Atefeh Chaharmahaliyan, an acclaimed poet, the former secretary of the board of committee of Iran Writers Association, and social and children rights activist, born in 1981, Khuzestan, Iran. She is a sociology bachelor-holder and master of urban planning from Tehran Uni. Her first volume of poems was published in 1999 by the name of “Paper Lover.” She has since then published a series of poetry volumes including “Hug me Shebly” and “The Book I Wanted Not.” In the area of social activism, in addition to her activities for empowering, educating, and aiding the poverty-stricken and disadvantaged social groups of gentrified regions such as Sistan and Baluchistan, especially regarding women and children of these regions, and her attempts to retrieve their rights, she has also experienced some years of social and educational work with the ill-guarded children of Darwazeh-Ghar, am extremely poor-settling and vulnerable neighborhood in the capital, Tehran. One of the most noticeable outcomes of such an experience is a collection of short stories written by a number of children in this neighborhood under her supervision, called “Collective Paradise.” Some stories of the book won the national award of “Sepidar,” a literary award in the area of children literature for “acculturating children and adolescents for encouraging them to take the environment into consideration and making and effort to preserve and protect it, in form of social and public movements.” This volume was first published in 2019 by Nimajh Publication on whose websites the book is introduced as follows: “Collective Paradise is the first collection of short-stories of 12 individuals, the then children who now have turned into adolescents, who have been under training for four years to bring their talents into fruition, as a result of which, they have collected 26 short stories in one volume and won the first place in a relevant story-writing national award. This short-story collection ranges from romantic and realist to fantasy and imaginative stories, first published in 2019 by the efforts of and with a foreword by Atefeh Chaharmahaliyan, poet and literary critic….and now is enjoying its third edition.” Atefeh herself gave an interview to one of the online magazines over the news of the publication of the same book, where she describes the tie between social responsibility and literary creation as such: “Writing poetry is a social act in practice; since it gives an exterior form to a particular individuality; yet, relating the social role a poet plays to other roles as such is elective in nature;” and, in the same interview, she adds the following on the question of poetry’s “social responsibility and commitment” in our time: “I think poetry has always had an existential purpose rooted in either an individual, personal, or extra-personal commitment. Nowadays, that we have come to accept the decisive deities better be left seated in their own favorite cornered niche, we can see that it is more favorable to poetry if no one attempts to define it from the outside;” Such a statement, when placed upon the background of her own literary and social practice, implies the transposition of social-political responsibility and commitment from poetry to the poet herself; meaning that such a commitment should not be searched for and in the poetic text created by the poet by in the actual praxis of the poet, as a social being, itself; and this find its complete manifestation in the practical record that Atefeh Chaharmahaliyan leaves behind.
Nevertheless, she was arrested on Oct. 3rd by the security forces and got transferred to Evin prison in Tehran; close sources have also informed that, prior to her arrest, she had been summoned and persecuted by such agents over the sociopolitical content of her activities on social networks; she was finally abducted by the security forces on that date and while returning home from a friend’s. Due to pressures exerted by the security forces, distributing information about her situation while in detention was mostly covered in mist of uncertainty and despite long-time detention tied to uncertain proceedings, she was reported to be under pressure for forced confession and case-fabrication, which at the time of detention, caused considerable worries about her well-being; for instance, she was reported by the close sources to have suffered from long-term constant exposure to cell lights resulting in chronic severe headaches; her arrest caused a massive wave of protests in literary circles both nationally and globally; to name a few, on Oct. 16, 2022, over 500 authors, artists and activists, published a joint statement which was vastly reflected in Farsi-speaking mass media, in which they expressed their utter objection to the arrest of this poet and former secretary of Iranian Writers Association. The statement recounts her time-honored record of social work and activism, and draws a comparison between her constructive and time-honored, responsible social role, on the one hand, and the severity of the measures taken against her, on the other, coming to the following conclusion: “Atefeh Chaharmahaliyan has always been one of the tireless attendants, active, for years, in a quite transparent and manifested way, in aiding Iranian children and adult, from Sistan, Baluchistan, and Kurdistan to her endeared Darwazeh-Ghar in Tehran. Her arrest takes place in face of a situation in which Kurdistan and Baluchistan are enflamed by their multi-decade long and piled up demands and depravities, causing but a profound perplexity and regret.” In addition, the American branch of Pen International, publishes an official report on its website on Nov. 11, 2022, and declares its objection to the long-term prison sentences and reports signifying torture and abuse applied against the Iranian authors and artists in detention, in which it mentions her name next to some others as Said Helichi, Golrokh Ebrahimi, and Behrouz Yasemi, as some authors to have been exposed to such measures and thus protests against the conditions of their detention; on Oct. 19, 2022, too, the German branch of the same international literary organization objects her lack of phone access to her lawyer and family in detention and considers it a blatant neglect of her evident civil and human rights.
