Article
Culture
Freedom of Belief
Language
5 min read

Translating heart-languages

For two Iranian women, home and danger are often synonymous. Belle Tindall shares why they translate a defiant message.
An illustration of a woman with dark long hair looking to the right.
'Miriam'
Open Doors.

This weekend (16th September) marked the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini. Mahsa, also known as ‘Jina’, was a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was arrested by the Iranian ‘morality police’ and tragically died while being held in police custody. Her (alleged) crime was a violation of Iran’s strict dress code, as she was caught in the city of Tehran without her hair adequately covered.  

News of Mahsa’s unjust arrest and harrowing death quickly spread throughout the world, building a momentum of grief, shock, and defiance.  

Of course, we mourned the tragic loss of a precious life. A woman was lost; a daughter, a sister, a friend, a person. Mahsa’s life was taken away and we watched the world grieve as if she belonged to us all. Billions of hearts were breaking at the loss. However, accompanying such deep grief was a profound sense of rage. We were faced with the reality that women in Iran aren’t safe. On the contrary, they are in danger of arrest, violence and death – all at the hands of those who are supposed to protect, all under the guise of that which is meant to empower. In Iran, as in so many countries, a woman is simply a dangerous thing to be.  

Another people group who find themselves living in continual danger in Iran is its Christian population. In a population of 86 million, 1.2 million are believed to be Christians. With Christianity perceived as a threat to the State and an insult to Islam, Christians in Iran are often severely discriminated against. What’s more, the Human Rights charity, Open Doors, have observed that the tightening of the Penal Code in 2021, the force of which was keenly felt in the way in which protestors of Mahsa Amini’s death were so harshly dealt with, are making things increasingly difficult for Christians.  

So, to be an Iranian woman is hazardous. To be an Iranian Christin is hazardous. It therefore goes without saying that to be an Iranian woman who is also a Christian – well, such an identity comes with such difficulty, it can be hard to fathom. For such women, home and danger are often synonymous. Which is why the stories of Miriam and Stella, two Iranian women who are secretly translating the Bible into their own languages, is so astonishing.  

‘Miriam’  

Miriam is Iranian, but she also belongs to the fifty per-cent of the Iranian population who do not speak Farsi/Persian (the national language) as their first language. Azeri, Kurdish, Baluchi, Armenian Gilaki, Luri, and Arabic are all spoken throughout the country. Therefore, despite Farsi being the official language of Iran, almost half of the population aren’t fluent, while millions of Iranians are visually illiterate in the Farsi script. 

Miram, who despite it not being her first language, has learnt to speak and read Farsi to a high level, became a Christian through secretly watching online classes on Christianity. Being married into a strict Muslim family, Miriam kept her Christianity a secret from her husband. That was, until he walked in on her watching one of her classes. Despite the immense dangers she faces as a result of the minimal rights that a Christian woman holds in Iran, Miriam decided that she would be honest with her husband about her new-found Christian faith. Miriam still marvels at the unexpected response from her husband, who said,  

‘I know you are a serious-minded woman and if this is important to you, it’s OK.’ 

Out of curiosity, Miriam’s husband joined her in watching the online classes, until he too became a Christian.  

For the past three years Miriam has been secretly working on translating the Bible from Farsi into her ‘heart-language’ (for the sake of Miriam’s anonymity, she has kept her ‘heart-language’ confidential). She tells us that she is willing to take the profound risk of doing this work because, 

‘We are not allowed to study our heart languages in Iranian public schools. This is a limitation for our people. Iranian leaders use my people as political tools. I wanted to do something good for my people. I have this language specialty and experience, this expertise, so I can help my own people. People like my mother can read this book.’ 

Being the first person from her community to do such work, Miriam states that,  

‘Despite having two children and knowing that my life is at risk for believing in Jesus in Iran, I cannot even imagine leaving this work unfinished. I must complete this work and see the result.’ 

'Stella'

A woman with dark hair looks straight at us.

'Stella'

Stella is also Iranian, and also speaks a ‘heart-language’, one that is shared with even fewer people than Miriam’s.  

After tragically losing her husband in 2013, Stella had to battle her late husband’s family to keep custody of her then seven-year-old son. As the battle continued to rage on, Stella fled Iran with her son, leaving behind her entire life in order to keep hold of her child. As a refugee, Stella’s life is not without its ever-present difficulties as she is continually fighting to stay in the country that she and her son have now called home for ten years.  

Stella became a Christian twelve years ago, while she was in the middle of the fierce battle to keep hold of her son while mourning the loss of her husband. As sorrow and desperation raged around her, Stella simply knelt on her floor and spoke into the silence ‘if you are God, save me’. She has been a Christian ever since.  

Just like Miriam, Stella is secretly working to translate the Bible from Farsi into the language of her community. With tears in her eyes, she says,  

‘There is no other job that your boss is God. I love my mother language. I'm telling the poetry; I write the context. I write the sentence, I record it… I am thinking about my mum, my father, my childhood. And everyone that doesn’t have it (the Bible) right now. I really want to bring God to my town and my people.’ 

