I remember my school teachers vividly in the Islamic Republic of Iran; their faces have yet to leave my mind. Mrs. Haghighat used to read to us passages of the Holy Quran every morning before we started class. It was a routine we did everyday, like bell work or warm up. She wanted us to hear and listen to the magical words of the book. She wanted to help us be good Muslim girls, proper, mannered, obedient. And I tried to be more or less that girl, the shy, respectful, good child. I prayed five times a day dutifully but not because mother told me to. In fact no one in the house forced me to what the outside world was telling its people. I covered my hair as I entered the fourth grade because I was being reprimanded by others. When I told mother of my decision, she neither applauded nor criticized my action. So I assumed I was doing the right thing. I remember Mrs. Mojarad who told us about the burning fires of hell and the birds and gardens of paradise. She taught and we learned and did what we were told to do. I was left to believe what I was told. I accepted the heaven and hell that was so distinctly described, like an irrevocable answer to a complicated equation. I accepted that if I showed a strand of hair I would go to hell and all of my hair would be cut off.
That was then, when my world was made up of women veiled from head to toe who believed in an idealistic paradise that none of them had actually seen. That was then when we would gather in a small room as a class of fourth graders, listening to stories of prophets and their sacrifices while our teachers encouraged us to mourn and cry.
And now…I’m a sinner I suppose. I write of forbidden realities don’t I? I write of my personal affinities and dreams don’t I? I am an independent thinker, am I not? According to rules of that other world, am I not then a sinner, a betrayer? In that world, isn’t thinking a crime? Isn’t defining your own rules of life a crime? Had I been in that world, I would have been jailed. Perhaps executed. Like so many others, like so many writers who lived on writing and died for it with a single bullet that came like an abrupt period at the end of a sentence.