In any case, she was eventually released temporarily on a certain sum of bail (with a five year long confiscation period) on Dec. 13, 2022, after 71 days of detention; and her initial hearing district court was held at the 26th division of the Revolutionary Court chaired by Judge Nima Afshari a day before her release in which she was sentenced to the following: Two years of discretionary custodial sentence in addition to a penal fine for “creating discord in public opinion” along with eight months of discretionary custodial sentence for “propaganda against the regime” as well as a five year of suspended surveillance period during which she will not be able to leave the country, join any social and/or political group or party, own and use smartphone, have activities on social media; in addition, she is mandated to do 70-page research-work in favor of the regime’s ideological stances and by at least 70 clear references made to a number of mandatory sources as such. This sentence was later reaffirmed verbatim at the court of appeals and following her refusal to sign the commitment letter as a pre-condition for her to be included in the judiciary public pardon circular, which was implemented at the end of the previous Persian year, to evacuate prisons from tens of thousands of political prisoners and arrested protestors in the course of the recent mass uprisings. She herself describes the situation in the following: “In Jan 2023, the objection bill to my sentence and the content of the district indictment was sent to the Revolutionary Court through the revered legal representatives, Mses. Kolahchiyan and Hussein’Zadeh. In early Mar., the 36th division of the Court of Appeals made phone contacts and informed that the case had been qualified for the public pardon and on the verge of being closed, on condition that I attend there to sign the letter of commitment. In response to my refusal to do so, it was declared to my legal representatives that the sentence issued at the court of district is reaffirmed at the court of appeals verbatim and only with the exclusion of one phrase (that is, the mandatory research-work). In addition to the confiscation of the mobile phone, a certain sum of fine is due to be reimbursed is immediately enforced. In case of lack of compliance with the orders issued by the judicial authority, or commitment of any act deemed a deliberate act up of crime up to degree seven, the two year and eight month long prison sentence will be enforced. It must be added that due to her refusal to sign the commitment letter, her sentence is now under proceeding at the Sentence Execution Office.
This said, inspecting this peculiarly arranged sentence more closely, which better be called a “cobweb sentence,” against Atefeh Chaharmahaliyan (including suspended prison sentence, being barred from leaving the country, using smart phone, being active on social networks and virtual media, and membership in any political and/or social groups and parties) which has been issued and deemed enforceable against many artists, authors, poets, media activists, journalists, and cultural figures in the course of Zhina (Mahsa) Movement, can shed light on new dimensions of the logic behind this comprehensive suppression. First, the obnoxious phenomenon of the sterilization of the social society, that is, the disempowerment of civil society and its activists and popular organizations for preserving and reviving it, and a security-minded response, on the one hand, paired with heavy sentences, against children, women, teachers and labor activists, not to mention the rest, (including Atefeh Chaharmahaliyan’s recent sentence), and, on the other, shutting down NGO’s effective in empowering the vulnerable social layers (such as arresting the managerial members of Imam Ali Society and then declaring the organization illegal and hence its mandated shutdown which happened before recent uprisings and resulted in thousands of poverty-stricken and ill-guarded children and orphans losing their sole source of livelihood protection and welfare) can clearly demonstrate that when the state pundits and officials argue against the economic sanctions Iran is going through, and criticize them on the ground of the destructive blows it sends to the civil society, by expanding poverty throughout the country, they merely use a distraction tactic against the public opinion, while at the same time, their own security machineries and apparatuses are, as if railed off and targeted, directed toward suppressing and eliminating all those forces and organizations that used to carry the weight of the abandoned state liabilities for the empowerment and protection of the increasingly augmenting social layers suffering from socioeconomic depravities; one of the most tragic cases in point here is actually the fate of the very Darwazeh-Ghar children, overfilled with talent and creativity, who participated in the previously mentioned “Collective Paradise” short-story project; children who, according to a source affiliated informing IWAC, are now all, with no exception, forced to abandon their formal education and artistic and cultural training to enter wage-labor market to support their families; this aside, these cobweb sentences should be regarded as a certain symbolic stifling that, on the one side, by prohibiting a country leave, cancels the possibility of a legal departure for the individual, and, on the other, keeps the door of a suspended prison sentence half-open as a reminiscent of some constant threat, and implements a wide range of targeted prohibitions to terminate the very foundation of the right to expression and representation through whatever means, barring from the right to publication and media presence, from the right of subscribing to social networks and having relations and associations, and from the right of having access to an audience and discursive dissemination and, in this particular instance, even from the right to possess a sheer smart phone. An architected punishment composed of silence, suspension, and constant threat that, more than anything, resembles the expansion of prison borders to a point outside its physical enclosure, the expansion of prison logic into society, so to speak; a typical sentence issued against many cultural, media, literary, artistic, and journalistic figures including Majid Emam’Verdi, Ali Bahrampour, Bita Haghanni, Astiyazh Haghighi, Amir Ahmad Ahmadi, Amir Reza Doozandeh, Matin Soleimani, Mehdi Soufali, Muhammad Abbaszadeh, Muhammad Arab, Reza Keshvari, Nazanin Keynezhad, Mani Lotfi, Pouya Mazloumi, Nazila Ma’roufiyan, Monireh Montazeri, and Hussein Yazdi.