Stella can’t return home, but she is nevertheless determined to work for the spiritual well-being of those whom she was forced to leave, regardless of the immense risk. 

The heart language that both Miriam and Stella speak of, and are translating the Bible into, is the vernacular that binds their communities together in their home country of Iran. But to me, hearing these stories; the term that Miriam coined feels loaded with depth of multifaceted meaning.  

The language with which they speak of their faith is unfused with resilient hope and faith-fueled boldness. 

Their words when they speak of their home are dripping with resilient affection, obvious frustration and forgiveness.  

The way in which they speak of themselves, and their dangerous task, is undeniably defiant and astonishingly selfless. 

Article
Books
Culture
Morality
5 min read

Never Let Me Go: 20 years on

Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is the perfect Frankenstein story for today.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

Four young people peer through a window.
Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in the 2010 film adaption.
Fox Searchlight Films.

This article contains spoilers. 

Human beings are creative. For good or for evil, making new things out of raw materials is something that we can’t help doing, whether that’s writing new books, creating new recipes, or building new houses. Why are we born this way? Christians would say it’s because of the imago Dei: because according to the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, we are made in the image of God. If God created the world and every one of us, and if we’re made in his image, then it follows that all of us have this creative impulse within us, too.  

But if creating is something natural to us, does it follow that it’s also core to our identity as human beings? In other words, is making something that we do, or something that we are? Are we different from all other living creatures in this world by being creators ourselves?  

Although he doesn’t call himself a Christian, these are precisely the kind of theological questions the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asks time and time again in his books. And nowhere does he ask them more powerfully than in Never Let Me Go, which was published 20 years ago. 

Never Let Me Go starts off as the story of three children at a boarding school. Kathy, one of three friends, serves as our first-person narrator; it’s through her eyes that we slowly realise something sinister is taking place. As Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow into teenagers and then young adults, it’s finally revealed that they are clones, brought into being thanks to advancements in cloning technology in a dystopian post-World War II Britain. They are brought up for the sole purpose of being organ donors. Or, to put it more bluntly, they’ve been raised for slaughter.  

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy have a happy childhood at their boarding school, Hailsham. Their future is hinted at by their teachers, but they’re largely shielded from the truth. All around the country, we later find out, clone children are being raised in horrific conditions. But Hailsham is different, because its Headteacher, Miss Emily, is part of a group that believes the clones deserve to be treated humanely – at least until someone needs a kidney transplant.  

But, though treated in a ‘humane’ way, society doesn’t see the Hailsham clones as ‘human’, and that’s precisely what Miss Emily is trying to prove: that they are not unlike real, normal people. So, she encourages the children to make art. ‘A lot of the time’, Kathy tells us, ‘how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at “creating”’. The children don’t understand why they must always paint and draw, but they’re told that Madame Marie-Claude, a mysterious figure, will collect their best artworks for a seemingly important ‘gallery’.  

Years later, Tommy and Kathy have become a couple. Before dying – or ‘completing’, as they call it – after her second ‘donation’, Ruth tells them that she believes a deferral is possible for couples that are truly in love. Kathy and Tommy go to Miss Emily’s house, their former Headmistress, certain that, as children, they were encouraged to produce art precisely to be able to prove, one day, their true feelings.  

They are quickly disappointed. Miss Emily reveals that Hailsham has now closed down, but that while the school stood, it was meant as an experiment, aimed at convincing the public to improve living conditions for the clones: 

‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all…we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any human being.’ 

Equating creativity with human identity does make sense, to an extent at least. In The Mind of the Maker (1941), Christian novelist and critic Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the closest we can get to understanding God as our Creator is through engaging ourselves in creative acts: ‘the experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation’. In creative acts, from a Christian perspective, we partially grasp God’s creation of us.  

Ultimately, however, being creative in imitation of God, is not enough to get to the very core of what defines a human being. There are all kinds of factors, from old age to mental or physical disability, that make any form of traditionally creative act highly unlikely for some people. By that definition, someone in a coma or a newborn baby is not fully human. 

That’s exactly the definition of humanity that underpins the cruel society of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. We need a better definition, and Christianity provides a unique tradition to help us on the way. A Christian concept of the human person is one that looks both at why we were made, and what we were made for. Christians believe that God made us out of love, and for the purpose of being in communion with him. He made each one of us as a special and irreplaceable individual, and for each of us our telos – the end or aim of our life – is to join him in heaven.  

If we embrace this definition of what it means to be human, then the extent to which we are able to express our intelligence or creativity while on earth doesn’t really matter anymore. If we believe that merely to exist is good – not to exist and fulfil our potential through this or that accomplishment, but just to exist – then we can’t deny that each member of the human family is, in fact, a ‘person’ in the fullest sense of the word.  

It is precisely this God-shaped hole that makes the concept of human dignity so fragile and slippery in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is, ultimately, the perfect Frankenstein story for the modern day. It warns us about the consequences of what might happen if we try to treat other human beings as things we have paid, but even more powerfully it shows us the danger of valuing human life for its creativity, instead of loving it as the creation of God. 

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.
If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.
Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief