Dina Afkhampour · Stockholms Kvinnohistoriska · Stockholms Kvinnohistoriska

Titel

Dina Afkhampour

Hur nåddes du av nyheten om situationen i Iran?

I heard about Mahsa Jina's killing online -- a scholar friend posted about it and I am ashamed to admit that I immediately had a very cynical response. I thought, 'just another victim of the regime.' We have been desensitized to such an extent that we no longer have normal, humane responses to these deaths. Then something burst. Quite literally, it felt like the center could no longer hold and everything collapsed all at once. WE ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. Ever since, I have often thought about Mahsa Jina dying alone. She was a tourist in Tehran. That was not her city. She was a guest. And if you know any Iranians, you know that we are very hospitable people. There is nothing we will not do for our guests. It hurts me to think of Mahsa Jina alone in a place that was not familiar to her. That she was treated with so much contempt and that she probably thought no one would care enough about her. But look now, her name has spread the fire of justice around the globe. We cannot forget her and we can never go back to being cynical in the Diaspora.

Hur får du information om utvecklingen i Iran och har du tankar om rapporteringen?

I get most of my information from non traditional sources including visual edits on social media. I hate the reporting all together. Its been terrible. The mainstream outlets have been extremely slow to report and when they do, its nothing in-depth. I appreciate the difficulties of reporting from the inside of Iran or getting fresh, on the ground accounts. But even the analysis has been wrong or inaccurate. Unfortunately, Iranians both inside and out of Iran are not immune to conspiracy theories. We have trust issues. So there has been just as much time spent discrediting analysts, journalists and outlets as there has been actually reporting the news. I call this 'noise.' The noise is just too much and at some point you begin to treat all items of news as carrying the same weight because it just takes too much effort to analyze the truthfulness or credibility of each one. Its a real mish-mash of reporting out there. From a visual point of view, the videos or snippets coming out daily are very frequently filmed secretly, from a distance so that as Diaspora, you feel removed from everything even more. At least I do. The videos make me feel desperate and helpless. I can only rely on telepathic communication. That each person feels my heart is connected to theirs somehow and that every victory they feel or every loss is not equally felt here but that it reverberates. And more deeply, if given the chance, I will share their fates. I define myself as part of their problems so that I can be a part of some solutions. I feel responsible. As someone who was born in Iran, speaks Persian fluently and shares in the cultural traditions but has never really lived there, I am an inbetweener -- I cannot kid myself that I am one of them. And yet I fully am. It is my homeland too and my fate is bound up in every one of theirs. I hope they know that we, in the diaspora, are partners to them in their joys and their sorrows.