Freedom

Winning a prize in prison. How does that make or break you?

I remember studying for exams. I wanted to get to that university to study Environmental Science so badly. It was a subject I loved, but more than anything I was wise enough, luckily, at the age of seventeen, to know that education was my ticket. A ticket to a new life. To a life I could call my own. I remember looking up and out of my bedroom window at that vast, beautiful, tempting blue sky. It was so much easier to study when the rain ran down the windowpane and everything was grey.

But I learnt sometimes you must work and not play.

I remember walking into our local sweet shop when I was small, in the days when everything was weighed into paper bags, and having to choose just one from all those huge, marvellous, shiny jars of sweets. I remember walking back with the sweets in my pocket as the paper bag creased and softened on the walk home.

But I learnt you have to choose and you can’t have it all.

I remember travelling to a concert with my dad and the city orchestra playing live for the radio and being asked not to talk or cough and my uncle singing a solo half way through Berlioz Requiem. I remember going to the ladies alone in the interval, I was probably only eight, surrounded by all these glamorous women in colourful, long, glittering dresses. A fish out of water. I remember going backstage and meeting the singers in tuxedos signing my autograph book. I still revisit all that sparkle.

But I learnt that sparkle doesn’t last for ever.

I remember watching my sister opening her presents on her birthday and learning the patience to wait.

I learnt to accept it was her day and not mine.

And all these other things we are constantly learning of course make us who we are.

This week I have spent hours on the final, final version of my book. Out of 5000 photographs I have now 108 pages and the definitive lines. They must be ready, tucked in a file for Monday and that is it. You can spend months on something and never regard it as finished.

But you learn to draw a line.

And all this, I know, is simple, it’s nothing, apart from making me who I am.

And I was wondering, at the end of last week, when the news headlines spoke of Nobel Peace (before the news began to scream of even more terror and how deeply ingrained hate drives this world), I was wondering, yes, I was wondering how it feels to win a Nobel Peace Prize while you are in prison.

In prison, for thinking what you think, for being all that made you, for believing in nothing more and nothing less than your right to freedom. How does Narges Mohammadi feel to accept her prize for peace while she stares at grey, concrete prison walls, for thirty long years? For sure she knows the famous quote Martin Luther King wrote from prison,

‘Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.’

How does it feel when she looks out the window at that blue sky? If she has a window at all.

Freedom is only simple if you have it.

I hope she gains strength from other’s inspiration.

And I was thinking, how does it feel to have your mum in the news in the name of peace when she is denied her freedom for believing in freedom?

How does this make you, you?

This kind of suffering is on a scale I cannot imagen.

There’s a lot of suffering I can’t imagen.

Freedom is simple, when you have it, by Pipp.