Life on the Side of Women, Women on the Side of Freedom
By Sahar Sadjadi (McGill Univesity)
This essay is dedicated to those in Iran’s prisons for women, life, freedom.
“We live in one world.”
–Nawal El Saadawi
Last year at this time, the events in Iran ran ahead of our imagination. Something happened that we haven’t yet fully grasped.
For the first time, some say in history, a revolutionary uprising happened through a struggle for gender justice. It was ignited on September 16, 2022, by the death of a young Kurdish woman, Jina (Mahsa) Amini, at the hands of the “morality police” in Tehran for what they considered her inadequate hijab.
Having lived as an immigrant from Iran in multiple Western countries, mostly in the United States, I was no stranger to the othering of Middle Eastern people or the Orientalist imaginaries around Muslim women. I had also experienced the hesitation of activists and scholars concerned about Islamophobia and imperialist hostility to position themselves vis-à-vis dissent in Iran. Still, I was confounded by how alien last year’s event appeared to many people, including feminists.[1] This is an invitation to think beyond borders together, to be moved by the enormity and beauty of what occurred. Our world needs what the revolution’s slogan stands for: “woman, life, freedom.”
It has been a year in wonder.
Jina (Mahsa) Amini’s brutal death gave birth to the largest uprising in Iran since the 1979 revolution. Jina had traveled from her hometown of Saqez, in Kurdistan (Rojhalat), to Tehran for a family vacation. When the news of state violence perpetrated against her spread, people gathered in Tehran. At her funeral in Saqez, people gathered again; mourners chanted jin, jian, azadi (woman, life, freedom), a slogan that grew out of Kurdish regions of Turkey and Syria (Rojava). The chant took over Iran in Persian translation zan, zendegi, azadi, raising people from Kurdistan on the western periphery of Iran to Baluchistan on the eastern periphery, garnering solidarity actions in Turkey, Lebanon, and the world over.
"Woman, life, freedom" painted in the mountains north of Tehran. Photograph by author.
Oil workers went on strike. Baluch workers refused to extract gold in the mines that didn’t benefit that impoverished ethnic minority region. “It is the poor who rise up,” a Kurdish working-class woman said in an interview with Tawar Collective, adding that she didn’t see a single wealthy person among the protestors in her town.[2] Women burning headscarves, compulsory wear in Iran, the symbol of the state’s undemocratic rule, and its primary technology of enforcing the gender binary in public, went hand in hand with destroying other symbols of the state and chants to bring down the entire system.
New epics were born whose heroes and martyrs were neither Hussein nor Che Guevara but Jina, Nika, Sarina, nine-year-old Kian, and brave women battling armed forces. Their weapons: hair and clothing. Their street tactics mixed protest and urban guerrilla warfare, emerging in one city corner, vanishing when state forces arrived, and reappearing elsewhere.[3] Schoolgirls rebelled in extraordinary acts of defiance and desecration of images of state icons, for which they paid heavily, facing arrests and mysterious chemical attacks. Other Jinas went to prison. Mourning women cut their hair at funerals. Gohar Eshghi, an elder mother turned activist who had lost her son to torture, unveiled and proclaimed, “If they are killing young people for this, I am taking it off after 80 years.”
Astonishingly, men stood by women. In masses. Among the many men who were killed in the uprising, the man who became a legend next to Jina and Kian, was Khodanoor, a Baluch man, from one of the poorest regions of Iran, brutally murdered by security forces. The image that went viral was not of his murder. What remains of him, everywhere, is video of him dancing gorgeously. His passionate dance embodied the desire for life that invigorated the uprising, even when facing death.
Time was condensed, in the way revolutionary times are. Decades passed within a few weeks. There was a leap in consciousness.
A friend in Kurdistan told me how a relative whose child’s illness required regular visits to the capital reported that people’s attitude toward them as Kurds in Tehran had radically changed. In Tehran, people chanted for Kurdistan, calling it their “eye and light”; in Kurdistan, they chanted for Baluchistan. For the first time, there were public conversations about self-governance for various ethnic and linguistic regions. These days, it might seem like this was a dream we left behind, an opening that closed. When I was in Iran a few months after those epic events, however, a transformation in social relations was palpable. It was as if after the volcanic eruption, lava had melted the earth and rearranged its molecules. The epic flowed into the ordinary.
Freedom was now tied to woman.
