Hello fellow readers!
For the past few weeks in my ASTU class we have been discussing and analyzing Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in order to understand the war in Iran from a different point of view; from a perspective other than the Western one, from a person who actually witnessed the revolution with her own eyes when she was a child. Childhood is the most precious time of one’s life; the time when we are still discovering the world beneath the protecting wings of our parents, the time when we get to make mistakes without facing serious consequences, the time when everything is a constant learning process that does not seem forced or painful, but most importantly, childhood is the time when we get to be innocent and see the world with special lenses that restrain us from the horrific glare of the real world.
I got to experience all of that when I was a child and at that time I thought that every other child experienced it in the same way. It seemed to me as an undeniable right, something that we were entitled to have before taking off the lenses and encountering the blinding glare of the real world. Only as I became older I realized that only a small percentage of the kids in the world get to experience the childhood that I did, and that a bigger percentage is forced to grow up and toss themselves into the abyss of the real world. This is exactly what Marji went through living in Iran in the times of the Revolution. She witnessed first-hand how people protested in the streets against the oppressive government, how her uncle was tortured and later on killed, how her friends lost their houses and their families, how the police raided her house in search of incriminating evidence, and how her own country could tear itself to pieces as the people who were once familiar to her became total strangers. For all of these reasons Marji grew up too fast, but not by choice, but because the situation demanded it; the wings of her parents could only do so much to protect her and shield her from the outside world, and so she found herself exposed to the results of the Islamic Revolution at an early age. But Marji is just one kid; what about the other kids who went through the same thing during the war in Iran? What about the boys who had the plastic keys hanging from their necks symbolizing salvation? What about the kids that were too young to go into battle but went anyway and lost their lives in the field? What about the kids struggling to survive nowadays in Syria?
The issue of children dealing with war in their countries is timeless, but childhood is not. These kids won’t get those years back, they won’t get their family members back, they won’t get their homes back, and in the most unfortunate cases, they won’t even get their lives back. Right now I lean back and think about my childhood in Bolivia where everything was perfect, but this thought is clouded by the daunting feeling that this is only my reality and not everyone else’s. Because I know that when the kids from Syria grow up and become my age and look back to their old childhood days, they won’t feel the same way about it.
Thank you for reading! Hope you guys have a great weekend 🙂
