Fereydoun Amoozadeh Khalili, a children’s author, damn me for being a children’s writer.
Fereydoun Amoozadeh Khalili, a journalist and author in the field of children and adolescents, wrote in a note in the Ham-Mihan newspaper in defense of the protesting children and adolescents who are being suppressed these days: Damn me for being a children’s writer, for being the writer of the children and adolescents of this land, who should be writing about these horrific moments but am not, cannot write, my pen has dried up like a detestable thorn in a wasteland. Damn me for supposedly being a children’s and adolescents’ writer and not being able to write your tear-filled story, my homeland’s schoolgirl, my nation’s schoolboy.
The story of the feelings of those moments when your school doors open and men whose faces and identities are unknown enter the school. Damn me for being a children’s writer and not being able to write about the moment they called you, and you first looked into the frightened yet sympathetic eyes of your classmates and then into the ashamed eyes of your teacher who avoided your gaze. Do not think of anything else, my child. Let that oblivious minister prescribe a psychology room and a correctional center for you, who chanted the most social slogan of the era, ‘Woman, Life, Freedom,’ so you might not turn into an anti-social personality. My dear sorrowful child, I believe that one day you and your friends will build a school full of hope, life, beauty, knowledge, and kindness—a school that I, this minister, and my generation could never build for you. That day is not far.