1974: Shahrnush Parsipur

1974

Shahrnush Parsipur - Iran

Imprisoned

Shahrnush Parsipur was born in Tehran in February 1946. The author of eleven novels, she began to write when she was sixteen and, while studying at the University of Tehran, had several short stories published including The Little Red Bull and Heat of Year Zero. She graduated from the University of Tehran in 1973 and worked as a producer on National Iranian TV.

Shahrnush Parsipur's first novel, The Dog and the Long Winter, was published in 1974. However, following the torture and execution of two Iranian journalists and poets by the Iranian intelligence services she resigned her position with the TV channel in protest and was arrested and imprisoned for fifty-nine days.

After her release she moved to France where she wrote her second novel, Plain and Small Adventures of the Spirit of the Tree, which was published in 1977.

Parsipur returned to Iran in 1980, a year after the Islamic revolution, and was arrested and incarcerated for four and a half years without trial or charge. After her release she continued to write and her novel Women Without Men was published in 1989. Described as "stark and bold" the book delineates the lives of five contemporary Iranian women, including a teacher, a housewife and a prostitute, who come to live together in a garden in Tehran. Its frank depiction of women's sexuality led to her re-arrest and subsequent flight from Iran in 1994. She went into exile in the United States. That same year she wrote Prison Memoire about her experiences in prison. Parsipur continues to write, has had a Brown University's International Writers Project Fellowship, and gives lectures. All of her books remain banned in Iran.

Writing Sample:

Bored as I was, I began, along with a few other inmates, to make worry beads. The dough of the bread was the material we used to form the beads, and we used powdered paint to colour them.

At this time, prisoners were being regularly taken for interrogation. They usually wore oversized slippers to these ordeals. The reason or this was that they were regularly whipped on their feet, and in consequence the feet would swell. Had they not taken their oversized slippers, they would have had to walk back to the cell on bare bruised feet.

The daily departure of these prisoners to the prosecutor's office created an incredible atmosphere of terror in the cells. I continued to make worry beads and observe my cellmates. The number of prisoners had drastically increased.

The number of prisoners beaten was also on the rise. I remember well Shahin, a dark-faced girl. She belonged to one of the leftist groups. I asked her to show me her bruises. She laughed and said that because of her dark skin, the bruises could not be seen. I followed each case with avid curiosity. It seemed in some cases that the whole body was one big bruise.

...

Toward the end of November, overcrowding in the prison reached an explosive point There were more than three hundred and fifty people crammed in our few cells. Every night, a group of prisoners were forced to stand in a corner, because there was not enough room for everyone to sit down. Summary trials and mass executions had become routine ... I was tired and disheartened. I felt the weight of all the corpses on my shoulders. In one way, though, I felt happy to be in prison in these treacherous times; I knew that if I were free, and did not take any steps to protest the executions, I would have forever hated myself. But the unfolding catastrophe was much bigger than anything I could do, bigger even than anything a political group could do. In captivity, one is not tormented with these problems, for there is definitely nothing one can do. I knew that when the sad history of these days came to be written down, then at least my role would be clear.

Albert Camus, in his interpretation of the Sisyphus myth - the man who had killed his son and was commanded by the gods to spend eternity pushing a rock up a steep hill so that it can roll down again - claims that the man was happy because he need make no choices. Now, in prison, in times of bloody and banal brutality, I too was happy because I need not make any choices. I had not asked to be in this position, but I made no efforts to escape from it, leaving my fate in the hands of the Hezbollah.

Trans. Abbas Milani, from Prison Memoires, published in This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers 1996, Cassell ISBN 0-304-33306-9