COLLAGE: THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A REVOLUTION

by Marianne Peel

Illustration by Roshi Rouzbehani for The New Yorker, October 9, 2022

“…it is the conscious articulation of time.” —Hans Richter

                                                                                                      

I.                    Rahumpour, who lived in Iran from age six to sixteen,

remembers the panic she felt as a child.  Gusts of wind

pulled her headscarf down, exposing her hair.  A frenzied rush

to adjust the fabric.  To hide her hair beneath the hijab. 

 

II.                 Hadis, a child of twelve, is taken into custody.  A few wisps of hair

had escaped from her headscarf.  Three women covered in heavy chadors

spit a lecture in a dark room downtown:  you have sinned, you have

not learned the lessons of the Quran, you will go to hell.  She is instructed,

educated, to pull out a string of hair.  If that hurts, imagine getting hanged

by your hair for all eternity.  School dismissed.

 

III.              Mahsa Amini, twenty-two, is arrested by the Morality Police

for improperly wearing her hijab.  In custody, they beat and bruise her

into a coma.  Corpulent blows to the head. Skull fractures embroider

her x-ray.  Official government cause of death:  heart attack.

 

Photos of Mahsa weigh down the internet. Lying in a hospital bed.

Tubes and wires all over her body.  Blood pooling from one ear. 

Rivulets of blood tattoo the starched, white pillowcase.

 

Her mother cries:  I am her mother.  I am dying from grief.

Her father cries: Everything is a lie.  No matter how much I begged,

they wouldn’t let me see my daughter.

 

IV.              In the public square of Kuma, a young masked woman balances

atop an electrical box.  She lowers her head to one side.  Slices off

her long locks with sheers.  A ritual sacrifice, this self-shearing. A denial

of ancient poetry where hair guarantees immemorial beauty, chains of binding

love, shrouds of truth.  Now women walk around uncovered, brandishing

shorn heads in the lethal sun.  A beautiful, proud wound.

 

V.                Schoolgirls with backpacks and black Converse sneakers march

down Tehran streets waving school uniform veils in the air. They wave

headscarves in circles, block traffic in every roundabout.  They shred

images of the Ayatollah, hurl his jigsawed face fragments into the street,

shouting Death to the Dictator.  Shouting Bisharahl, the Persian word

for lacking any honor.

 

VI.              Women without hijabs set crates and trash bins on fire, create a barrier

between themselves and the Morality Police.  The police lob teargas grenades.

Hijab-less women are pinned to the pavement, suffocating in the obesity of fog.

They belly crawl into alleyways, crouch in doorways, make themselves small.

 

VII.           Sixty women are detained in a torrid police station.  They cannot sit. 

They cannot move.  They cannot use the toilet.  They are told

if they are hungry, they can eat their own feces.  They are told

If you don’t keep quiet, we will rape you.

 

VIII.              Women of shorn heads are detained in psychological institutions.  Diagnosis:

anti-social behavior.  Women of shorn heads will receive treatment.  Will be

re-educated.  Security officers sexually assault the women of shorn heads. 

They can return to classes after they are reformed.

 

IX.                An officer forces a woman toward a bike.  Another approaches her

from behind.  He puts his authority hands on her buttocks.  She crouches

on the ground.  A dozen officers swarm her body.  They pull and pull

at her hair.

 

X.              A woman climbs onto the roof of a car, sets fire to her hijab.  All of the women

feed their hijabs to the bonfire flames.  A mass burning.  And they dance

in celebration, in ecstasy, like Whirling Dervishes, as they watch hijabs smolder

into dust, into ash.

 

XI.           Nika, a sixteen year old protester, sends a message to a friend.  I am being chased

by security forces.  She goes missing for ten days.  Her family finds her

in a morgue drawer at a Detention Center.  They are forbidden to view

her body.  Only her face.  Only for a few seconds.  Her body is stolen

to Khorramabed, on her 17th birthday. Given improper burial

in a town far from home.

