By: Nasrin Parvaz

www.nasrinparvaz.com

HOME

When I came here in 1993, it looked like I’d been expelled from hell and couldn’t go back. When I was asked where I came from, I used to say: hell. Home meant the hell that I ran away from to save the other six layers of my skin from burning!

Since then I kept watching it, reading and writing about it. I tried to stop some stoning or hanging of women, and I became sad with every execution of a different kind of people, women in their teens for their ‘inappropriate’ behavior. The picture of home is usually grey. I say grey, not black because I adore black. You cannot see things that are happening in black. You can hide in black and sleep in peace and be sure no one can see you and catch you. Black is power that can hide you and protect you. But in the grey picture of home you can see what is going on even from far away.

No day passes without execution, flogging and amputation, and the world does not look at it, does not report it. It seems ignorance is the best way to feel peace or keep the peace! However, for many of us home is in our house; no matter how long we have been away; no matter how we taste the phrases like “personal is political” by losing our loved ones in separation; our pulses quicken and slow down according to the political waves of bigger home and smaller home. After all I left home and joined the world, which is our bigger home.

The small monitor in our small household brings many pictures of home which are mostly one sided. It shows the brutality of the regime and that makes us sad. Rarely does it bring us pictures of people, their power or their struggle. However some times the people’s struggle is so evident that cameras cannot miss it. Women’s Day, for instance, in the last few years has brought us pictures of women’s demonstrations and gatherings. Voices of women demanding their rights were heard via the internet.

Once again, this weekend when I woke up and turned on my computer, I was overwhelmed with pictures of happiness from home. In many towns in Western part of Iran people made a snow festival. The event was called by the Association to defend children’s rights, and thirty thousand people joined the party. Pictures talk, they show what they have made with snow. Statues in human or animal shape are sculptured from snow. There is one special image which stands out from all of them. It is of a woman made life-size out of snow, and she has a necklace. She is standing under the sun, watching the crowd. Isn’t it amazing that in a sexual apartheid country people can make a woman statue? Isn’t it amazing that the people of Kamyaran went to the Sanandaj area and brought snow to join the party? They brought snow from 50 kilometers away in trucks to have their say! I wonder if this woman is made of imported snow.

Though the organizers called it a snow festival there are many placards with slogans on them. One placard hanging on the neck of a snow animal says: Stop execution. There are banners against torture, child abuse and child labor. A banner says: ‘Put children first to have a better life!’ There are many children holding placards defending their rights; it is in a country that doesn’t even count children as human beings. A child carries a placard that says: ‘Help disabled children.’ Another child’s cheeks are painted with ‘peace’ and ‘a better life’. Her eyes say more than slogans on her cheeks. A snow man is holding a placard that says: ‘Stop humiliating and torturing children.’

In a country where happiness is sin; where protest against governmental brutality is forbidden, people create their own ways of celebration and protest. Should I thank those who with their cameras made it possible for me to see the power of people in my sitting room? Pictures of home that uplift my being, yet again, rare pictures of home!

Home? Which home? The home that contains my sitting room or the home where the graves are out-numbering the homes? Or perhaps home is the place where the Earthians are living today! Whatever, home is not that grey today!

January 2005