On the 40th day in commemoration after his death, a mother was walking in front of his full-length photo beating on her chest. Looking away from her son, she would reach the picture of her brother, and the men of the tribe standing around like the overturned tulips (1) of the Koohrang plains in Mazeh Rashteh (a village in Koohrang), weeping.
Forty days before the plains were overwhelmed with grief, there was unrest in Yazdanshahr. It was Sunday, November 17, 2019. He had not yet left school. Khamenei, in his extra jurisprudence class, taught all of Iran on television that “It was the same when Imam (Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Islamic Republic) was here; One task was decided and implemented by the authorities, the leaders of the three branches of the government; It’s the same now.” It so happened that the troops of the three branches ambushed him with war weapons, when he returned from his school to his house in the twentieth east, they plunged the decision of the three branches of the regime into his heart.
He was 17 years old, the descendants of Ibn Ali from Bardin Bab of the Mori tribe of Bakhtiar tribe. He never got home that day. His bloodied body, which had been torn apart by the three branches of Khamenei’s regime on his way home on a street in Yazdanshahr, Najafabad, was thrown into the grave at night. When winter came, his father Mirzagholi still did not walk away from his grave, the lump in his throat didn’t give up, and when Mehdi Sotoudeh with the sticklike blue microphone of IRIB pulled Mirza Gholi in front of the camera, he wouldn’t move away from the table which had multiple photos of his child on it: “When my son would come home from school, he would go to his room, I had to force him downstairs to eat lunch.”
He turned to take a series of photographs standing in small and large frames like the Zagros Mountain range, arranged on a table that resembled an altar of worship, and by appealing to them testify to his son’s innocence in front of Sotoudeh’s camera. The Sound & Face (IRIB’s name in Persian translated literally) cut off Mirza Gholi’s sound and face and again became the regime’s sound and face, infected with sanctity. The 40th day passed. The anniversary also came to an end and in the spring, in the middle of all commotions, Maryam’s** tears fell from Koohrang plains.
Translation of this post by Sahar.
1)Overturned tulips (Fritillaria meleagris) is from lily family and an endangered species. They’re called “Gol-e-Begeryu” meaning “Crying Flower.” They grow in Koohrang area in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari province, in a vast plain, near Zagros mountain range. Their name is derived from an epic story in Shahnameh, where the flowers in the area witnessed killing of Siavash and started crying. Because of that tragedy and the grief, they overturned.
**: Another local name for the “crying flower.”
