2024-04-08 20:02:13
Bolzano. Nasim means “gentle breeze”. And she was born there, where this word is almost a poem: in Iran. Even her life could have been like a light wind but no, it didn’t happen. Starting from her passion for the mountains.
In ancient Persia they are high and snow-capped and seem to still hide mysteries, the ones that a girl imagines she can pursue by climbing them and then looking at the world from up there, counting on it being better than the one down below. She goes up but then meets the gaze of the guardians of the revolution, the religious police. They tell her: look, you can’t stay here doing these things among men, you go one way and they go the other. And Nasim: “What do we do? Does the mountain divide in two?”. Like the bathrooms: separate male and female bathrooms. Except that the tops are not toilets, they are places where what happens below should be like a distant echo, spaces in which differences disappear and not only those between men and women but also issues such as wealth and poverty. Or, in particular, if you are from here or a foreigner. Everyone is at home when you start climbing and rock climbing. But no.
It is from that episode, which touches his own life passion, that Nasim Eshqui’s life changes.
Iran becomes a place to escape from while the mountains remain the place of freedom. He goes to Europe, settles for a while in Italy and then the time becomes that of the story, because his battle for a free mountain delivered also, if not above all, to women who want to be free, becomes one of his daily commitments.
He turns and tells, explains and battles. Which she becomes not only oppositional to the Ayatollah regime but fully feminist.
So much so that the book he writes about his life and his possible horizons, is entitled “I was a rock, now I am a mountain” (Garzanti), has a subtitle which is a program: “My battle for the freedom of women in Iran and in world”. Because there is no point in stopping at those tormentors that she left in her country. Even if the latter did a lot to make her escape.
Hard headed, Nasim. Forged by everything that falls around it. Starting from her childhood: she is abandoned first by her father and then by her mother and then she finds the strength to survive only in herself.
“I would have liked to be a man” he later said. For the reason that it would have been easier for her to resist and push back in Iran. But everywhere, basically. She discovers the mountain almost by accident. She walks at high altitude, she meets people who go from walking to climbing and from plateaus to rocks. She says: I felt the joy of being away from the city, in the open air. But above all to be far from the police.
The one who separates women from men with a whip. She then climbs alone and manages to open many routes, never climbed by men. Nasim Eshqui was born in 1982. It has been three years since the Shah was deposed and Kohmeini arrived in Tehran. From a secular state, Iran becomes a religious dictatorship, unleashes war against Iraq, distances itself from the West and imposes the veil on women. In these dark times, Nasim climbs his rocks, argues with the police, doesn’t tell them. And today she is the only Iranian professional mountaineer. Her story was even told in a movie.
It’s called “Climbing Iran”. And it contains, in two words, almost everything: the mountains, the climbing, his distant homeland obscured by fanaticism. The author of the docufilm is Francesca Borghetti, the same one with whom you co-wrote her book.
Nasim finally arrives in Bolzano.
It will happen to us Friday 12 April in an evening at the Municipal Theater of Gries, in the Telser gallery (8.30 pm), during which the film “Climbing Iran” will be seen but his book “I was a rock, now I am a mountain” will also be discussed.
The event was wanted and organized by the Bolzano section of the Cai, the Italian Alpine Club. In fact, to now “be a mountain”, Nasim first had to become a “rock” to resist every push of life.
Now she is one of the best climbers in the world, having opened more than 100 routes in Iran and the rest of the planet.
However, she didn’t stop at climbing. She transformed and then grafted this passion of hers – for which she had to pull out her nails – into a model of life and “politics” to tell women to persist in their battle for freedom. Of course, in Iran, where she is dramatically trampled.
But then everywhere it is questioned either through prejudice or in contexts that hinder gender equality.
2024-04-08 20:02:13