After the brutal repression of the nationwide protests in November 2019, the Islamic totalitarian regime increased its violence and barbarism every day, intensifying the atmosphere of terror and suffocation in the real world and cyberspace. There was not a day that no one was executed, no cyber activist was arrested, no political prisoner was not tortured or killed due to medieval tortures. Not a day with no one going on hunger strike, not sentenced to inhumane punishments in the courts of the Islamic Revolution, or not taken to hospital with a wounded and lifeless body. In all these days, life was going on in all other parts of the country. Somewhere a flood swept away people’s houses, in another corner the IRGC was downing a passenger plane with all aboard, an actor left marks of smiles on cameras in a government festival and for a few days the daughter of an Iranian fraudster who’s distorted her name to hide her origin, in a festival outside of Iran, raised the flag of a regime that had killed 23 innocent children like a bat’s wing under her hands. These were all there. It’s still the same. The regime is still encroaching on the lives and property of the Iranians and is not accountable to anyone or any institution. The Islamic Republic has not yet announced how many people were killed during the protests in November 2019, has not yet publicized the number of detainees.
Just as there are those who speak and write about detainees today, as there are still voices of justice heard in the middle of all routines, there have been people in the past routines who had memories, concerns, and anxieties focused on those who were imprisoned.
Here we return to Saturday, January 18, 2020, and the mass of events that took place around the memory of political prisoners during the fluidity of history.
World’s Saturday
Ali Zolghadr, the head of the Greater Tehran Public Security Police, on Saturday (January 18th) announced that some people have been arrested, saying, “they were using cyberspace in recent incidents to incite young people and undermine national security.”
The 16th anniversary of the birth of Persian Wikipedia (simultaneously with the nineteenth anniversary of the birth of English Wikipedia) was held on January 16,2020 in the morning and evening at the Bazaar Cafe building.
U.S. officials have said they examine passengers entering the US from Wuhan, China at 3 airports to prevent a new virus from spreading. The virus has killed two people so far. The virus has reached outside of China to Thailand and Japan.
Shahab Hosseini, a well-known Iranian actor who had previously implicitly announced he’s opposed to the “boycott of the Fajr Film Festival” in a post, in another post on Instagram in response to what he called “a flood of criticism, judgments, obscenities and curses” wrote: “You have repeatedly rebuked me in the worst possible way for expressing my views, and you are stigmatizing my political affiliation.”
Chairman of the Parliament’s National Security Committee: The firing on the Ukrainian plane was an inevitable mistake.
My Saturday
I am sitting on the damp, cold cement floor of the detention center
Every drop of water dripping from the ceiling of my 16.5 square feet cell, it’s like a hammer hits me on the back of my head!
Someone’s footsteps sound comes from afar
I’m petrified, maybe he wants to take me again
My body shrinks…
Like the moment he hit me on the back with a baton… once, twice, three times…
I didn’t feel any pain from the eighth / ninth time, it was just a feeling of warmth in my legs,
Like when I was a kid and my mom would put me in the bathtub to play with my toys.
Oh, Mom, Mom
You know mom…
I have so much time here to think things through. But nothing come to mind. My brain is empty like a cassette tape!
What day is it today?
How long have I been here?
How many more days and hours should pass, till this door opens and one says, “Get up! You’re free to go”
Is it possible for me to see that day when this door opens and someone says, “Get up, You are free”?
The sound of closing iron door scatters my thoughts,
This time there are two kinds of footsteps. One for the jailer. The other is someone’s slippers.
Who could it be? What is his/her name? Does he/she breathe like me with his/her dream of freedom?
Oh Mom,
How are you now?!
Do you even know I’m still alive?
Alive .…
Do you know I’m still breathing?
I wish that piece of bread that you used to put in my school bag every day was here now.
I miss the sesame seeds you sprinkled on the cheese.
Oh, Mom
How many people like me miss their mothers?
I wish I knew if anybody outside here remembers me
Translation of this article by Farin Faryadzan
