“These are the words I want to pass on to future generations after walking in blood.” a year later, the Iranian revolution from within.

On September 13, 2022, Mahsa Gina Amini, originally from Saqez, Kurdistan Province, Iran, was arrested by the moral police for wearing a “badly worn” headscarf. Three days later, he died in custody after falling into a coma. Authorities say the young woman died of a heart attack. A version that was immediately questioned by his family. His father, in particular, claims that he has injuries on his legs and blames the police for his death. Mahsa Amini’s death is the final straw in a country already in crisis, sparking an unprecedented uprising across Iran. Many women-led protests have denounced a law passed after the 1979 Islamic revolution that requires all women to wear head and neck veils and conceal their hair. And the whole nation loudly proclaims its right to freedom, chanting the slogan “Zan, zendegi, liberti” (“Woman, life, freedom”).

Since then, despite the repression, the insurgent movement has never stopped. As told by Neela, who posts on the streets of Tehran (ed. Calmann Lévy)* under a pseudonym. Over the course of the pages, this unnamed Iranian woman plunges us into the heart of the rebellion, where she is both a witness to and an actor in her people’s uprising during her daily outings on the streets of the Persian capital. Selected extracts.

A witness rather than a living

“At this moment in our history, ‘bearing witness’ is a brighter word than ‘living.’ You can live your life as a spectator. To bear witness, as a witness and as a martyr, is to be an actor in our destiny. These are the words I want to pass on to future generations after walking in blood. What I want to offer to those who will look for us in the vortex of our history. If they’re looking for us.”

Mahsa Amini’s death, the trigger

“It is these unique moments that accompany me when I go out. Naked women who stand with police lines, activists who send messages from prison and under torture, lawyers of imprisoned political prisoners, those sentenced to death. If you listen carefully, you can hear the hammer on the court table across the country. After each of these strikes, the regime and the population once again come to the same conclusion. Athletes take off their veils at world competitions and upon their return they are first arrested before being forced to make a public confession. On social networks, theater groups broadcast performances against the regime. We throw buckets of paint at official murals that all depict soldiers. We put posters with the names of our dead on the pedestrian bridges above the roads. We dye the water in the public fountains red, and the blood-colored jets rise into the sky of the city.”

Rape as a tool of repression

“From time to time, new information is filtered from hospitals. The inmates were admitted for rape and genital mutilation, then returned to the prison for some treatment and terrorizing hospital staff. It is impossible to record page by page the testimonies of dozens of guardians who report repeated rapes of protesters. We are just as horrified by the reports of rape as by the courage of these women who come forward after being released from prison. Courage that allowed many ex-prisoners to write accurately about how they too had been raped years earlier. The government’s decision requires all protesters to remain in prison until the traces of the rape are removed. In my opinion, this is one of the strikes that was effective against the movement.”

Feminist revolution

“Looking over the past forty-four years, we can see how the number of women taking a stand has grown. Their resistance, even sporadically, even gradually, transformed their struggle into civil disobedience so powerful that the world was finally forced to follow. We are no longer just a cliché of a miserable country. We are the embodiment of protest.”

Martyrs for women’s rights

“It will be written in the history of this nation that there are women who surrendered to their fate to become martyrs under the conditions of all kinds of forced domination. These are women who were sentenced to twenty years in prison and deprived of lawyers for defending the rights of other women and children. Mothers who find themselves in prison for demanding justice for the murder of their sons and daughters. Those who protested against stoning and were subjected to mock executions several times. The one who set himself on fire in the heart of the city to demonstrate the lack of right to dispose of our bodies. Those who protest are sentenced to dozens of lashes. We can all call them live protests. But also countless who write about the murder of women in their newspapers and throw them in prison even before these newspapers are printed. Or the one who left a toddler at home one morning to climb atop a transformer in the streets of Tehran, waving his scarf on the end of a stick.

Taking off your scarf, an act of rebellion

“I didn’t wear my scarf when I passed them (riot police). Most of us don’t do that anymore. I know that nothing can stop one of these soldiers from raising a rifle and putting bullets through my body.”

*on the streets of Tehran , translated from Persian by Ambre Morier, ed. Calmann Lévy, 128 pages, €11.90.