Malala Yousafzai, the girls’ education activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, recently sent a video message of solidarity to Iranian women, with the track playing in the background. There have now been many interpretive dance performances to it all over the world, and it is regularly blared from cars and balconies and open windows across Iranian cities and towns. Within a few short weeks after Hajipour composed the music for it, musicians across Iran and beyond its borders have sung it verbatim in their own voices, translated it, and sung it in other languages-and even universalized the lyrics for a more global audience. ![]() Since its release, the song has become the single most covered protest song in Iran’s history. It forced into the open, in the face of authority, all that people have known for long but were not supposed to express openly on such a national dimension. “Baraye” has broken that violently imposed wall between the state’s enforced reality and people’s real lives. Still, the state has sought to maintain a semblance of its ideology and control in actual public spaces and its media. ![]() On social media, Iranians have created a life that more closely mirrors their inner selves-replete with harsh criticism of leading clerics including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei female solo vocalists who are otherwise banned singing at the top of their lungs and the exhibition of private lives that are anything but a reflection of the state’s projected pious paradise. The regime has tried for years to push the apparent and already real aspects of people’s lives out of the public sphere. ![]() This explains why security forces detained Hajipour a couple of days after he posted it on his Instagram page, where it had already accrued millions of views. The lyrics were written by Iranians at large and merely set to music and vocalized by the young up-and-coming singer Shervin Hajipour. If it is networked and leaderless, so is the song. If “Baraye” reflects a different, perhaps unprecedented mood on a national level, it also mirrors the organizational structure of this recent protest movement. “Baraye” creates national intimacy by citing very specific events that all Iranians have suffered through together, in a palimpsest of collective traumas. ![]() It is radical in revealing on a national level the cruelty of a system that denies such basic demands-exposing the devastating conditions Iranians face under the current regime. The song reveals the simple, ordinary nature of the things that Iranians are aching for, asking for, and even dying for. In its recounting of all the painful grievances, “Baraye,” which translates in English to “for” or “because of,” signals the end of patience with the status quo and opens vistas onto a new future with a vocal crescendo that culminates in the word “freedom.” What makes this moment different from previous periods of protest is that the wall of acquiescence and pretense that maintained the state’s authority in the public realm has been torn down on a scale not seen since the 1979 revolution. To change the minds that have rotted away “Baraye,” the anthem of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Liberty” protest movement-a song woven together entirely from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians express their investment in the current protests-continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the Islamic Republic several weeks after it was first released online.įor Iranians in Iran but also for the millions in the diaspora, this is the song of a generation, perfectly expressing this political moment and all that is at stake.īecause of the fear you feel when kissing
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |