Superstition or Cultural Poverty

Warning: This is one of the bitterest stories I have written, drawn from a true story… The word father is sacred to me, to you, perhaps to many others. A father is someone you can lean on for a lifetime… if… If, and only if, he is not clothed in superstition… This is Baluchestan: a small house whose window frames hold no windows, only blankets. In this house, barely worthy of the name, a little girl lives, or rather merely survives, with her five brothers and her mother and father. The girl never smiled at simply being alive, at being a girl, at being made the family’s so-called honor. At five, her childhood games gave way to the status of a servant in the home, waiting on her father and brothers. Years passed. The men of the house crushed her so thoroughly in their game of “honor” that the back room became the safest loveless embrace she knew. Every young man who came to their door hoping to marry the girl in our story was branded an affront to family honor and became easy prey for the brothers who were brothers in name alone. Our girl was forty now. The doorstep had worn away with all the absences, all the people who never came. Her unholy father saw that his daughter had been left alone, without a man, and had grown tired of her presence. He put her hand in that of an old man, for a price, perhaps a small one. The old man, now supposedly her protector, or perhaps the darkness over her life, took Golnar (not her real name) north with him. Golnar was no freer there. She endured the merciless fists and kicks of the man who was supposed to shelter her. Time passed, and the wounds on her body grew deeper and more painful even than the wounds inside her. She had no choice but to flee that dungeon and return to her family’s house… I cannot even call it a house of hope. She imagined that her brothers, who talked so much of honor, would rescue her, or at least accept her. Since Golnar had always been made the guilty one, she hoped they might forgive her. But no… Only hours after she arrived, one of those five brothers in name alone came. Afraid for his reputation, afraid people would say the family had no honor, driven by bigotry, superstition, and rage… He killed our Golnar. Yes, killed her. That night Golnar had not reached home. She had reached a grave, dug by superstition’s lackeys and those counterfeit brothers. That brother spent about a year in prison. Then, with the family’s consent, he was released and moved to another city. (I said “family.” Isn’t that a joke?) My fellow Iranian, my friend, a piece of my own flesh: Iran, this weary land, is full of bitter stories in which the smell of blood seems like perfume beside the stench of superstition. They have poisoned our Iran with superstition so they can keep their own wheels turning while people remain in ignorance. If together we fight superstition and the abuses licensed by religion and government, we will save not only Baluchestan, Khuzestan, and Khorasan, not only Tabriz, Lake Valasht, and the Persian Gulf, but all of Iran. Golnar, Mahsa, Nika, Majidreza, and your children and mine have pinned their hopes on us. Let us raise our heads and save our Iran. Long live the Shah.