The young student in her underwear walking around the square at Azad University in Tehran will go down in history. Because his gesture of incredible transgression speaks not only of the suffocation of a people, but also of the path out of the mullahs’ rule as its inevitable end. The solitary and stubborn walk of this young woman speaks of the impossibility of pursuing a purely interior life, a hidden life. The mullahs installed a generalized schizophrenia which was so aptly illustrated by the opening of the film. Syriana (2005, Stephen Gaghan): a young woman with makeup, in a dress and high heels, removes her makeup and covers her hair with a veil and her body with shapeless jogging pants then a long black chador before leaving a house where the sound of festive music still rings out.
For too many years, the Iranian people lived a free life inside (not without greasing a few corrupt paws) where alcohol, drugs, dance, music and sex circulated abundantly and a life under false bells and whistles. virtuous on the outside, hoping with each arrival of a pseudo-reformer a little more freedom, a little more air, a little less of the darkness which presided over their lives cut in two, lives halved. The first consequence of the assassination of Mahsa Amini was an electric shock: freedom cannot be negotiated, it is not given as compensation, it must be taken as a trophy. The proud march of the student says that the mullah can no longer hold an educated people – by its care, delicious irony of History -, a people eager to live – nationalist and proud, the Persians can no longer bear to be of dark scarecrows -, a sensual people – we do not recite Omar Khayyam, Hafez and Rumi from cradle to grave with impunity, we end up being inhabited by the velvet of wine, the thrill of bare skin, the absolute of love.
The heart of taboo
The gesture of the student in her underwear, a point of light in the gray Tehran, tells the long story of the emancipation of women’s bodies. Because the female body has always been, at all times, in all geographies, in all religions, in all norms, in all censorship, the heart of taboo. Body of shame because body of desire, body of temptation because body of beauty, social body because body of motherhood. By removing her clothes, by displaying her nudity, the young student from Azad University nobly carries the history of women on her skin. She takes with her Phryne, one of the richest and most famous hetaeras of ancient Greece – the hetaeras are the ancient courtesans, the only women, like later courtesans, married or not, bourgeois or proletarian, who had the right to own land, property or a bank account. Model of Praxiteles, she was judged for having introduced a foreign religion to Athens and leading young girls astray. When all seemed lost, her lover and lawyer Hyperides asked her to strip naked in court, and, faced with such beauty, the Athenian jurors declared her innocent, because only the gods can offer such perfection.
Colette’s pride
The young student is not crazy, she has the pride of Colette who stripped herself on stage in 1905, thus marking her first step towards independence, she has the pride of Huda Sharawi, an Egyptian intellectual committed against colonization who, in 1923, removed her veil as a sign of emancipation and marked the birth of Arab feminism. She is the admirable Aube, the heroine of Kamel Daoud’s magnificent novel Houris : “Half-man, half-woman, half-dead, half-alive, half-mute, half-talkative, half-slaughtered, half-smiling, I am having fun and savoring this millennium of pure irony which places me between God and our sexes.”
We do not yet have certainty about the name of this young woman. I know him: he is the one who stands up in the mirror of every woman who, since the dawn of time, has rid herself, in a sublime gesture of truth, of the veil of shame and modesty. That of every woman who says a scathing “no” to all attempts to imprison her in the prison of frustration and morality. That of every woman who celebrates the flesh for what it is: a freedom and a cry of enjoyment.
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