For Aida

How different the lives of two friends can be!

I wake up in the morning and groggily walk myself to the bathroom with my phone. I check my calendar and some messages to see what I have coming up in the day. 

I see a text from my dad about someone in prison. Some of these messages have become the norm over the last few months of the women-led revolution happening in Iran. Most of the news can be summed up as ‘someone (whom you didn’t know) died or was arrested’. Today though, this name sounds familiar and I look closely and feel my eyes widen and all of a sudden I’m wide awake. “Release Aida Amidi, a writer and a member of the Iranian Writers’ Association” reads the caption beneath the photo. Aida Amidi, Aida?!

Aida was my childhood friend when we lived in Iran. She was the first person whom I consciously remember knowing as a friend.

I reply to my dad whether this is true and whether it’s the same Aida, he confirms yes to both questions. I call him and ask him for more details and there are very few. My dad tells me that after he saw it on Facebook, he called her dad and was able to speak to him for about a minute before their phones were disconnected and he was no longer able to reach him. My dad learned that she was arrested about a month ago. When later I tell my partner that a childhood friend was arrested, he tells me that there should be another verb than ‘arrest’ since that connotes doing something wrong, and sadly from the eyes of such men who hate women they are doing something ‘wrong’. 

My dad tells me she is allowed visitation once every two weeks and phone calls once a week. That’s all he learns before the phone is disconnected. We exchange a few other words of sorrow and hang up. I search for her online. She had a twitter account and it is now deleted no doubt by the Islamic regime’s security forces.

I look up from my phone and over into the bedroom where my partner and my dog are sleeping peacefully unaware of anything that has happened. I feel very heavy all of a sudden and I drag myself back to bed hiding my face under the covers. And there I think about her and how different the lives of two friends ended up: one a political prisoner under a brutal dictatorial regime and the other living as common-law with her partner leading a “normal life”. 

Aida was taller than me and in my memories of her she was the more thoughtful, calmer, and the more intelligent one. If I was this cheeky and talkative little girl, she was the calm, quiet and the respectful one. In the above photo, we are performing at a school concert (for the commemoration of the 1979 Islamic Revolution no less), and Aida is standing on the far left and as you get to the right where yours truly is, you can see that not only I’m not wearing my scarf, but I no longer have my vest on either and my hair is in disarray. Cheeky!

One of my sharpest memories of her was this conversation we kids had around the birth of my youngest sister. My mom was in labour and my parents were in the hospital and we were being watched by Aida’s parents. Me and my sister and Aida, and her sister and brother were all together playing and laughing and the conversation turned to the new arrival to our family. We were each expressing if we wanted the new baby to be a boy or a girl. My sister and I wanted another baby sister, but Aida and her siblings wanted us to have a baby brother so that our families would look similar, 2 girls and a boy. We went back and forth and didn’t agree and we must have really gotten into it because her mom who was cleaning the living room, interrupted our argument to say ‘it doesn’t matter what sex is the baby, let’s just pray that the baby is healthy’ and with that we all knew that the conversation was at an end because there’s no sense to argue when an adult talks about the importance of health. 

I have always thought of that story as something incredibly sweet: that a friend would want her friend’s family’s gender composition to look like hers so that they can be even closer together and even more similar. It speaks of the desire for closeness through similarity.

We moved away from that city in a few years and I lost touch with Aida. Since our dads kept in touch, we were able to still see each other on some occasions. And then we immigrated and those faint connections became even less. Several years ago my dad was able to find her dad on Facebook and reconnect. And I learned more about her and what she does and listened to her interviews, where spoke beautifully and eloquently.  

I feel the white sheet of the bed around me and think of Aida in prison. How different two friends’ lives turned out to be. 

A decade ago I was accepted into a prestigious PhD program at a top Canadian university with a prestigious and wildly respected professor as my supervisor. This professor was an academic whom I have always admired. I was going to study under her tutelage and research and write about Iranian political prisoners, especially women. 

In preparation for the program, along with finishing my Master’s thesis, that summer I read many books and memoirs of political prisoners of Iran, especially those who were imprisoned under the Islamic regime. My summer readings made me very keenly aware of what happens to people in political prisons. I knew of assault and torture but I didn’t know the extent and the methods that create such psychological traumas that some never recover from again. I read about their traumas and was vicariously traumatized myself. The extent of injustices and cruelty astounded me and the vicarious trauma changed me. I would go about my daily activities and then remember a detail of someone’s story and get lost in those details and forget my own tasks and later in the evening would have a panic attack over the brutality of their lives and the guilt of my own freedom.  

I dropped out of that PhD program with tears in my eyes over the doors that I was closing to myself but I knew I couldn’t continue studying something this heavy for 4-5 years from a theoretical perspective that I wasn’t interested in. I walked out mainly because I knew my own mental health boundaries and I knew exposure to such violent and horrific stories for years would impact me negatively and severely, since I could already see the stress it had caused me. 

And I only read about these stories, not lived them. I read them and had the privilege of closing the books and putting that research project away. How are all those poor souls living those stories? How are they enduring such violence?

I think of Aida and I can easily imagine some of the things that could be happening to her right now. I think of the girl she was and us singing together and performing a play for the school. I feel the warmth of my dog by my foot and I’m grateful for her presence and once again I feel guilty for my own ‘normal’ and happy little life filled with freedoms people in Iran dream about and fight for.

And then like a ping I hear a voice and it’s none other than Toni Morrison’s. ‘The function of freedom is to free someone else. When you are no longer bound by wreckage, risk freeing someone else.’ 

I get out of bed. I have words to write, stories to share, people to call. 

I will write for Aida.

Edits: Aida has been released from Evin prison on surety and awaits “trial”.