Memoirs of Devoted Female Veterans of Khuzestan

 OHWM- Zahra Sharifpoor, a public media & journalism activist whose childhood memoirs have been shaped during the Sacred Defense is trying to gather “The Memoirs of Devoted Female Veterans of Khuzestan”.
 In the years of the Sacred Defense everyone could defend the soil and water of the country in some way, men made shields of their chests before the aggressive bullets of the enemy in the frontlines of the war between good and evil, and also women with whatever in their power, with guns, sacrificing and boosting the morals of warriors, were able to pay their debt to their homeland. Understanding the fact that how women, having tenderand sensitive souls, stood before the Iraq’s aggressive assaults, maybe far beyond perception. But there were women who made sacrifices to the last drop of their blood in the very first days of Iraq’s aggression against Iran in border towns in west and south of the country for the sake of supporting and backing warriors and avoiding evacuation of their home. Many years have passed from those epic days and many memoirs have been written and published from the mouth of eye witnesses and narrators of that era. Zahra Sharifpoor whose childhood memoirs have been shaped during the Sacred Defense years, using her recent experiences in media and journalism, has become interested in gathering “The Memoirs of Devoted Female Veterans of Khuzestan”. She believes there much has been written and said about the memoirs of men warriors in the years of the Sacred Defense, but there is still so much to say and hear about the memoirs of women.
Zahra Sharifpoor presenting herself in news coverage of the Sacred Defense and journeying to the war stricken regions and returning to the childhood memoirs became interested in war memoirs: “long time ago after the suggestion of my mother I decided to increase my information about the Sacred Defense and doing some readings on it; I became more and more resolved in setting foot on the land of the Sacred Defense literature and culture”, she says about it. “Considering the fact that numerous works have been written and published about the presence of men in the imposed war, I decided to turn toward the women memoirs about Sacred Defense. Since if I just was tended to work on the memoirs of women during the war era, the range of work would have become vast, I decided to gather memoirs of women who were warriors and also wounded in the war. For reaching and investigating the memoirs of these, again I decreased the scope of work and focused on Khuzestani women. So the book I am presently writing is named: “The Memoirs of Devoted Female Veterans of Khuzestan”. These are four main features of women’s oral history in this book. “at first I thought I could easily find these people using Martyrs and Sacrificing People Affairs Organization Information Center” Sharifpoor says about finding memory tellers, “especially with this 4 main features but one of the problems I encountered facing in Martyrs Organization information was that there were women in this center who were wounded in bombardments and of course there were plenty of them. So with this approach to search and find those women who had these 4 main features that I had in mind, with cooperation of friends whose names are not mentioned here due to lack of space, I made so many frequent phone calls to numerous people and I succeeded in finding some of them.” She continues: “among women I had visited to interview, some had told their memoirs many years ago so they refused to do it for the second time. Sannie Sameri and Fereshte Oveisi were among the women who were fellow warriors with the female martyr Maryam Farahanian and had told parts of their memoirs sporadically, but had not told their memoirs independently. Also Pari Hoursi, Khadije Mirshekar, Saham Taghati, Zahra Shahidzadeh and … were also among other female veterans of Khuzestan whose memoirs I have gathered. A few of them never agreed to be interviewed.” Emphasizing that media and journalism activities had been a great help in this way for her, Sharifpoor continues: “interviewing in media is so brief and skips over the matters swiftly, but it’s not the same in gathering oral memoirs, because it takes more precision and more attention to details and all of the details uttered by the narrator should be tended to. Women, on the other hand are so emotional and sensitive, and knowing this matter was very helpful in gaining their trust. Also when we put the narrator in the proper situations which are proportionate to their memoirs in time and place, they recover the memoirs in their minds better and are able to tell them. For example some of these narrator women did not like to tell their memoirs in the presence of their friends and acquaintances, so I accompanied them to prepare the settings for them. When the narrators returned to the past in such settings and told their memoirs from the bottom of their hearts, it was as if they were completely new and fresh to them, so they were deeply touched and emotionally moved. Of course I sometimes encountered some problems; for instance it was impossible to rebuilt real place conditions of the scenes of the memoirs for a lady who resided in Khuzestan during the war but was living in another city at the time of the interview.” She adds: “I prescribed the memoirs exactly like it was uttered by the narrator in aspects of theme and content; of course, away from any kinds of exaggeration and amplification. But speaking about the quality of the work, the spoken form is precisely edited and changed to written language. I have not yet chosen a name for this work and presently and it’s passing the editing process.”
 â€œWhen I heard the memoirs I was so touched, I had lived in war-torn regions and have witnessed war scenes excruciatingly filled with anxiety, but in spite of this fact, again I was touched.” Sharifpoor added in the end, “one of the features of these memoirs was that the narrators had the same gender as me and this was a great help in the path of memoirs and I could reach great understanding of the memoirs. Also during the work I encountered other interesting and attractive subjects which every one of them has a different story in turn. After I finish this work I intend to write those stories in the form of short stories. A war has aspects beyond national; memoirs, stories photographs and … all in turn could be a true and trustworthy narrator of war. Memoirs of female veterans of Khuzestan are also a page in the memory book of our country, depicting the real events of that period.”

OHWM Correspondent: Fatemeh Noorvand
Translated by: Arash Yazdanpanah