Green is the new Green!

The Persian language blogosphere is a rich, varied and dynamic sphere of over 60,000 frequently updated blogs. In 2005, out of the 100 million blogs registered around the world, 700,000 were registered Persian blogs inside Iran and in the diaspora. With over 20 million Iranians connecting to the internet, and over 600,000 Iranians signed up on Facebook by the Presidential elections of the summer of 2009, the Iranian cyber community is by far the most dynamic community in the Middle East, and one that is unambiguously diverse. Of the over 60, 000 Persian language blogs, three quarters may be characterized as non-political in content, interested rather in questions of religion, poetry, and sexuality.





Shortly after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as president in June 2005, there were clear indications of a campaign for the centralization of state power over traditional media. During the first two years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, more than 100 newspapers and other periodicals were banned. 70% of the press outlets were run by active supporters of Ahmadinejad. It is important to note that what remained of the opposition's news outlets was banned or put under strict surveillance in the aftermath of the June 12th Presidential elections in Iran in 2009. On the eve of the 2009 election, foreign reporters were either imprisoned or expelled from Iran. This, in part led to the rise of online “underground” papers, such as Kalam Sabz ( Green Word) and Khiaban (The Street), and more urgent uses of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and the Iranian social media site: Balatarin.com




According to Nasrin Alavi, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the Vice President for the reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi in the Presidential elections of 2009, was the first Iranian on Twitter to call the Presidential elections of June 12th, 2009, a fraud. He was by no means the last. Elham Gheytanchi describes the days following the election:

Immediately after the results of the election were announced showing Ahmadinejad’s “landslide victory”, protesters poured into streets. For three consecutive days, masses of Iranians marched peacefully onto the streets in silence asking one question written on their placards “Where is my Vote?”

As the results of the election were announced, a twitter message from Bandar Abbas, a port city in the south of Iran, read (Raye ma ra dozdidand, bahash darand poz mida) “They have stolen our votes and they are flaunting our stolen votes!”

In an unprecedented move, the political establishment decided to cut all SMS messages, the Internet connections and mobile phones in the week after the election results were announced. The next day, demonstrators in at least 20 different locations in Tehran gathered waving placards that read (Doroghgoo khaen ast va khaen tarsoost va tarsoo sms ghate mikonad) “The Liar is a Traitor and the Traitor is fearful and the fearful cuts the SMS.”



As news and images of the protests on the ground circulated in social media all over the internet: on Flickr, on Twitter, on YouTube and on Facebook, they were channeled back to Iran via satellite, broadcast largely by way of the then popular BBC Persian.



A sense of euphoria and unprecedented freedom had dominated national politics during the presidential campaigns. Iranian state owned television broadcast a series of lively debates among the candidates. This was a first, under the Shi’ih theocracy. During one of the debates, the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi put on green shawl to highlight his status as a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. A month later, on the days following the election, an all-embracing, spontaneous movement donning green armbands, finger-bands and headbands took to the streets to call Ahmadinejad’s victory a fraud—the color green thus became the symbol of the movement. The opposition was lovingly called the “Sea of Green", the “Green Wave”, or the “Green Movement”.



The silence of the street protesters was broken as the violence of the regime became palpable. Neda Agha Soltan was brutally shot and murdered on Kargar Avenue, at the corner of Khosravi and Salehi streets in Tehran on June 20th, 2009. The YouTube video documenting her death in the midst of a small crowd circulated on Facebook and Twitter immediately. Her name, Neda (“voice” or “calling” in Persian), became the rallying cry for the Iranian opposition.



Outside of Iran, around the globe, images of the spectacular crowds in green and the murder of Neda Agha Soltan captured the hearts of people everywhere. High school students in the U.S. would talk about “Going Iranian” against authority figures. Indeed, as Golbarg Bashi noted in the heat of the summer, “Iranian is the new black”. Hundreds of songs dedicated to Neda in English and in Persian, started circulating on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Her name became a search topic or so-called “hashtag” on Twitter (#Neda). It was the highest ranking hashtag on June 20th, 2009 indicating thousands of posts on the day of her death.



A corollary hashtag, #iranelection, continues to rank on Twitter. It was the highest ranking hashtag for weeks following the elections, dropping only momentarily after the tragic death of Michael Jackson. It ranked high as a search topic on the 30th anniversary of the hostage crisis Nov 4th, 2009 and on the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic on February 11th, 2010.

