Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter Twenty One; The Poet as Dissident by Dave Jaffe

     The Poet as Dissident by Dave Jaffe: Part One


    All the revolutions of the 20th century erupted in places ruled by tyrants or tyrannical governments. And yet  at the end of these revolutions, tyrants ruled the countries again. Of course the new rulers weren't the same as the old ones. But the new rulers ruled their subjects with an iron hand.
    The life of Asieh Amini shows how true this is.
    Amini is an Iranian-born woman now living in Norway. Her life was recently told by Laura Secor in a recent edition of the 'New Yorker' magazine.
   Amini grew up in northern Iran in an upper class family that had wealth and servants. Yet then came the revolution of the late 1970's. The revolution overthrew the ruling Shah and replaced him with another tyrant, Ayatollah Khomeini.
    "The United States has consistently opposed democracy and is supporting corrupt, brutal regimes," writes Noam Chomsky, reporting on people's reactions to the United States in the Middle East. The Shah was faced with a near-revolution in 1954 but survived thanks to U.S. help. He was a top-down oil-rich tyrant. Yet in the late 1970's he was faced by a massive uprising that called for his overthrow. The Shah then fled Iran. But the new ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, imposed a harsh and brutal Islamic rule on the people.
     Thousands of rebels, many of whom were Marxists, were hunted down and often killed by Khomeini's armed supporters. "I don't like my country anymore," a former Iranian citizen said in the early 21st century. "It's not a nice place to visit."
    At first, Asieh Amini didn't take sides in the revolution. For one thing she was too young to understand what was taking place. She wrote poetry and painted pictures. She even joined a poetry circle in a nearby library. Yet soon the revolution engulfed her family. One member of her extended family was a judge who condemned his two sons to death for planning anti-revolutionary activity. This man Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammidi Gilani became infamous for this act.
      Amini went to university In Tehran. She studied journalism, wrote poetry and wrote stories for a state-controlled paper. Then she became an editor for a youth supplement of a large paper. Many men working on the paper resented her for her power. She worked at other papers that were closed down by the government because of their politics. She married, raised a daughter called Ava and then endured a terribly painful illegal abortion.
   Then came a moment of revelation. In 2004 she stumbled upon the story of Atafeh Sahaaleh, a 16 year-old girl who was hanged for acts that were called 'not chaste'. Amini found about the story, tracked down many witnesses, and wrote up her account of what happened. Only a woman's magazine would publish her story.
     Amini now discovered that women who had sex outside marriage would receive 100 lashes of a whip at least three times. Yet on the fourth time they would be executed. Amini was now launched on a very dangerous path. (To be continued).