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During a Hamburg demonstration against the political regime in Iran, a man helps a woman cut her hair in protest
Photo:
Bodo Marks / picture alliance / dpa
Look at the protests that have swept across the country since the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini.
She died on September 16 due to the misogyny of an Islamist regime whose institutional fear of women is so great that it only knows how to help itself with tyranny and torture against emancipatory forces.
The protesters, led by women and the younger generation, united by the slogan of the Kurdish women's liberation movement - Jin, jiyan, azadî (women, life, freedom) - channel the anger at the death of Amini and the grief for the many more dead in one combative resistance.
For example, 16-year-old Nika Shakarami, who disappeared during the protests and was found dead by her family ten days later, with clear signs of trauma to her body, was recently killed.
It is a decentralized movement, as described by sociological data analyst and journalist Zeynep Tüfekçi in her book »Twitter and Tear Gas – The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest«.
It is a feminist protest on the verge of revolution that is gripping large sections of Iranian society and could liberate the country from oppressive religious laws.
With the regime making nationwide communication more difficult through internet censorship and a blocking of social media, the protesters need even more international visibility and attention, because only this can help them to protect themselves from the brutal repressions.
The uprisings and their actors have the best chance of survival under the observation of the world public.
show solidarity
On September 25, the Iranian screenwriter and director Asghar Farhadi – known, among other things, for his film “Nader and Simin – Eine Separation” (2011) – surprisingly clearly called for international help on his Instagram channel.
The Oscar winner asked for visible solidarity with the protesters worldwide and invited “all artists, filmmakers, intellectuals, civil rights activists from all over the world and all countries as well as everyone who believes in human dignity and freedom” to “stand with the to show solidarity with the strong and courageous women and men of Iran, be it through videos, through writing or in any other way«.
Iranian actress Fatemeh Motamed-Arya removed her veil at a public funeral in Tehran, which means nothing less than a possible professional ban for her.
Iran's Minister of Culture, Abbas Salehi, said earlier this week that actresses who publicly remove their hijabs should look for another job.
The actress Taraneh Alidoosti, who played the leading role in »The Salesman« in 2016, also positioned herself publicly and clearly in her Insta stories: »We will not remain silent!
We stand up!
Women, life, freedom!«
At the end of September, Iranian filmmakers wrote an open letter critical of the government, expressing their support for the protests.
Among the signatories are Ali Abbasi, the director of the film »Holy Spider« (2022), which was submitted for Denmark as an entry for the 2023 Oscars, and its leading actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, who won the best actress award for this film in Cannes this year became;
also the director Shirin Neshat, whose film »Land of Dreams« (2021) will be released in German cinemas this November.
This open letter is also a cry for help for more visibility: »We ask you to make the Iranians' calls for freedom even louder.
Become the voice of the people who are paying for freedom with their lives.
These calls for international solidarity recently prompted more than 50 French actresses, singers and lawyers to cut strands of their hair.
In a video circulated on social media on Wednesday morning, Juliette Binoche, among others, cuts off a tuft of her dark brown hair while a cover of the partisan anthem "Bella Ciao" is heard, performed by Iranian singer Gandom Larini;
as well as her colleagues Isabelle Adjani, Marion Cotillard, Jane Birkin, Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Armanet and many others.
The last image is a drawing by Marjane Satrapi, the author of the graphic novel »Persepolis«: a black-haired woman on a mountain of cropped hair.
The video was initiated by the Paris lawyers Julie Couturier and Christiane Feral-Schuhl and the human rights lawyer Richard Sédillot.
Sédillot told the French news magazine Le Point: "After much discussion with friends of Iranian descent about what could be done, I thought that this video would send a message of solidarity, bringing to the attention of the international community what what's happening in the country.« The producer Muriel Sauzay and the actress Julie Gayet, who support the project, managed to attract around 50 personalities.
"The worst violence is the silence for these women and men who are fighting at their side to win their freedom," Gayet told Franceinfo on Wednesday.
It was the aim
The video marks the start of a larger planned solidarity campaign with the aim of increasing the pressure on politicians, who are also accused in France of not supporting the protesters with enough support.
minute of silence
A minute's silence was held in the National Assembly on Tuesday to honor the courage of "the women, men and all of Iran's youth" who "express their thirst for freedom," as Yaël Braun-Pivet, President of the National Assembly, formulated.
MEP Abir Al-Sahlani cut her hair during her speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday evening.
“Until Iran is free, our anger will outweigh the oppressors.
Until the Iranian women are free, we will stand by you«, she explained, then she took a pair of scissors and shouted »Jin, jiyan, azadî!
Women, life, freedom!« and had her braid in her hand.
In German-language social media, a letter co-initiated by the author Asal Dardan with signatures (including mine) from over 600 cultural workers addresses the protesters: »The call for a feminist revolution in Iran is loud and clear.
We see your courageous resistance, we hear your determined voices.
We admire your courage and resistance.«
What is remarkable about this letter is that it is addressed to the protesters, because they should receive the message that their work in Germany is appreciated and that their oppression will not be ignored.
"They deserve solidarity because they have nothing but their bodies and their voices," Dardan explained.
Visualization worked in France
When this declaration of solidarity was spread, criticism was immediately heard: everything was only performative again, purely symbolic politics, vain, ineffective.
There were also complaints about the letter from Germany: Toothless, trivial, written and signed in the safe rooms from a distance - whereby it is misunderstood that exile migrants put themselves and their relatives in existential danger by signing.
But: In France, the visualization worked.
Many media are now talking about the internationally known icons who cut off a strand - and that's why everyone is talking about the struggle of women in Iran
As a gesture, this is of course symbolic, but precisely in this symbolism lies the essence of what is at stake: the smashing of a system whose ideological basis is the domination of women.
Amini's death has made the public painfully aware that the political bedrock on which the Islamist republic has cemented its power is sexism;
a regime that puts women in a worse position institutionally, structurally and with fundamentalist-religious arguments.
Cutting off one's hair, which is perceived as so dangerously feminine and therefore a threat to all men and the social system, is thus a thoroughly subversive gesture.
It is civil disobedience directed against one's own body, an act of sexual sovereignty and emancipation.
And this is the paradox of hair as a political part of the body, particularly the female political body: even when absent, it is visible.
Making the hair cut an element of solidarity is the feminist way of celebrating this resistance.
By the way, form criticism is always much easier than support.
It wouldn't even be difficult here: It's all about making things visible.
Due to its decentralized organization, this movement is powerful and fragile at the same time.
It can only survive if everyone talks, writes and reads about it, across all walks of life.
With this column I would like to do my small part and wish for more signals from politics, more sympathy for what is happening there, more discursive debate.
The regime will continue to try to make these people disappear with routine repression.
By shutting down the internet, by arresting and torturing protesters.
Let's not look away!