Prisoner Of Tehran: A Memoir, by Marina Nemat

As a high school student who had been somewhat deeply concerned about the failures of education with regards to textbooks and supplies during the course of my own time in high school, this book provided me with a bit of a chill. The inciting incident of this book was the author having protested about education shortcomings at her high school in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, for which she found herself jailed in the notorious Evin prison for a couple of years. To say that this was a traumatic experience of her is extremely understating matters. The author, to her credit, does not shy away from an honest portrayal of how she feels about her time in Evin prison and the time after her release when she nevertheless felt like a prisoner of her experiences. This feeling that she had not totally escaped from her imprisonment even after being released was indicated by the fact that the authorities in Iran still were interested in hearing about her and in talking to her about the actions of hers that they viewed as being troublesome or even treasonous–such as her marriage to her Christian husband Andre after having (under coercion) converted to Islam. The life that the author portrays here is definitely a hard one, marked by a great deal of sorrow.

Although this is a fantastic memoir, there are a couple of quibbles that I have with it. These do not affect my own appreciation of the author’s work, but they do help to put it in a bit of a context that I hope will be helpful to other readers. It is perhaps understandable, given the nature of this book and its contents as a prison memoir, that the narrative we get is highly fragmentary. This is not a book that is organized in a simple and chronological manner, and the author skips forward and backward, as if she is trying to make this book as a mosaic of the shards of her shattered and deeply traumatic memories rather than a flowing and properly ordered narrative. It is only after the author accounts her life after prison that the book has a pretty standard narrative–though even this account is filled with its moments of trauma and danger, including her accounts of continued investigations into her behavior as well as the problems she had giving birth to her son, who had a somewhat enlarged head but no health problems, which forced a caesarian section. The other, more substantial problem, is a more troublesome one, and it is not so much based on the book itself but how it is presented. The back cover material of this book presents the author as giving the gift of forgiveness to her former in-laws, the parents of her prison husband Ali, as well as to her first husband, who was also one of the prison guards at Evin before falling prey to the internecine violence of the early post-revolutionary period, likely because of the secrets he knew about what was going on at the prison. From what I could see, though, the author gives a considerable (and praiseworthy) amount of praise to her former in-laws for the way that they treated her with respect and helped as best as they could to protect her from trouble despite the fact that they found her a less than ideal daughter-in-law by virtue of her religion and status as a political prisoner. It is, of course, perfect acceptable to give the gift of forgiveness as well as appreciation, but the book’s back cover material, implying that the author needed to forgive the family of her former in-laws, represents a rather selfish view that the author herself (hopefully) does not have.

Given all of this, the contents of this book read surprisingly well given their dark and fragmentary fashion. The author portrays, in numbered chapters that fill up 300 pages or so of writing, her own childhood as the descendant of a Russian Orthodox family that wore their faith somewhat lightly, and whose efforts to rise within society were endangered by violence as well as the effects of the Russian revolution and its aftermath. The author discusses her experiences with young love and with political protests during the dangerous times at the end of the Shah’s reign as well as the beginning part of the Islamic Republic period. Between discussing her harrowing experiences in dealing with torture and deprivation in prison, not only physical but psychological torture, she talks about her experiences as a student in a school that becomes increasingly hostile to her identity as an independent-minded Christian girl. Her budding romance with Andre, a pianist at the local Catholic church, is interrupted by her imprisonment, and some of her friends and classmates find themselves killed by the regime for their political behavior. Meanwhile, the author also shows the awkward courtship and marriage that she had with the prison guard Ali, where she was married but remained as a privileged prisoner (one of several like her, the author intimates), where she becomes pregnant but suffers a miscarriage even as her sister-in-law is able to give birth after years of fertility problems. After being widowed she finds herself enduring the hardships of prison until she is released, returns to live with her family, marries Andre, and finds herself living in remote Sistan and Baluchistan while he pursues a career as a provincial academic before they are able to flee abroad to Canada to seek a life of freedom.