“Did Father Give Water?”

A Letter from Farzad Kamangar, Teacher and Human Rights Activist Sentenced to Execution, to His Students

Hello Children,

I have missed you all. Here, night and day, I write the poem of life with thoughts and sweet memories of you. Every day I greet the sun in your place. Through these tall walls I awake with you. I laugh with you, and I go to bed with you. Sometimes I have this feeling of “missing someone,” and it takes over my entire being.

I wish we were exhausted like in the old days when we would return from a visit, which we used to call a “field trip.” And even though we were tired from all the clamor and dust and dirt, we would forget how tired we were when we would go to the clear village stream which would wash our weariness away. I wish we could lend our ears to “Water’s Footstep” and allow our bodies to be caressed by the plants and flowers like in the old days. I wish we would commence our class along with nature’s beautiful symphony leaving our math books with all its problems under a rock, because when Father does not have any bread and bacon to bring home to feed the kids, it does not matter whether you can calculate ? as three point fourteen or one hundred point fourteen. I wish in those days that we could put aside the science lesson with all its chemistry and physics experiments, and we could look forward to change, hoping for a day of “love and miracles” like we are escorting the clouds in the sky along with the breeze. Waiting for change, we would not force Kourosh to cut class and send him on a path of becoming laborer, so that he would not fall off the roof in search of bread and fall to his demise leaving us forever. We would wait for a change that would bring us a pair of new shoes, nice clothes with sweets and candies for the New Year.

I wish we could once again and secretly, out of our cranky principal’s sight, review our Kurdish alphabet, and together we could in our mother tongue write poems, sing songs, and dance and dance and dance again.

I wish once again, among the first grader boys’ team, I were the goalkeeper and you guys would score a goal against the teachers’ team, like Ronaldo, and would embrace each other afterwards. Unfortunately, you do not know that here in our homeland our hopes and dreams will be forgotten before our portraits are framed.

I wish I were a fixed member in the chain game of first grader girls–those girls whom I am sure wrote in the margins of their diaries: “I wish I weren’t born a girl.” I know you have grown up now, and you will get married, but for me you are still the same pure, innocent angels, who still have “Kiss Marks from Ahura Mazda” between your eyes.  By the way, who knows if you angels were not born in pain and poverty, if you would, paper in hand, attempt to collect signatures at a feminist campaign. Or if you were not born in “God’s forgotten land,” and had you not been forced to wear that white bridal veil when you were thirteen, and say farewell to school with regret and tears in your eyes and to experience “being the weakest sex.” Oh Ahurain girls, by all means one day if you pick pennyroyal or make a bouquet out of violets, do not forget to talk about all the joy and purity of your childhood.

Oh boys of the sun’s nature, I know that you are no longer allowed to sing and laugh with your classmates, because after the tragedy of becoming men, you must struggle with the new sorrow of earning money for your families’ survival. But remember not to turn your back on your poems, songs, Leilas, and dreams. Teach your children to be children made of poems and rain for their homeland. I send you to a near future not far from tomorrow to sing the lessons of love and honesty for our homeland in the hands of wind and sun.

Comrad, Playmate, and Teacher of your Childhood,
Farzad Kamangar
Karaj Radjai-Shahr Detention Center
February 28, 2008