Fragment of Behjat Sadr’s notes
October 1983Extract from the publication Behjat Sadr. Traces, Paris, Zamân Books, 2014.

Notebooks are my mirrors

Inside that mirror, I see
My cheerful face of yesterday,
My clenched teeth of this morning,
And my eyes heavy with pain in the evening.
I observe them inside my notebooks.
The lines are the echoes of my voice,
Which crashes against the heavy wall of my loneliness,
And whirls between it and me.
The silence of my cry is illegible on this white wall of loneliness
I trace these illegible lines, in the mirror of my notebooks