Among the images I find most moving, are the ones from the university cafeterias. Scenes of young women and men, university students from all over Iran, undoing the gender barriers of the regime by simply either sitting together in the cafeteria or else moving the cafeteria outdoors.
Perhaps it is because already in this simple act of sharing a meal, they express a longing for a زندگی معمولی, zendegi ma’mouli, or an ordinary life, as articulated in Shervin Hajipour’s Baraye. While I watch Hajipour’s video as well as clips of high school and university students together singing this song of his that he wrote also as their song using their words, I am struck by this: the modesty of the revolution they call for and practice in their acts of defiance. The wish for an ordinary life, the mourning over the impossibility of such a a life, the sorrow over the fragmentation of community. For all the righteous anger also there and expressed in the demonstrations, this sadness is still what strikes me the hardest.
Ma’mouli can be translated as ordinary, pointing to how the oppressive regime in Iran has transformed the ordinary into extraordinariness. But it can also be translated into another English synonym, as common. This latter possibility – just like the Swedish allmän – reminds of how the conditions for an ordinary life are intertangled with the conditions for building community. A common life as a life in common, a life in the commons. My foster son, who long before I met him used to be one of those Afghan kids also present in Hajipour’s song, once told me that at his Swedish school people neatly split into two distinct lines when going to the lunch restaurant. In one stood the “immigrants”, in the other the “Swedes”. They formed spontaneously he said, and no one questioned them. Never did the two groups come to share a table.
Segregated eating practices reflect a society that has given up on, or is actively working against, community. In Sweden, the slang word for buddy is kompis. Etymologically, it is derived from the same source as company, companionship and similar words. Your kompis is the one with (cum) you share bread (pane). Cum pane. A slang pointing directly towards the original act of any community: the sharing of bread or any other food, the act of eating together.
I keep looking at the clips from the university cafeterias in Iran; students undoing the regime’s undoing of community, in the longing for a life ordinary, for a common life in the commons. Violetta Parra, in her homage to the students of the 1960s, wrote:
Que vivan los estudiantes / jardín de nuestra alegría / son aves que no se asustan / de animal ni policía
May the student live / the garden of our joy / they are birds that do not fear / neither animal nor police
Neither animal nor police. Yes, que vivan los estudiantes y que vivan todos los jovenes who keep the dream alive of a life in the commons of safety and ordinariness. Zan, zendegi, azadi.
