How poetry - and a fashion house - is helping to stop violence against women

Sydney University academic Dr Saba Vasefi fondly remembers the pomegranate-filled garden of her Iranian childhood home as a sanctuary where she and the female members of her family and their friends could dance, recite poems, swim in the pool and even drink alcohol illegally.

“Our family oasis metamorphosed into a gathering place for distinguished writers, thinkers and artistic friends. As a little girl, this sanctuary shielded me from our fundamentalist oppressors so that my earliest memories are full of maternal figures of resistance,” Vasefi said.

Writers in Resistance in Carla Zampatti designs from left to right: Ghazal Asgari, Ghazaleh Jamshidpour, Sahar Gh, Saba Vasefi, Golestan Hatami, and Khatereh Nazari. Credit: Louie Douvis

With this image as inspiration, in 2021 the journalist, poet and media academic started a writing program for fellow Iranian women who had been held in detention in Australia during the offshore processing regime on Nauru.

As a refugee forced to flee Iran in 2010 because of her work with women there on death row, Vasefi arrived in Australia with only a red suitcase in one hand and her 10-year-old daughter in the other. She could relate to these women’s feelings of displacement and wanted to help those fleeing gender-based violence find their voice to speak out against it.

She set up Writers in Resistance, a platform for refugee women and girls to write and perform poems in collaboration with Red Room Poetry, a non-profit in Zetland which aims to elevate the art of poetry.

It is a literary form with which all the Iranian women were familiar, as Persia has produced poets for centuries, from Rumu in the 12th century through to fellow Iranian detainee on Manus Island, award-winning writer Behrouz Boochani.

After writing workshops in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre and out in nature, Vasefi translated the poems from Farsi to English, and an anthology of the work of five Iranian refugees has been published by Red Room Poetry.

Vasefi’s report on the gendered harms of detention won the 2016 Premier’s Multicultural Communications Awards, and as a finalist in the same awards earlier this year she met Alex Schuman, the CEO of fashion house Carla Zampatti.

He was so impressed with Vasefi and the Iranian women’s stories, the Carla Zampatti Foundation offered them designs from their spring 2023 collection to wear while performing their poetry at recent events at both the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

“My sisters and I are passionate supporters of women’s empowerment, creative expression and Australia’s multicultural success. It was deeply moving to hear from these women. We feel their pain and support their struggle,” Schuman said.

This weekend as part of the United Nation’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, which marks the launch of a 16-day global campaign to highlight the need to end violence against women and girls, Vasefi will work with a new set of refugee women.

“A woman who can write is a person who can think, and no one can crush a woman who writes. It is an empowering way to help end gender-based violence,” said Vasefi, whose work is the subject of an upcoming BBC documentary.

She points to her Iranian mentees as proof of the power of poetry. Shrouded Scars: A Child Concealed, a poem by 21-year-old refugee Khatereh Nazari, is about her youth in Australian-run offshore detention in Nauru.

She was 10 years old when she fled Iran, along with her single mother and older sister. Despite the significant gaps and disruptions caused by her time in immigration detention centres, Nazari was able to successfully complete her HSC in 2020, after being evacuated to Australia in 2018.

“My skin is now a canvas of survival, Dear oppressor, will you dare to listen, What have you done to a little girl’s life?” she writes.

Golestan Hatami, a 43-year-old Kurdish refugee fled persecution from the Islamic Republic in Iran, arriving by boat to Australia in 2013. She was evacuated from Nauru to mainland Australia in 2018 for an abortion due to the deterioration of her mental health in offshore detention. Her poem Miscarriage of Injustice is a reflection on child loss, trauma on Nauru and living under suicide watch.

“It was a miracle that I survived physically, let alone psychologically. Only writing is safe and soothing,” Hatami said.

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