“Today I dropped off three Iranian friends at the train station in Marseille. I have been living there for three years. Today is Friday, February 3, 2023, it's sunny, it's ... warm. We spent the morning in their flat. It's on a hill and has such a view over Marseille that you can see the sunrise and sunset without changing your seat. The three of them live there in the light. They have a new coffee machine, they even have the milk beater. 

This is a heavenly vision if you don't know that their nights are haunted by the exactions of the Islamic State. 19,000 people have disappeared or been imprisoned since the beginning of the Revolution, and all of them are lodged in the heads of my three friends. If you don't know that this computer on this clean, tidy, orderly desk is receiving live videos of hangings by crane, of blood rocks, since September. Their suffering, guilt, pain of being far away, of being stuck here. If one does not know that this whole flat is filled with hope, hope, hope of being in Tehran next year. If you don't hear my head telling me that I hope it won't be like "Next year in Jerusalem". The fear of never getting up again if this Revolution does not succeed. Chowra who buried her mother who died in the state prisons; Darya who walked in the dark at the age of 10 when her parents, revolutionary, prohibited to go back in their country, living in France, thought they would never rise from the fallen hope of 2009; Rezvan whose story I don't even dare ask. I leave them at the station, they leave, waving and laughing among themselves. Their life has been put on hold to devote themselves to the full support of the Revolution - from here. They are going to Paris to give a conference.

Today is the fourth time in a week that I drop off friends at the train station - I stay with them until the end and then I leave alone, I am very melancholic when I leave the building but suddenly at the top of the mythical stairs that go down to the city, it's as if my world expands, that I am alone in this city, that it belongs to me, that I am totally free. I go down further and further into the city, the station area is the poorest and the darkest of Marseille and of Europe. I know these streets by heart and I waltz through the alleys, through the twists and turns to go back home without thinking. Then I come across the library, a new space that extends beyond the narrow streets, it calls to me, I go in. I am free. I have almost nothing in my bag, in the library there is an exhibition on birds, many birds have been hung from the ceiling as if they were flying in the Great Hall, it is very beautiful. As I get closer I realise that they are vultures. I go up to the second floor, full of books, I don't want anything that will lock me in for long, I go to the poetry. I look at the selection of the librarians of the only library in Marseille, I take the only book written by women, I can't stand reading men anymore. I take Beat Attitude, Women poets of the Beat Generation on my table. I who likes to read classics and who before reading moderns wants to have read everything since antiquity, I want to be free. I read in English; first poem is calm, pleasant. Second poem, a word jumps out at me and rips my face off, STROKE. I see Hugo clutching my throat again, I feel my soft cushion oppressing my face. Hugo who made me run away to this port where I want to be free. Then I think to myself that my little French brain must have confused Stroke with choke. As this word, stroke, still hits me, I go to look at the translation, I see the word "caress". I look for the word on the computers of the library and I discover this word has a meaning sometimes so violent and sometimes so soft. Sometimes so precise and sometimes a meaning that seems to be thrown to you in the face. I realise that it is exactly like this sweet love that almost killed me, like these three peaceful women who can be seen as lucky to be far from Tehran in a sun-drenched flat but who are bruised by the violence of this state in their mind, like these dark and poor streets in this district that is called the Golden Virgin and where I am randomly looking for my freedom.

Like this ink stamp that Darya gave me because it reminded her of me, a naked woman with her head and hands in armour.

Here [In the image below] are all the meanings of Stroke in the Cambridge dictionary…”

- Violette d’Urso