Azadeh

Dear Serendip has done me a great favor and translated my first Persian post. Here is her perfect translation:

When I asked from my country’s police:

“Why that night when I was stranded in the middle of Tehran-Karaj freeway without any gas inside our Peykan (cheap Iranian made car), he passed us by in his elegant Mercedes Benz and he refused to help me.”

He cussed at me and used foul language and expletives, many of which, I had not ever heard of before until that night. At the end, he wanted to take me to the police station but when I started to apologize profusely, he took pity on me and did not take me.

My country’s police, when they want to evict an Afghani worker from a building, they throw him down from the window of fifth floor building and it’s not important for him if he dies soon after.

My country’s police, arrests me, if I want to be the parents of a child that I gave birth to.

My country’s police, if he doesn’t like the way I have put my hejab on, cusses at me and beats me on the head with his baton.

But I can’t curse at my country’s police, because my uncle is a policeman and I love my uncle.

…but I want to curse those who have sanctified arbitrarily every which authority and power and have never allowed me to talk about them.

When My president lied.

When my parliament representative did not defend the rights of my teacher

When my police killed a human being because of his crime of being an Afghani

And when a father in the narrow alleyways of my city stoned his own daughter to death.

P.S. You can read the study by Stanford University and see how ordinary human beings like you and I can potentially become the most merciless prison guard in a matter of two days.

There are some times that I crave to write in Persian, in which my thoughts find their way directly to my typing fingers, without going forward and backward for editing. Here is the other Azadeh in Persian.