What did “woman” come to mean in the slogan that galvanized and catalyzed solidarity among various peoples of Iran that the marginalized and the poor of all genders came to chant, that defied Iranian nationalism and reshaped the politics of the ethnic and religious minority resistance? “Woman” emerged as a historically subjugated subject that other subjugated subjects could stand with. This wasn’t a matter of an essence with which one was born. Following the woman, life, freedom uprising, Iranian queer lives became more politically visible. The public learned about Evin prison’s trans women ward and the arrest of Raha Ajoodani, a transgender human rights activist. Kurdish women’s militancy had influenced a shift from an essentialist to a political relation between women and life in woman, life, freedom (Rostampour 2022).[4] What happened in Iran took “woman” farther in that direction.
It was in the name of life.
But what is this life that is worth losing your life for? This life that is not just about being alive? What is this life that is on the side of women and freedom, not against them (unlike, for example, the “pro-life” movement in the US)? What transpired on the streets of Iran drew on a different politics of life than the subject of the familiar “biopolitical” critique, joining other invocations of life in political struggles from the Jin, Jian, Azadi in Kurdistan or Black Lives Matter in the US or Vivas, Libres y Despenalizadas in Latin America.
If life is often depicted as that which is either set against death or the nonliving, this life is neither. Amid an explosion of creativity and art, songs accompanied and annotated the slogan women, life, freedom. One in particular, “Baraye” (For), became the anthem of the uprising in its early days. The singer, Sherwin, adapted the lyrics from tweets describing the reasons people were protesting. They included “For dancing in the alleys, because of the fear you feel when kissing, because of the shame of being broke, for Afghan children, because of all the pills for insomnia.” The song gripped millions of people with a portrait of living a life of ordinary pleasures, against misery and poverty, for adults and children, for citizens and immigrants. The life worth dying was a life of dignity, joy, and freedom. The song includes endangered species, trees, and air, as it unfolds. [5]
The song ends in freedom.
Azadi, a word that has echoed in liberation struggles from South Asia to the Middle East, comes closest in English translation to “freedom.” The uprising grafted small freedoms of life, such as “dancing in the alley,” denied by a state intent on controlling all aspects of public life, to the notion of freedom that had rallied generations of collective political struggle, resisting domination by the regional nation-states in Kurdistan and against “estebdad” (despotism) in Iran. Azadi reverberated from the 1906 Constitutional Revolution to the 1979 revolution to become the “woman, life, freedom” revolution in 2022.
Each of these words, woman, life, and freedom, conjures multiple meanings and invokes varied political histories. There are political forces who invoke the slogan but seek to evacuate it of its revolutionary spirit by promising a return to a fabricated glory of past kingdoms in Iran; there are some who want a “regime change,” but not a revolution. We cannot afford to relinquish these immensely powerful concepts out of the fear of their potential abuse, whether it is “life” in the hands of anti-abortion activists, “woman” in the hands of anti-trans forces, or “freedom” in the hands of authoritarian white nationalists. These terms belong to other political genealogies, such as freedom struggles of Black people in the United States. In Iran, these three words, together, tapped into the yearnings of millions for a life of freedom and dignity for everyone.
In these times of rising authoritarian ethno-nationalisms armed to destroy people and the planet, with fantasies of restoring a past patriarchal order, a revolutionary call for “women, life, freedom” keeps calling.
Sahar Sadjadi is a physician, anthropologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University.
Notes
[1] For a counter-positioning, see Angela Davis’s message of solidarity with the "woman, life, freedom” uprising at the aftermath of Jina (Mahsa) Amini’s violent death.
[2] Tawar is a feminist Kurdish collective formed at the aftermath of the Jina uprising.
[3] On the experience of women on the street battles, see Figuring a Women’s Revolution, a remarkable essay by L. written in Iran in Persian and translated into English, Arabic, Turkish and German, garnering transnational engagement with the text.
[4] Somayeh Rostampour’s original piece was later translated into English.
[5] For the full translation of the song’s lyrics, see Olszweska (2022). This popular song, released a few days after Jina’s murder and at the beginning of the uprising, wasn’t politically perfect. Nor was an uprising of such diverse groups of people in a large country. I have tried to capture the liberatory potentials of what emerged as popular those days. Other songs were created in the past year such as آواز لیلاها (Ballad of Leilas) more attuned to peripheries of Iran, where the uprising was most militant and state violence most brutal. This song was played at many solidarity gatherings in multiple countries, organized by Feminists for Jina, a network of feminist collectives and activists that formed after the Jina uprising in the diaspora. For other songs see سرود راه کوچهby anonymous music students in Iran and زندگی سرود (life’s anthem) by Mehdi Yarrahi, imprisoned Arab-Iranian musician.
Cite As
Sadjadi, Sahar. 2023. “Life on the Side of Women, Women on the Side of Freedom.” American Anthropologist website, September 19.