Last night, I watched a couple of the videos of Neda Soltan as she died in the streets of Tehran. They were very difficult to watch, and I found myself physically flinching as I tried to process the sights and sounds that were passing into me.
In the video, the 26 year-old student of philosophy, having just been fatally shot, lay in a growing puddle of blood. Her eyes were open, and vivid in appearance, but they did not seem present in any way that I could comprehend. It was like nothing I had ever seen, and because of that it carried with it a brutal and unmistakable authenticity. The footage, shot from a cell phone, was a fury of sound and movement. The screams were visceral and unmediated, arising unbidden from the people around her.
Three or four people attended to Soltan, trying to staunch the wound and save her life, but it was no use. The bullet had struck her heart. Suddenly, blood, following an unnatural course, pours out of her nose and mouth and she is dead.
Her death was unsentimental and swift, and even as a person at a great remove, knowing exactly what he was about to see, I still found it shocking, even hyper-real.
For whatever reason, I expected the video, like a life, to have a context—a beginning, middle, and an end– but all I saw was the end. A beautiful woman was killed—instantly– and in watching her final moment, we learned nothing about her. She just vanished from the world, a mystery that defied closure.
In a culture in which martyrdom carries great cultural resonance, Soltan has already been elevated to a mythic status, existing now as a potent and idealistic symbol of the opposition to the Iranian regime. She was beautiful and alive, and she was right there, on the streets, in the midst of a romantic storm of passion. She was the physical embodiment of an imagined, and perfectible, future.
As much as we might need her to have been at the forefront of a nascent revolution, her family said she was apolitical, and had merely stepped out of the car with her singing teacher to get some fresh air, that she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. In short, she was no more committed to her death than was the person who was struck by a car while absently crossing the street. But we need her to be more than that.
Nobody knows how or why she was shot, but some people are suggesting that she was targeted because she was using a mobile phone. Throughout the protests, the phone has proved an invaluable tool for organizing and disseminating information ( the video of Neda, herself, for instance) for those opposed to the government, and so it’s not a stretch to imagine that the authorities would like to inhibit such transmissions.
Like most of you, I’ve been receiving instructions from friends, via Twitter and Facebook, to set my Twitter account to Tehran time in order to create more traffic, thus making it more difficult for the government to track the plans of the protesters. I’ve had some ambivalence about doing so, because I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d just be helping myself feel better about myself, or actually helping a cause, one that I really didn’t know very much about. This was further complicated by the fact that the requests I was receiving were not coming from the streets of Iran, but from people just like me. There was something presumptuous, almost imperial in the request, but the impulse comes from a true and sincere place, and so, feeling like high-tech minutemen fighting for a just cause, we comply.
We can’t even begin to imagine how things are connected in this world, but one very obvious, if brutal solution to the government’s problem regarding the protestors use of mobile communications, is to simply shoot the people they see using cell phones in crowds. This changes the nature and the intensity of the conflict at hand, escalating it to a point that perhaps the actual participants, those on the ground, would not welcome. And so we watch from afar, as the life bleeds out of an innocent young woman, and we’re astonished by how quickly death comes, and how indifferent it is to our best intentions.