These vigorous younger generations care nothing for the Islamic Republic’s 43-year history of grand designs, broken promises and bloody wars. Little wonder this vile regime cannot comprehend it. The uprising has no leaders, organisation or manifesto other than “Women, life, liberty” – a slogan signalling collective commitment to human rights, free expression and democratic self-determination.
While most seem to be led by young women and schoolgirls, backed by young men, a wide range of ages, ethnic groups and social classes is represented.
Yet today’s ongoing nationwide protests, defying brutal crackdowns, are unusual in several respects. Is this the fate now awaiting the young women of Iran who have bravely taken the lead in challenging the latest lethal excesses of Tehran’s morally bankrupt regime? Like other countries, Iran’s 1979 revolution vanquished a tyrant, only to have another take his place. The people rise up, the people are crushed – and the western democracies, crying foul, eventually accept the new-old reality. Just look at the Arab spring “revolutions” in Syria and Egypt. It’s a pattern that repeats with dismaying frequency around the world.
Its boss, General Min Aung Hlaing, stands accused of overseeing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority – but has got off scot-free so far. Reynolds returned to poetry with Long Way Down (2017), a novel in verse which was named a Newbery Honor book, a Printz Honor Book, and best young adult work by the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Awards.In Myanmar, the army launched a coup last year, replacing elected politicians with a military junta. He focused on poetry for approximately the next two decades, only reading a novel cover to cover for the first time at age 17 and publishing several poetry collections before he published his own first novel, When I Was The Greatest, in 2014. He won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent for this first work of prose and seven more novels followed in the next four years, including Ghost (2016) and two more books in what became his New York Times best-selling Track series, Patina (2017) and Sunny (2018) As Brave As You (2016), winner of the 2016 Kirkus Prize, the 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Youth/Teen, and the 2017 Schneider Family Book Award and a Marvel Comics novel called Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2017). Born in Washington, DC and raised in neighboring Oxon Hill, Maryland, Reynolds found inspiration in rap to begin writing poetry at nine years old.
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