It may come as no surprise, then, that thousands of people on Twitter, put a green overlay on their avatars in solidarity with the Sea of Green in Iran. Many changed their location to Tehran and set their time zone to +03:30 GMT to protect people who were actually tweeting from the ground. This image of a Neda with a green overlay-- a Neda Soltan who was initially mistaken as the murdered Neda Agha-Soltan-- comprises of the many thousands of the green avatars of active Twitter subscribers in the aftermath of the summer elections in Iran. (Neda Soltan is currently seeking asylum in Germany in the wake of the publicity that the misuse of her image attracted.)




The thousands of supporters the Green Movement on Twitter and Facebook became nodal points of information for what was happening on the ground, in the absence of foreign news agencies and independent media in Iran. Many of these supporters continued to help spread the news about various online and in-person campaigns. Others came to the aid of Iranian protesters by identifying safe havens for the wounded on Google maps as word spread that the wounded were being picked up and imprisoned by military forces upon their arrival to hospitals around Tehran.







December 7, 2009, about 6 months after the Presidential election, Majid Tavakoli, a student at Tehran’s Amir Kabir University of technology was arrested after he gave a talk during the student protests. A photograph of him in a hijab (full Islamic veil) was published by official news agencies announcing that he had attempted to flee security forces donned in women’s clothing. Supporters of the Green Wave around the world, saw things differently. Cognizant that this photograph was an attempt to ridicule Majid Tavakoli, by associating his courage with “the weaker sex”, thousands of Iranian men all over the world, donned the hijab and posted their photos on the web, using them as their avatars on social media such as Twitter and Facebook.



In captioning their photos, the men claimed their solidarity with Iranian women who have no choice but to veil under the Islamic regime; they voiced their opposition to the Human Rights violations of Islamic Republic and called for the release of the imprisoned Majid Tavakoli. This global campaign is known as the “The Men’s Scarves Movement” or the “I am Majid” #IAmMajid campaign.

The international campaign eventually went live. A YouTube recording signals its impact elsewhere: A group of Iranian men calling themselves “Majid” pose, donning the hijab in front of the Eiffel tower.




This act of resistance to the violation of Human Rights in Iran had stunning reverberations: French men and women donned the veil in solidarity with the Iranian Men’s Scarves Movement, and in this simple gesture that went viral on the internet, showed their opposition to l'affaire du voile in France.

This is not to say that the effort to bring about civil rights and the fight against the violation of Human Rights in Iran has subsided in anyway, but to suggest that the circulation of the images and sounds of the post-Election period, their going viral on the internet, has had significant consequences for oppositional movements and global collaborations elsewhere.

Tehran: A city transformed by love and silenced by force.

Before my baby brother, Kasra ,was born, and before I fell in love with the English language, leafing through a small dark-blue Oxford English dictionary; and actually, long before my family moved to Norway and I became acclimated to a different climate and culture, I spent my days on my grandmother's kitchen floor in the Yousef Abad neighborhood of Tehran, waiting for a taste of her divine fereni simmered perfectly, and flavored with rose water and pistachios.

The radio was always on, as I remember it, perhaps to drown out the din of the streets outside.

My heart skipped a beat every time I heard the radio announce: "Inja Tehran Ast. Radio Iran" ("This is Tehran. Iranian Radio Broadcasting") as if that next hour would be the defining one in my tiny life. I remember that I loved Persian music very much. The little turntable- gramophone I carried around everywhere, along with a handful of singles, played my favorite tunes over and over, until it drove the whole household up the wall. I loved Haji Firooz who came around sometime around the Persian new year, Naw Ruz. The Muharram ceremonies were captivating to me, too, if they were allowed by the Pahlavi regime, and if I was allowed, by my parents, to go outside and watch them on the streets of Yousef Abad.

Tehran, the city of my childhood, is a city I cannot recognize from the cry of the roof-top poet who asks "Inja kojast?" ("Where is this place?"). Tehran is a transformed city. A city transformed by love and silenced by force.

As I listen to the fleeting cries of Allah-o-Akbar from the roofs and balconies of the city of my birth on YouTube, I am reminded, that this fleeting call, this ephemeral voice, though etched in tradition, has the power to transfom our consciousness and call us to action in a different way worldwide, in part because of the digital structure of a world that connects.

I learned the lesson of the transformative power of the digital and ephemeral from the arts and the tromp l'oel movement of light on a structure, captured in this video and posted to Facebook by one of my friends.

