The Revolutionary Mourner, and the Collective Body: The performativity of grief in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement

Abstract

In this article I look at the performativity of grief in the recent widespread protests that shook Iran. Through analysing the documents that depict moments of mourning among those who lost their loved ones in the brutal crackdown on the protesters, I tell the stories of protesting mourners. I take a closer look at their bodily gestures and performances, exploring a collective body in grief, that is standing tall despite its wounds, rather than being broken down by the ferocity of the oppression. In this piece I give an alternative reading of the revolutionary acts of grief, where the dead body is imortalized into the symbol of the collective body joined in the cry of Woman, Life, Freedom.

Notes

1 ’Jin, Jian, Azadi‘, meaning Woman, Life, Freedom; originally a Kurdish slogan that became the main rallying cry during the recent widespread waves of protests in Iran.

2 In a ceremony for Mino Majidi in London, her other daughter says, ‘Every day that goes by, my heart is not calming, but my anger grows.’

3 In a ceremony for Khodanour Lojei, his mother weeps holding a photo of him on her heart. Next to her a child is sitting staring at the camera, holding a placard that reads, ‘we won’t forgive, we won’t forget’, a slogan that has been widely used in protests in Iran recently.

4 In much footage of funeral ceremonies, especially in Kurdish regions, crowds sing, ‘Martyrs never die’.

5 In Iranian culture, the traditional mourning lasts forty days. When the forty days of Jina Mahsa Amini’s mourning was coming to an end on social media many started announcing that her fortieth day was going to be a turning point. Despite a brutal crackdown, thousands of protesters took to the streets. It was indeed a turning point, as they shouted that from today, every day was going to be someone’s (a killed protester’s) fortieth.

6 Jacques Rancière believes aesthetics is ‘the distribution of the sensible’, ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’ (2011: 7). In ‘Dancing into alternative realities’ I argue that the disobedient body of a woman, ‘disrupts the hegemonic order and the documents of these [transgressive] performances, scattered on the internet, or hidden away on personal hard drives, configure an alternative aesthetic, that defies tyranny and embraces the possibility of a kind of emancipation’ (Zavarei 2022).