Fréderike Geerdink
Dear Jîna,
It’s been a year since you died today and honestly, I’ve been thinking about nothing else today. You just wouldn’t believe what has all unfolded since the first pictures of you emerged. You in the hospital, on life support. You before that tragic family visit to Tehran, a confident young woman with a headscarf loosely draped around her head. You, dancing in the living room.
The living room where they called you Jîna. I imagine that if you heard anybody call you Jîna, you would know you were safe. After all, only people you could trust and who loved you would call you by that name, in places where it was safe to be Kurdish. Mahsa, your Persian name, was for the outside world, right?
I imagine being called Mahsa could mean different things. Definitely safe: your parents or siblings calling you in a public space, where your Kurdish name spoken out loud could get you and them in trouble. Maybe safe: a teacher in school, forced to comply with the rules whether they wanted to or not but maybe seeing you for who you were – did some of them ever speak Kurdish to you on occasion and contribute to your sense of belonging? Unsafe: state institutions.
Sidelined
Ever since the state murdered you – sorry for saying it so bluntly – the usage of your names has been just as telling. Your community, where you were safe, calls you Jîna when they speak, write or sing about you, when they turn your name into art or paint it on protest signs and banners. They sometimes add Mahsa because annoyingly as it is, the minute your story started to make international headlines, Jîna was sidelined and Mahsa was how you became known.
Annoyingly, I say, because it was you, Jîna, who was murdered, not Mahsa. You know this all wouldn’t have happened to you if you hadn’t been Kurdish.
Not everybody who uses the name Mahsa does so out of bad intentions, of course – just like when you were alive. There’s sort of a scale, right? Some people just want to support the protesting people in Iran and use the name they see most often. Harmless, I guess. Media insisting on using Mahsa: not acceptable. It reveals, I think, more than just a simplification and distortion of your story: they will argue that as ‘objective’ media, they just go with your official name. That’s not objective, that’s siding with a repressive system. Can you believe, Jîna, that there are even human rights organisations that stick to Mahsa? Absurd.
Diary
I’d love to hear your opinion about this. I’m sure you would give me insights that can’t occur to me sitting here comfortably in my home office. I can speak to a thousand Kurds and still, the 1001st I’d speak to would enrich me yet again with a new thought, a new angle, a Kurdish saying I didn’t know yet but was highly (or remotely) applicable, a short reading from her diary to explain something, a sharp question that would haunt me, a memory, a dream, a loss.
We know so little about you, Jîna. To what extend were you interested in politics? I guess what I am curious about is what you would have done this past year if it hadn’t been you who was caught and killed by the morality police but another young Kurdish woman. Strange, how writing a letter triggers a question that didn’t occur to me earlier this past year.
I saw a documentary on Dutch TV about young women from Rojhilat who had crossed the border into Kurdistan in Iraq and joined the resistance there. The filmmaker (with roots in Mahabad!) interviewed them about their motivations to join. They talked about how they were treated by the state after you had died and they resisted, how surveillance in schools and on the streets increased, how the pressure on their communities intensified. How they eventually saved themselves from death or endless imprisonment and torture by crossing the border. Would you have been one of them?
Music
I think the least you would have done, was dance. We saw marvellous videos of fires on the streets with women without headscarves and wearing jeans dancing around them with Kurdish music. Would you have gone out after dark to resist against security forces taking over the streets of your hometown Seqqiz? Would you have gone to the graveyard to visit the graves of those who died in the protests? Would you have secretly filmed the security forces’ brutality, the further militarization of your Kurdish lands, the strikes and closed shops in Seqqiz and elsewhere and sent the footage to sources abroad for them to spread?
Maybe you would have married, studied, worked in a job you liked – life goes on for those who survive.
After you were laid to rest, a family member of yours wrote on the tombstone. He wrote: “Jîna, dear, you will not die. Your name will turn into a symbol.” You have become a symbol. A symbol of a woman, jin, a symbol of life, jiyan, a symbol of freedom, azadî.
You are immortal, Jîna.
Fréderike
