They amaze us with their grit and courage in the face of guns, truncheons, and tear gas. They swoop on the basij, slap away their flailing hands, and shame them as the brutes beat an older woman or a seven-year-old child or a young man being dragged away never to be seen again. They make us smile with their green head and wrist bands, V signs, posters, and knowing grins. They break our hearts as they pray "Allahu Akbar!" and call out to one another from their roof tops. They make us tremble as, with their children, they scream in fear at night when the thugs invade their homes, their leaders disappear, and the city sinks into the nightmare of the police state they are living in now.
They make us yell, "You Go Girl!" when the cops beat them and they fight back, when they kick a hoodlum cop in the butt, when they scream in the faces of men who have lost their humanity. But they also stun us when they shield another cop in their arms from the anger of exhausted, anguished, frustrated protesters. These Women Warriors are bright, educated, strong, compassionate, gorgeous, so incredibly beautiful they take one's breath away.
The uprising is dangerous for all the protesters but particularly for them; yet it is necessary for them to fight if they are ever to be free, and they know it.
And now one of them has been slain--Neda Agha-Soltan whose family called her "a beam of light." She went out that morning to protest; instead, we all watched her bleed into the street and take her last breath. Our hearts broke again as we screamed with those trying to stop the blood pumping from her wounded heart, trying to make her breathe again. Shock, horror, anger, and disbelief: she was too young, she was too vital, she was too lovely.
She now lies alone in a cold grave while the video of her public death plays over and over and over on TV screens across the world; it is not only tragic but also obscene to see her displayed like this, lying in the street in her jeans and shirt, her eyes slowly growing blank as the blood pours. We want to turn away, but we cannot stop seeing her through our tears and our anger.
Despite the despots' efforts to prevent it, Neda has become the individual--the symbol--every cause, every movement must have to make it real to the rest of us. She is the man in China, standing defiantly in front of the tanks, with his bags rocking beside him, refusing to let them pass; she is Anne Frank in Holland who wanted to be a writer and who personalized the Holocaust for generations in her Diary; she is Joan of Arc in France, who led an army and was martyred for her cause as well. However, Neda--who didn’t get a say in her destiny--if asked did she want to be a martyr, probably would have said, "no, please, I'd rather go home today." And it is so achingly sad.
As the media remind us on the hour, she is an icon now, an image mourned the world over. But more importantly, she is a warm, vibrant young woman, daughter, student, singer, traveller, fiancée, friend who lost everything to a vicious regime that would turn violently on its own people rather than give up their arrogant, iron-fisted hold on power, which they are in fact powerless to keep now because they have been exposed as the murderers they are.
As we watch her die over and over, our anger rises, our hearts break again, and the tears will not stop. As we celebrate our new Women Warriors, we and they grieve for Neda--our sister our daughter our beloved angel who now belongs to all the light.
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