Umberto Baldo
On April 25, after reading a piece of news, I felt the urgent need to post my reflection on a social network.
The news in question was that of the death sentence of a young musician, Toomaj Salehi, the most famous rapper of Iran’s Ayatollahs.
And in the post I wrote that I would have liked it if during one of the many demonstrations for April 25th, the Day of Liberation from Barbarism and Oppression, there had been at least some voices protesting this ignoble sentence.
Not only for the sentence inflicted, but above all for the crime that underlies it: “CORRUPTION ON EARTH”.
I purposely wrote the charge for which Toomaj risks being hanged in capital letters, because only a Theocracy can foresee a crime of this type.
But why so much fury against this boy, persecuted by the regime for many years?
For the simple reason that over the years hers has become the “voice of the Revolution”, in particular that of “Generation Z”, that of Iranian girls and boys.
In the bonnets of the veilless girls of Tehran – but also of Mashhad and Isfahan – pass words like «Their crime is dancing with their hair in the wind/Courage was their crime/the courage to denounce your 44 years of government ”.
These are the words of Tooìmaj’s songs, which is why he scares the regime.
Because he speaks a language, rap, that the ayatollahs not only don’t understand, but fear.
His millions of followers, who sing his rhymes by heart, and who support his courage from all over the world, are scary.
Toomaj is 33 years old and comes from a village in the province of Khuzestan, from a family of dissidents who had already known prison.
He probably didn’t imagine that he would become the leading voice of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution when, in 2017, he started uploading videos on YouTube in which he looked into the camera, into the eyes of Ali Khamenei and his followers, challenging them with rhythmic poems, which they immediately transformed into resistance songs.
I know that for us and for our children it is difficult to even imagine that in Iran we live in a climate of dark terror, which emerges from the shocking stories of Iranian human rights organizations, which speak of arrests of journalists and activists for freedom of expression, left to die in atrocious suffering behind bars.
It is difficult to even imagine the horror experienced in the terrifying Iranian prisons, where protesters and dissidents are systematically brutally tortured during detention.
These tortures consist mainly of sexual violence, and many protesters bleed to death, as happened to the young Armita Abbasi, 21 years old, arrested for demonstrating, raped in prison, and then hospitalized for rectal bleeding.
She was then abducted from the hospital by paramilitary forces to conceal the rape she had suffered.
The same happened to Nika Shakarami, a 17-year-old girl, with a very sweet appearance and full of vitality, kidnapped by the Pasdaran, raped for days and brutally killed in Tehran because she had performed singing with her head uncovered during a demonstration of high school students in remembrance. by Mahsa Amini. After a week, her body was found on the outskirts of Tehran with a broken nose and fractured skull from multiple beatings, and with clear signs of rape.
It should be underlined that sexual violence is also systematically practiced on men.
It is therefore not surprising if the songs of Toomaj (for whom the revolution Donna, Vita, Libertà is a “roar of a thousand angers and the expression of the revolutionary roots of Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmens, Mazni, Sistani, Baluchis, Talesh, tat, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Gilak, Lur, Persians, Qashqai. Iran is a collection of rivers”) for the “black urban dwellers” they are like vinegar poured on a wound.
For the cutthroats who lead the Islamic Republic, this type of message is completely new and disruptive.
Above all because it is a message that is uniting center and periphery with very eloquent slogans: “Kurds, Baluchis, Baha’ís, Azerbaijanis, Bakhtiars, freedom and equality” and the motto “Woman, Life, Freedom” is equivalent to claiming “Democracy, secularism , civil rights and minority rights”.
And there are many oppressed minorities in Iran, starting with the Kurds.
“Have you not noticed how cruelly your guards beat women?/Maybe you are terrified of Iranian mothers/It is the gods who create people like me/You are the enemy of humanity and I am your enemy”; these are some verses of “Faal”, which in Italian we could translate as “destiny”, written and sung by Toomaj.
It is evident that it is precisely this character of the children’s revolution, the one that comes through the words of the songs, which the young people sing, listen to, and spread, which has literally driven the regime crazy, also grappling with a terrible internal economic crisis, and with the distant clash with Israel.
We had already seen it.
Toomaj is not the first musician to end up under the meat grinder of the Islamic morality police. This also happened to Shervin Hajipour, another Iranian singer, arrested after publishing a song which also became an anthem of the protests against repression in Iran,arising from the death of Mahsa Amini. The song is a collage of tweets written by supporters of freedom in Iran, published under the hashtag that went viral after the death of the Kurdish girl. It’s called: “Baraye…” – “Per…”, and you can find it online (listen to it, I recommend it).
From what transpires, the Iranian regime, despite the terror and atrocities, finds it very difficult to enforce compliance with the hateful dress code; women are willing to sacrifice their lives to defend their dignity and freedom, and leave home with their hair flying in the wind, even knowing that they may never return and be arrested, tortured or raped.
In conclusion, looking at history we can see that music and singing often represent the outlet of an oppressed people.
Giuseppe Verdi, for example, understood this well when he offered the Italians of the Risorgimento the “Và pensiero” in which the Nabucco Chorus sings “O mia Patria si bella e perduta…” to the “joy” of the Austrian occupiers.
And even more so were the “Work Song” and the “Blues”, the musical forms in which black Americans took refuge during slavery.
In reality, music, upon closer inspection, always represents a people, but in certain particular moments it bares its soul.
I think that a regime that is afraid of songs has reached a point of no return, at the end of the line.
And so I fervently hope that the death sentence of Toomaj Salehi for “Corruption on Earth” represents the ringing of the final bell for the Ayatollahs.
Umberto Baldo
