Beneath
the Narcissus is
an autobiographical account of my experience as a political prisoner for eight
years (1982 – 1990) under the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It begins a year before my arrest, when the
regime was beginning to crack down hard on any opposition and mass executions
were taking place. As a young woman of
23 I had already been active for two years organising workers to fight for
their rights. My arrest took place in broad daylight on a Teheran street, when
I was intercepted on my way to meet my political associate. From then on I
entered a nightmare world from which I was to emerge eight years later scarred
both physically and mentally. Initially sentenced for execution, I was to be
incarcerated in four different prisons, throughout that time. Through family
pressure my sentence was eventually commuted to ten years, of which I served
eight. Three years after my release, I made the reluctant decision to flee my
country since I continued to be under harsh surveillance, and friends were
being re-arrested.
The book moves forward
chronologically starting with the shock of arrival in prison where I am placed
in a corridor with other women, all blindfolded, confined to a square of black
blanket, their feet swollen and bleeding from beatings. I am interrogated and
tortured and give false information to play for time. More severe torture after
this leads to paralysis of my lower body. I am placed in solitary confinement
where I am horrified at the bloodstained walls. I learn that the cell was
inhabited by a pregnant woman who lost her baby there. My spirits however are
raised when I am joined by two women. One of them has her four year old son
with her. The shock of meeting such small children in prison is compounded by
the relief and pleasure I get from playing with this little boy. Our relative
happiness at finding each other is shattered when we are joined by a fourth
woman, who is one of the prison’s notorious ‘penitents’. These are prisoners
who have been broken under torture and forced to recant and become ‘born-again’
Muslims. They are used by the prison
authorities to spy on the prison population - in effect a fifth column. The
fear and distrust created by the exploitation of these penitent prisoners is an
important theme of the book, which goes on to show how difficult it was for the
female prison population to build mutual support since friendships were
actively discouraged. The book illustrates the prison regime’s primary aim of
breaking prisoners not just through physical torture but through the
psychological torture of isolation and fear, fear of each other as well of the
prison authorities.
The main thrust of the book
concerns relationships between the women prisoners, who were both brought
together and divided by their shared experience. Factionalism and the pressure
of turncoat prisoners sowed seeds of distrust, mitigating against the natural
solidarity of women in prison. There are
a number of episodes in the book illustrating this, where I describe my
struggle to be true to myself and my political beliefs without losing my
humanity. The books shows how prisoners need to hang on to their political
identities as a way of surviving, and how this can lead them into conflict with
fellow prisoners with different convictions and priorities. One example of this is my refusal to join a
protest over the right to wear colored chadors. Since we are against the whole
idea of wearing chadors in the first place, but are compelled by the
authorities to do so, whenever we have contact with males, it seems ridiculous
to me to negotiate for colored as opposed to black chadors. Fierce arguments
erupt over political attitudes to every aspect of our difficult life in prison.
On the positive side I show the
importance of friendship between prisoners, as an aid to survival. Letters and messages are passed secretly
between myself and others. We have many secret ‘post-boxes’, one of them being
the flowerbed in our recreation yard. Friends bury tightly scrolled up letters
beneath plants, with colored cotton threads attached that peep out of the soil
to indicate their whereabouts. I always bury mine beneath a narcissus or a
typical Iranian flowering bush, called in English, the “marvel-of-Peru”. In our difficult circumstances we help each
other as much as we can. A baby is born to one of our cellmates and we all try
and help her with clothes and bedding for the new born baby and in tending him
when his mother is too weak. I ask my parents to bring in soft cotton material
disguised as skirts for myself, to use as baby sheets. Towards the end of my prison experience,
when I am close to death from a stomach ulcer, a group of friends actually
saves my life – watching over me constantly as I threaten to lose
consciousness, and dripping honey onto my tongue to give me some strength as I
can no longer eat.
Another source of survival is any
contact we manage to have with the outside world. I describe visits from our
families, which we are sometimes allowed and sometimes denied - the poignancy
of speaking to one's parents through a glass wall, over a telephone, with the
threat of being cut off at any moment if anything politically sensitive is
mentioned, of hearing one’s mother begging one to confess in order to be
released, or seeing one’s proud father cry. Other contact with the outside
world comes through books that have either been smuggled from the store of
confiscated goods from new arrivals or borrowed from prison libraries. We
devour any literature we can get our hands on that can feed our minds and
spirits – Brecht is one of our favourites. We copy out whole books and pass
them on in secret. We have no access to radio, but the heavily censored
government newspapers are available for us, unless we are under punishment. The
televisions in or rooms and on our wings are there for propaganda purposes and
give us little or distorted access to the world outside. When public
'confessions' of prisoners are broadcast, we are compelled to watch them.
Desperate for news from outside Iran, a friend and I write to friends in
Europe. We never receive a reply. Our
only hope comes when we hear there is to be a visit from the head of a UN Human
Rights Commission. The night before, we debate the risks of trying to make
contact with him. The following morning we wake to discover a wall has been
erected overnight, blocking off our corridor. The prison authorities are taking
no chances. He comes twice more, the last time coinciding with the day of my
release. His interception has resulted in my and other prisoners’ early
release.
The book depicts the day-to-day
life of women political prisoners, their sleeping, eating and washing
arrangements, the difficulty of privacy and of maintaining a sense of identity.
It also offers an informal study of the psychological effect of prison on a
female population, with observations on and conversations between a core of
women I was in close contact with. As such it is not only about my struggle to
survive these difficult years but an account of women’s experience in prison, a
subject that has not been much written about.
The book closes with a brief
account of my life in Iran after my release and the difficulty of picking up
the threads of normal life again. I
describe how, after my arrival in this country with my story still locked
inside me, I continued to suffer from nightmares. These are gradually eased as
I begin to release my story in the context of psychotherapy and testimonial
writing at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Telling and
then writing my story and remaining politically active in defiance of what was
inflicted on me has been of enormous importance in reconstructing and making
sense of my life.