Natalie Yemenidjian
Esha Momeni could not understand why the women of the One Million Signatures Campaign were not closer.
So, she asked questions – a lot of questions.
She got to know you before you realized what happened.
It was a curiosity that gave the graduate student many friends at Cal State Northridge, but in Tehran, Iran on Oct. 15, it landed her behind bars.
Click. Click. Click. The left turn signal went and so did the sirens behind Esha’s car. She was pulled over by Iranian police and instantly called her father, crying.
Twenty days after she was arrested for passing a car illegally on Modarres Highway and taken to Evin Prison in northern Iran, she was charged for “propaganda against the State.”
Several women’s rights advocates in the One Million Signatures Campaign have been similarly charged.
Esha’s involvement with the campaign was the same as everyone else’s, she just happened to document some of the campaign’s women for her Master’s degree thesis requirements in mass communications at CSUN.
“The group has no hierarchy,” said Roja Bandari, UCLA Ph.D. student and member of the One Million Signatures Campaign. “There is no real leader, we are not in the business of having a revolution.”
The campaign, established June 2006 in Iran, brought the efforts of women’s rights groups together and created a goal to collect one million signatures to demand a change in discriminatory laws in Iran.
The creators of the ongoing blog for-esha.blogspot.com posted a letter from her father, Gholem-Reza Momeni on Nov. 4, the same day she was charged.
“Although you made me cry when I heard your sad voice and your outpour of tears over the phone,” began the open letter. “Inside I felt proud of my little Esha who like an exceptional champion and a historic hero will triumph over the effects of an era of injustice. This feeling gives me an inner delight and strength of a young man. This brave woman roars like a caged lion, yet she leads a great symphony, which will make the universe dance and lifts me like a light-footed angel up to the zenith of my dreams.”
This poetic expression of fatherly love was most likely influenced by the same literature Esha would get lost in as a little girl.
“She was an artist,” said someone who has known Esha all her life. “She would read all of the books in her father’s library. She loved to express herself.”
Esha is her father’s daughter. The strength she awakened in him is the same strength that brought her and her family to Iran from the states in the early ’80s, while everyone else was leaving the politically torn country.
She came back to America, where she was born in 1980, for her graduate degree at CSUN, the same school her father went to for engineering.
After being charged, the Iranian government released her on $200,000 bail. Her parents used their home as collateral.
Since publication, Esha remains charged with “propaganda against the state,” and is at home with her parents.
“We just want her to graduate with us,” Anasa Sinegal, a graduate student and a classmate of Esha’s at CSUN said at a candlelight vigil Nov. 12 for Esha in front of the Oviatt Library at CSUN. “We want her back.”
Her classmates described her as one of those people. The kind of person who walks around campus with a welcoming glow and a sincere interest in your story, said Sinegal.
Esha always pressed Bandari and the other women in the campaign to get to know each other.
“She was almost annoying about it,” Bandari joked. Esha’s plight has brought these women together now. “We know each other so much better,” Bandari said.
With the elusive heart of a poet, Esha wrote “A Different Experience” a portrait of life in Iran the summer of 2007.
In the essay, she writes: “…Behind every closed door, a young girl dressed in white is making history so that she can embrace the future with pride and honor. My grandmother everyday practices her signature, as evidence of her existence and her uniqueness. Here in Iran, I, you, and our mothers are all brides dress all in white, and with our peaceful approach we dance in the alleys from house to house so that our promise of equality and unity transforms the sounds of chains on our feet to the melodies of an anklet.” If you feel similar, and you want to witness the melodies of an anklet as Esha says, then take a look at the cute anklets found here for inspiration.
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CSUN graduate student Esha Momeni, 28, was arrested in Tehran, Iran where she was taken to Evin prison and later was charged with “propaganda against the state” for interviewing members of an Iranian women’s movement. She is now at home with her parents in Iran, but there is no telling when she will be released back to America. (Courtesy of CSUN)
