanton regime

Neda’s courage came before getting out of the car, when she took singing lessons, an activity Iran's government forbids. That was her defiance that was her stand against repression. I’m brave enough to wear a green wrist band, but I don’t know if I’m brave enough to sing.

Hijab Girls

If you were to guess which two of these things were not like the others things, which two of these things don’t belong during recess at Glencoe Elementary you would pick these two girls. Because you saw that unlike the others they wear headscarves, bright flower-covered hijabs, with matching straight-waist dresses. Unlike the others, you saw this, their skin is dark. Black, yes, but not African-American, not chocolate, no slavery here. Their skin glows mahogany, even more beautiful because only their almond faces and their tiny hands show. But you know that’s not what makes them not the same. That’s only the outside. They’re not like the others because they walk alone, together. And melancholy follows.

They always walk alone, together. Hand holds little hand while the other kids yell and run and chase, going this way then twirling and going that way. They walk straight, not in lockstep but in rhythm. Those are the eye-catching children on a schoolyard: the still ones, the deliberate ones, the un-childlike. The ones by themselves. They seem like little adults or dreamers, but mostly they seem overcome by melancholy.

I see them maybe once a week as I run pass the school during my first mile, and they hold their heads close, sharing secrets and stories, as they walk alone, together. I’ve decided they are Somalis, the daughters of refugees floating in a city far from their embattled home, waiting to go back, dressing their children as they will when they return, watching their melancholy become their children’s as the news comes in and, again, it’s bad.

I run by, making up stories, and the girls walk hand in hand, whispering to each other, remaining unlike the others and more and more like themselves.