 

XII.        Women of all ages, without headscarves, hold their hands out for Mango Lassi

at the local juice stand.  Women without headscarves ride on the backs

of motorcycles, hair liberated in the marketplace wind.  A woman speaks

to a man selling shawls and headscarves: Pack up and go, sir.  Don’t you know

this is all over?  Her arm sweeps past his wares, encompassing centuries. 

Why don’t you buy them and then burn them? the man responds, holding centuries

in his flaccid smile. 

XIII.        Students at Sharif University conjure silent sit-ins.  Boycott classes.

Make street music with chants of Zan, Zendgi, Azadi:  Women, Life, Freedom.

Special forces converge, encircle the students, shoot those who try to leave.

Those remaining are shrouded in plastic trash bags.  Those remaining

are beaten.  Those remaining are stacked in white vans, shuttled

to locations undisclosed. One woman whispers to another through the plastic:

Don’t be afraid.  We’re all together.

A middle/high school English teacher for 32 years, Marianne Peel now nurtures her own creativity.  She spent three summers teaching in China; received Fulbright Awards to Nepal and Turkey. Marianne’s poetry appears in Muddy River Review, Jelly Bucket, Comstock Review, and Naugatuck River Review, among others.  Her debut collection No Distance Between Us was published by Shadelandhouse Modern Press in 2021. Marianne has a new book of poetry forthcoming from Shadelandhouse Modern Press in Fall of 2023. 

SWEET TRAPEZE ARTISTS OF FREEDOM

by Nanette Rayman-Rivera

Artwork by Sahar Goreshi

to the women of Iran

The smell is sultry, veined with gristle like tempting meat, a steady

beefy purr, bloating, ballooning, bigger, ballooning again, a fragrance

of good womb and rose, the whole Iran pulsing like a furnace or a mammal.

No longer anesthetized Barbie dolls, but beautiful female creatures,

 

emerging and effervescent—feathered wings, a smell of trees and jasmine,

hair flailing and feathering, bobbed, their bodies as pearlescent shells,

mothers, daughters, tired of living low-down to the ground, dwarfed by

men with fritters for brains, perfectly gorgeous women wearing their souls

on their faces, littering on and consuming the tyrants. Never bashful,

sloughing off the stinking rotten meat that hangs off of the morality police.

 

When they came spewing jasmine and rose, showing off the charms

of WOMEN, sweet skin in the folds of their burka-jails, hair haloed by the

gods, voices firm and soldier, tough yet sweet as roses, shedding ugly

garments, their own woman-meaty smell wafting, they stomped the

sewer stink of the morality police and watched them grounded and dying.

 

What so chews at their hearts? These women, with their famous fertile

manes, will not lie down absolutely. Sky and flowers in darkness. Not

alone, they uplift their incarcerated world. They fluff up their hair ringing

out the toxins of a thousand years. They arouse each woman’s nature,

a thousand roses clutching tight to their gallantry.

 

Past the cities and out into the tulip fields, where flowers bloom without

fear. Listen to the birds and the women rutting the trees. This reaches me,

a woman, my wish for them, bountiful hair, scent and sense, combatants on the

roil, freedom kneeling at their feet. All through the streets, their fragrance—

acrobats of freedom roses, they spit at the men afraid of a woman’s beauty.

Their bracelets clanging, their hair free and waving at the world. Sweet foxes

biting morality, which is not morality, uncurled from caverns of sublimation,

unchained at the ankles, their voices not perjured, sweet trapeze artists of freedom.

Nanette Rayman-Rivera, author of the books Shana Linda, Pretty Pretty, and Project: Butterflies, is a two-time Pushcart nominee, winner of Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010, Glass Woman Prize. Sugar House Review, The Worcester Review, Wilderness House, Sundog, Up the Staircase, Berkeley Fiction Review, Pedestal, DMQ, Sundog, Seventh Wave, Stirring’s Steamiest Six, Green Silk, Collidescope Journal, Poetry SuperHighway. She lives with her puppy, Layla.