What gives light
must endure burning.

While reading the beautiful and painful words that the courageous and thoughtful Sepideh Rashno wrote for Toomaj Salehi, I found myself repeating this enduring line by Hafez in praise of truthfulness and of living in truth:

“Strive in truth, for from your breath the sun may be born.”

Every time I read something by Sepideh, I see each of her words illuminated by this light of truth. And what an appropriate name Sepideh—dawn—is for a spirit that has drawn so much light from respect for truth, integrity and being oneself.

Sepideh wrote to Toomaj that eventually a day comes in every fighter’s life when the applause, the hands on the shoulder and the smiles have ended, and that person is left alone with all their loneliness and pain. At that moment they ask themselves:

Was it worth it?

Perhaps these days Mehdi Yarrahi, Niloufar Hamedi, Elaheh Mohammadi, Saeedeh Shafiei and Nasim Soltanbeigi, together with thousands of other prisoners, hundreds of young people who have been injured, including Ghazal Ranjkesh and Kowsar Eftekhari, students deprived of education, university teachers prevented from teaching, artists whose room for art and life has been narrowed, and families who after a lifetime of care found the flowers of their lives withering in their arms, are asking themselves the same question.

How many names from among these thousands will people remember six months later? How many will continue to write against forgetting? Even the most recognised names will at some point in the difficult moments of life be alone with this cutting question: was it worth it?

Sepideh, in answering for herself, is certain of one thing: she could not have ceased to be herself. She could not have lived in untruth.

Sepideh writes to Toomaj: I wish a voice could whisper in your ear that you are not alone. Power is always with the people, and people do not abandon honour.

She ends her text to Toomaj in this way: dream and life continue in you; even in captivity you cannot be bound. You are free. You are fiercely free.

Jean-Paul Sartre has a powerful formulation of freedom, rendered here as:

“Freedom is what we do with what has been done to us.”

With this understanding of freedom, the only person deprived of freedom is the one who does nothing in response to what has been done to them. In such a view, the freest people are Sepidehs and Toomajs, who have never remained indifferent to what was done to them.

Dear Sepideh, you are right. “Truth” is never alone, because it is sufficient unto itself. Viktor Frankl, the great thinker who endured Auschwitz and left us a work as valuable as Man’s Search for Meaning, writes in a formulation rendered here:

“What gives light must endure burning.”

I believe that light will be born from the great suffering of you and of these people. Under the weight of this victorious winter, many flowers will grow from the invincible summer within you, and spring will arrive with them.

Aydin Areta