After Tehran

by Marina Nemat

  But I didn’t. I had hit a dead end.

  IN EARLY MARCH 2009, I finally decided to join Facebook. This was a big step for me, because I am technologically challenged. Andre believes that I would have been happiest had I been born in the Stone Age, which is probably true. Technology has always intimidated me. When we came to Canada, I refused to learn how to drive, and it took Andre years to talk me into taking driving lessons. I never failed a driver’s test, but for months after getting my licence I shook with fear every time I sat behind the wheel of our car. When I decided to publish Prisoner of Tehran, it was obvious that I had to type it, but I knew absolutely nothing about computers and found them scary. Even moving the cursor around the screen was difficult for me. To help me out Andre bought some voice-recognition software, but that only frustrated me more, because the program didn’t understand my pronunciation. I eventually learned to type, use Microsoft Word and many other programs, and surf the net. Friends kept inviting me to join Facebook, but to me it was another computer skill that would take me months to master. However, after being unable to confirm the news about Jasmine’s execution, it occurred to me that I could use Facebook to find old friends.

  In the beginning, my Facebook page showed only my name and date of birth, but I soon began receiving messages from readers of mine who wanted to contact me. I was encouraged and put more information on my “wall,” and then I began looking for people. I connected with a few high-school friends who had never been arrested and had eventually left Iran, and then I started searching for my prison friends. But I failed in every case. Finally, I typed Jasmine’s name in the Search box. I didn’t really expect any results, but I had to try. Her name came up. I froze. This was impossible. It couldn’t be her. A small profile photo sat next to her name. I looked at it and my heart almost jumped out of my chest. Even though the woman in the photo didn’t look like the Jasmine I’d known, her smile was familiar. I tried to enlarge the photo, but it didn’t work. So I decided to write to her. But what should I say? “Hi! I was wondering if you and I were in prison together …” If this woman was not my Jasmine, she would think me a mad person who was harassing her. So I worded my message carefully:

  Hi: My name is Marina Nemat (maiden name Moradi-Bakht) and I’m an author living in Canada (you can Google me). I’m looking for a friend with the same name as yours. Are you the one I lost touch with in 1984?

  For the next few hours, I sat in front of my computer and kept busy, but I constantly found myself staring at my Google Notifier. Would this woman write back to me, saying that she was not the Jasmine I was looking for? Or would my Jasmine write to me that she was alive and well?

  The next morning, I opened my laptop before doing anything else and found this message:

  Oh, my God! Of course I know you from those terrible times! I can’t believe it … I remember you and even your nightmares … remember you told me about them? How wonderful that you found me …

  Jasmine

  The world stopped. I read her words again and again. She was all right. Tears rolled down my face. I had found her. The dead had come back to life. I had so many things to ask her, so many things to tell her. Did she know that her name was on a list of the executed?

  Jasmine! This is a MIRACLE! Where are you? When did they let you go? I’ve been looking for you forever. Please do me a favour and Google yourself. There’s a website that says you were executed in 1984! I saw it in December ’08, and I had a nervous breakdown. I even contacted Amnesty International … I also contacted the people behind that website, and they said there was no way to verify the info. My God! I thought you were dead! I’m a writer now, and I even wrote a chapter about you to include in my new book. It’s like a eulogy of some sort. I was devastated because it looked like there was nothing left of you except a name and a date … So many terrible things happened. I’m so happy you’re okay!

  As I waited for Jasmine’s response, I thought about the strange situation we were in. Even though she didn’t seem to think that I was dead, my message must have shocked her. I had spent the last few years thinking and writing about Evin, but she had probably tried to forget it—and now the ghost of the past was looking straight into her eyes. I didn’t want to be a reminder of pain and suffering; except, remembrance was all I had left. Jasmine and I were alive, but many others like us were not. Also, those who had survived Evin needed to be acknowledged in a human way. I realized I had to give Jasmine time to deal with the avalanche of memories she now had to face. But how I longed to hear her voice.

  That evening, Andre came home from work and we sat at the dinner table to eat. I had not called him to tell him about my finding Jasmine. I had felt exhausted all day, staring at my computer screen, thinking.

  “How was your day?” he asked.

  “You first.”

