Years ago when America was seeking integration, women's equality and peace, folk songs told the story. This is happening with the Iranians as well, as they put their voices to song telling the story of revolution and the innocents who died.
While people reflect on who should tell the news and how, the people on Facebook of Iranian background continue to tell their stories. They post videos, music bits, pictures, ideas and patriotic statements for all the world to read. Some talk of family back in Iran, while others talk of a country they want to see move towards more personal freedom. A woman has become the martyr many are now mourning. She, an innocent, shown as beautiful in life, and blood streaming from her face in death, has become the symbol of a cause Iranians say they hope will end up with change in the direction of peace.
Music, poetry, and great patriotic speeches have often played a part in history and helped to communicate ideas to others. Peter, Paul and Mary helped John F. Kennedy’s programs of brotherhood as they sang, “If I Had a Hammer,” a song that talks of all these things. It also became the anthem against the Vietnam War, as were the songs of people like Odetta who made people come together in sharing the pain of war in her song, “Anthem of the Rainbow.” “We Shall Overcome” was the signature song of the move to equality for African Americans, for the dream to be realized envisioned by Martin Luther King.
Now voices, guitars and poetry render the story of Iran’s revolution, even as events unfold. Are their stories just emotion? How much is fact and what is not? Only the details of history, seen through those who participate directly, might ever know the truth.
Years ago,
an Iranian poet named Qurrat'ul-`Ayn, who took the title Tahirah put in motion the woman’s movement when she was martyred by taking off her veil publicly in Iran. She was a public figure, and a famous writer of the mid nineteenth century whose wonderful works continue to be talked about in literary circles, not just in Iran, but in those places where the poetry of the East is recognized as viable along with poetry of Shakespeare. The West knows Khalil Gibran, the Christian poet –prose-essayist, but many don’t know Tahirah, whose defiance of religious codes in expressing women’s rights became a martyr to the cause of women. Her life was portrayed by Sarah Bernhardt, and her life story read by Queen Marie of Rumania, the country to first put women’s suffrage in place, long before the United States and such countries as Great Britain and France. It is only fitting, perhaps, another woman becomes the centerpiece of a movement, a story, a testament, as is happening now on Facebook, as people share the story of Neda.
The music is here for others to enjoy. As the story continues to unfold in Iran, it is told in the words of a song, even as the one before by Peter, Paul and Mary sang of peace.
