Talking with different people gives me the attitude of thinking that this is the earth’s planet, and you can choose places to visit and then your final destination
Mitra is an energetic and passionate woman, a teacher, student, tennis and football player. She loves learning and challenging herself in always new activities and sports and her routine could make one think whether her day is of 24 hours or if she found the way to double them. She comes from the North of Iran. When she was a teenager, she moved to the province of Mazandaran where both the climate and the panorama are like Turin’s one, a city she likes a lot in which she lives now. On the contrary, Teheran’s atmosphere is very different and reflects that of a capital with pressure, stress and pollution in the air. Mitra knows the city’s atmosphere as she lived there many years both for her studies and job.
She completed her first master’s degree in Iran almost ten years ago, together with many other certifications in different fields, and since then she worked at the university as a teacher of Farsi and as an examiner of the SAMFA exam, the only official Persian test approved by both Iranian and non-Iranian universities and companies. Mitra excitedly explains that Farsi does not have feminine and masculine pronouns or articles, it is genderless but, this interesting aspect, remains confined in the language. Her account highlights the influence of Iran’s Islamic and theocratic system on the daily lives of women, particularly in public settings and institutions. Women are expected to adhere to specific dress codes, including wearing the hijab, covering their arms, and putting on the manto – a long robe over regular clothing. As a teacher, she also had to forgo nail polish. Additionally, there are guidelines on how women interact with men, such as refraining from laughing loudly or making jokes in formal situations. Failure to observe these norms might lead to being reported to the department head.
Like many Iranian girls, Mitra grew up accustomed to the moral code. As a teenager, she enjoyed playing karate on a team and later on, tennis. On the tennis courts, girls had to cover their legs with both leggings and skirts and their arms from elbow to wrist, regardless of the season. While this made playing tennis more challenging, not following these rules could have led to the camp’s closure. In Iran, there is a common belief that “keeping your hijab tight” protects women from unwanted attention or harm. However, even women who wear the chador—a full-body black cloak—can experience discomfort in public spaces, such as in taxis or on the street. Additionally, if a woman’s hijab slips while driving, it can be caught on camera, potentially leading to her arrest, the confiscation of her car, and a fine to retrieve it.
“Why should a woman cover all aspects of herself, and at the same time be worried about herself?”
Nowadays, there is a global debate going on against the blame put on women’s way of dressing as a justification of men’s violence and abuses, and it is automatic to doubt whether a piece of cloth could really protect them. Moreover, the importance that men’s actions and words have over women, the confinement and definition of also their names by their fathers or husbands make Iranian women feel frustrated and choked.
At the same time, Iran is also “the country of history, of culture(s), of ancient Persia, of “Mithraism” from where her name comes from that means kindness, affection. It is also a country of resources. People have always had a cheap access to gas, electricity, water, food but today, the poor economy, the rate of inflation, the value of the Iranian Riyal compared to the euro, the sanctions, the high unemployment rate, the lack of opportunities and nepotism is affecting people practically and mentally. Mitra would have remained in Iran if she found the opportunity she was looking for with all the degrees and certifications she has, but she did not find any.
“This is the time that I need to leave my country, because of the time I’m spending running and getting nothing. It could be better to try another option and see if I could find a new world to make it, or not”.
She is now doing in Turin her second master in “Language Technologies and Digital Humanities” a very interesting and new field to her as it is the blending of linguistics and machine learning. She loves this interdisciplinarity, the study and understanding of how the Artificial Intelligence (AI) works and how it can be applied together with the NLP – Natural Language Processing – world, the set of techniques that enable computers to understand and process the human language. She did not have previous experience on these topics, and she is now learning how to deal with Python programming and taking an online course on how to work on different websites. She thinks that in Italy she has a great opportunity to study AI and progressively understand the path of research. In Geneva, during a conference, she had the opportunity to comprehend where this is internationally going and to figure out all that she still has to discover about it.
In parallel to being a student, Mitra keeps on being a teacher of Farsi. She teaches it to both American and Canadian students online and she likes adding some sociocultural background in her lessons explaining when some clauses are used together with proverbs and idiomatic expressions. The lessons keep her motivated together with the possibility to talk to so many different people.
“Talking with different people gives me the attitude of thinking that this is the earth’s planet, and you can choose places to visit and then your final destination”.
In Italy, of course, she immediately looked for a tennis court to play tennis in a comfortable way and she started playing football in a women’s team. During a match, she was also part of a documentary filmed by the Italian RAI channel about Iranian girls playing sports. With some of the girls of the team, she goes running three times a week at 7 am to get ready for Turin’s half marathon. It is hard, she hates running, but she thinks that “it is good for mental health, to be more focused, and to be in control of your thoughts. A sort of meditation to face difficulties”.
There are some unconscious advantages in being born in a western country in terms of safety and freedom. It is like a relief to change clothes when you want to, to wear what you prefer and to expose your body just to express your right to do it. On the contrary, it is in the west that men understand that they cannot freely interfere in a girl’s life, and it seems that “Italian girls have more power than Persian boys”. In Iran, mixed public places like pools do not exist, these are forbidden, and here many Persian girls do not feel at ease in wearing a bikini in front of men.
According to Mitra, since you cannot choose where you are born, you can decide how to live, the community to speak to based on your principles and whether to carry some cultural habits of your country with you. But,
