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| On the Occasion of the Death of the Self-Sacrificing Farmer: Azbarali Hajavi |
The self-sacrificing farmer was a fellow townsman of ours. But I only realized this years later, after reading about his story of heroism in school textbooks. Before that, like many people, I assumed the story of the train and the farmer was nothing more than a legend. Even his real name had been altered in the textbooks. In those days, all the celebrities I knew from the central region of Iran had a distinctly Tehran flavor and were absorbed into its culture—ranging from Los Angeles-based singers like Dariush to the superstars of 1980s cinema, all of them belonged to Tehran’s cultural geography. Their fame conveyed an idea to our generation: that success had to be sought somewhere outside our hometown, somewhere beyond our own culture.
This idea, combined with unemployment and other social problems, was enough to make us lose all attachment to our city—a city that offered no source of pride or inspiration for its residents. A city whose luminaries were outsiders and whose celebrities had never even seen it.
The lack of a joyful sense of hometown—this is perhaps the main non-material reason why people migrate from their birthplace. A sense of belonging is not created merely by being born somewhere. For a city that had the highest rates of migration, with Tehran as the main destination for migrants, any source that could inspire pride among its residents and create a joyful vision of their hometown was vital. Our local celebrities and luminaries could have played this role. They could have been symbolic assets of the city’s true culture, reflecting the authentic nature of its inhabitants. But they were deliberately silenced, leaving dozens of our villages depopulated and thousands of residents from smaller towns living in Tehran.
For those in charge, it made no difference—whether it was Habib Sahar, whose statue was only recently erected, or the self-sacrificing farmer, whose hometown we did not know for years—they were all silenced so that our generation would become enamored with the most trivial writers and the most hollow heroes.
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Azbar-Ali Hajavi, known as the “Self-Sacrificing Farmer,” was born in 1931 in a village near Mianeh, in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province. In 1961, at the age of 32, on a cold winter evening, he noticed boulders had fallen onto a railway track. To prevent an oncoming train from crashing, he ran in front of it, set his clothes on fire on a stick to signal the danger, and finally fired bullets into the air to alert the train drivers. His heroic act was later featured in the third-grade Persian textbook under the title “The Self-Sacrificing Farmer” as a model of courage and selflessness. He passed away on December 2, 2017, in Tabriz at the age of 86. |