This week, in the aftermath of the Iranian 2009 elections, another fleeting image of young Iranian student protesters helping a beat officer to safety (at 2 mins into this video)--a fleeting image captured on an ephemeral online video with an Italian voice-over-- changed the way I saw Tehran, forever. I realized in a flash and amidst a pool of tears, that these courageous men and women, whose phone-camera videos and pictures we continue to click and forward, whose cries we hear from the rooftops and the city-scapes of cities unknown to most of us; these courageous ones, are brothers and sisters --comrades --who shared the same bread and cheese, who were trained in the same schools, who studied the same books, who received their military training in the same army, who slept in the same barracks, who listened to the same music and who called to a power greater than themselves with the same sigh rising from the depths of a heart wanting to be free.

It was in this fleeting moment of comeraderie, a moment of love, steeped in the tethers of the old (that bread, those barracks, those school books) and the words Allah-o-Akbar, that I realized that one thing and one thing alone will bring about the freedom and change that the city of my birth is calling into being. And that one thing is love.

Another work of art, a ceramic piece that my friend Leili Towfigh made, taught me an important lesson

about our efforts to create in the world. I learned from it and from her blog that what we want to see in the world has to match what we hold in our hearts and minds. The inside and the outside must match.

If we fail, no, if we fail at that, what we end up creating, Will. Crack.

In the world of ceramics, it's called "dunting". In the world that we are fabricating breath by breath from the weave of our lives, anything less than love, anything less than a conscious return to the loadestone of justice, respect, and collaboration is doomed for failure.

For there to be love --for there to be justice--for there to be peace--for there to be freedom in this, my world-- I declare myself into being as that love.

And so, for that vision, I sew these words into the fabric of my being:

"You should be the change that you want to see in the world." ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul, If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain." ~Sa'adi

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always." ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

UPDATE: I just received this file. A video from Kerman, Iran. Protesters bringing flowers to the police. Such sweetness. Such love. Where is this place, Iran?

She returns on June 20th to wake God up: Listen Closely

(For captions click on the bottom right corner)

Get over it!

I agreed to do a podcast for Duke University Press  which just published my second book: Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. 

The Press wanted something current, like a discussion of the Oscar winning Iranian films for 2008 and a section on how current Iranian films are representing the 30th Anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. I've been studying the film industry and Post-Revolutionary Iranian films since the early 90s, flying out to film festivals all over the world just to see the latest Abbas  Kiarostami or Rakhshan Bani-Etemad feature film. But this assignment seemed quite difficult. Maybe it was because it would go public on Youtube, I don't know... Or maybe it was my being conscious of the fact that Iranian films that are popular with audiences in Iran rarely make it out of the country to the international screen in the first year of their production. It felt awkward to only speak to the foreign reception of Iranian films and not on topic, on what was going on on the ground.

Stretched for time between classes and my responsibilities as a faculty member in the Literature Program at Duke University, I was doing research late at night and all day long.  

What I found was fascinating. The Islamic Republic celebrated the 30th Anniversary of the Revolution in high fashion, staging the arrival of the spiritual and political leader of the revolution from exile at Mehrabad airport alongside a full string orchestra! 

Lots of parades and glittering honors.

I also found that an inspiring collection of films were actually being screened at the annual International Film Festival which commemorates the ten days of the Revolution. The film Walking My Life by Japanese director Satoshi Isaka won the Crystal Simorgh Prize for best film of Seeking the Truth (Competition of Spiritual Cinema) of the 27th International Fajr Film Festival. And Director Rashid Masharawi’s Laila’s Birthday won the special Moustapha Akkad Prize.  The audience vote and Crystal Simorgh Prize went to Bahram Bayza'i for his While We Were All Dreaming and I have to say that I was thrilled. 

A lot of what I discovered didn't end up working for the interview which was a scene of its own: The two interviewers and I laughed at the amateurish setting...

the lack of fill lighting, the camera equipment (yes believe it or not!)..Finally me: I laughed at my hair, baggy eyes and whimsical last minute choice of clothing and accessories. I got my numbers wrong. (Veiling ends with the Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1936 and compulsory veiling begins with the Islamic Repubic in 1982. And there were more that 227 films competing in the 27th Fajr Film festival.) My mind went numb, obviously. The camera battery died half way. I decided to take a photo of it, tweet it, and check my facts while the camera battery recharged.

 The whole event went down in less than an hour. It started late, stuttered, and went live before the day was done. We made it fun together.

...And in the end, the interview did what it needed to do, which was to highlight the importance of the film industry in the making of a theocratic state. It also highlighted a little known, but very important film industry and an international film festival of proportions. 

 My lesson: Get over it! Get over it and just do it!