Ahou Daryaei is our Antigone. There are thoughts that stratify, that come to overflow, but they don’t overflow until something provokes them. There are ideas, laws that are unwritten and yet branded within us that do not allow us to do otherwise, there is an inherent freedom for which some exceptional beings are willing to sacrifice their very lives. These are ancient and modern, even mythical spokesmen who, like eternal torches, indicate the way. So is Antigone.
For King Creon, Polyneices is a traitortherefore he is not worthy of burial and will punish with death anyone who disobeys his will, for Antigone, however, he is a brother and she loves him like Eteocles, in fact she will say in a famous verse: «I was not born to hate, but to love». He then takes the decision to contravene the laws of the city of Thebes and bury him; Antigone’s morality arises from different, innate laws of the gods “They are not of today, not of yesterday, they always live, no one knows when they appeared or where from”.
Sophocles, in this tragedy from the 5th century BC, presents a heroine who does not renounce love and pity for her brother, he openly challenges authority and sacrifices his life. The ancient myth, therefore, whispers to us, from the bowels of the earth or from above the heavens, the revolutionary power of unwritten laws that do not need to be approved by man to be true; what’s more the one who claims them is a helpless and defenseless girlaware of the punishment that awaits her, who acts following her absolute moral imperative and rebels.
Beyond the myth, in Iranian reality, too Ahou Daryaei she rebels against unjust laws that provide for a condition of subordination of women, against the compulsory hijab and protests by taking off her clothes on the Azad university campus in Tehran. Both, Antigone and Ahou risk their lives in the name of freedom. What will Creon, king of the city of Thebes, do? He will bury her alive. What will Hossein Simai Saraf, Iranian science minister, do? He will report her to the authorities who, after arresting her because “she did not observe the veil obligation and broke the law”, will have her forcibly admitted to a facility for “psychological problems”.
Ahou Daryaei is our Antigone. The soothsayer Tiresias arrives and warns Creon of the contamination present in the city and of the terrible events that are preparing for the family. The king then decides to free Antigone, but she has now hanged herself. In the same way, intact and rebellious, they also died Mahsa Aminimurdered by the Iranian Moral Police for not wearing the hijab correctly, Nika Shakaram who demonstrated bareheaded for Mahsa Amini, while Arezou Badri remained paralyzed, hit by a bullet.
The judiciary of the Islamic Republic has established the release from the psychiatric hospital for Ahou Daryaei, stating that the girl is mentally ill and crazy. Ahou has no possibility of reply, but Antigone still shouts for her today who, after her gesture, without fear turns to Creon, tyrant of the city: «And if it seems to you that I am behaving like a madwoman, perhaps he who is mad is mad. accuses me.”
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