  “To tell you the truth, not that great.” He went on to describe his workday, and I listened impatiently.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  “I don’t know where to start. I’m still in shock.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing bad. It was great, actually. Miraculous. But I still haven’t been able to get my head around it.”

  “What?”

  “I found Jasmine. She’s okay …” I told him the whole story. He was thrilled.

  The next day I felt like pulp. I hadn’t heard back from Jasmine. But I had to be patient. Too much was coming at her too fast. I was like a bomb that had just exploded in her world.

  Jasmine wrote two days later and told me that she’d been released two years after me. She still lived in Iran. After Evin, she went back to school and got a university degree, and then she got married. I had so many things to ask her. Was she in touch with any of our cellmates? Had she talked to her family about Evin, or had she remained silent? Did her family ask her about what had happened to her behind bars? I desperately wanted to know every detail about her life after Evin. Yet she could be arrested because of her connection to me. I had heard that email was a safe way of communicating with people in Iran. But even though technology had become an effective tool in the hands of dissidents, the regime could use it against the people. I decided to stop writing to her, and she agreed that we should keep our communication to a minimum. I was not going to take any chances with Jasmine’s life. I wanted her to be safe and happy, and the truth was—I was a danger to her.

  *Lanaat Abad.

  **Golzar-eh Khavaran.

  Letters from

  My Cellmates, and

  My Barbie Doll

  Since the publication of Prisoner of Tehran, I have met many ex-prisoners from Iran, but most of them are not ready to talk about the past. They have approached me at events to offer a few words of encouragement, or they have emailed me and wished me the best of luck. One woman wrote to me saying that as a teenager she had been in Evin. She later immigrated to Canada and became a psychologist, but she had never talked about her prison experience with anyone, not even her husband and children. Once she read my book, she told her children that they had to read it. This was as far as she was ready to go. But I didn’t lose hope. I knew that others would come forward sooner or later. The truth cannot remain buried forever.

  In December 2008, an Iranian woman—whom I will call Anamy here—wrote to me through my website. She said that she had been in Evin between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, around the same time as I was. After her release she had gone back to school and received a degree. She had remained in Iran until just recently, when she had begun to feel the urge to tell her story. She wanted me to help her publish her memoir. I wrote back to her, explaining my writing process and the difficulties I had faced, and I shared what I knew about the publishing world. I noted that in order to be taken seriously, she needed to finish her manuscript and then enrol in creative-writing classes to perfect it. Once that was done, I promised that I would read it and give her feedback. We communicated regularly:

  Dear Marina,

  Just like yo
u, I was sentenced to silence for years … I cannot remember anyone asking me about my experience in the prison … No family member, no friend or boyfriend, not even my husband … Whether they want it or not, this silence makes our loved ones one of “them.” I think the best way is writing, but in the meantime, I guess talking has its advantages … I had a tough time reading some parts of your book. Especially the parts about interrogations and 246. It took me back there, and I was literally gasping for air …

  There are major gaps in my memory. I was not aware of them before. I do not at all remember the room I was in Bandeh yek [a cellblock in Evin also known as 240]. I was there for months. How is this possible? In the meantime, I clearly remember the wet grasshopper I saw sitting on the windowsill the rainy night they forced us to evacuate 246 and move to Bandeh yek. I was desperate and hopeless … I think I remember everything that was somehow meaningful to me …

  A couple of nights ago, I had this feeling that I would not have much time, like I would not stay alive for long. I don’t know whether it is an intuitive feeling or a hidden desire. I think, as you said in your book, I have been sleepwalking, too. I have always been somehow distracted from life, more like a witness and not like someone really involved in it … I have never been passive in my life, but I was doing it all from a distance. I always knew it had something to do with the prison. It is just like you have gotten off a train, and then after a couple of years, you once again want to catch up with it! What you said in the interview on the last pages of your book about the effects of writing your memoir on getting back into life was really interesting to me. I had never thought of it like that before …

  I cried a lot reading your email, and I had a very hard time replying. What you said about having the same feelings about death while writing your book had a very profound impact on me. Not just because it was so unbelievably exactly the same as mine, but because it made me start to think that many things that I considered to be my personal problems, now seem to be symptoms that all ex-prisoners are experiencing in the silent cells we are still in … It is so unbelievable to have this much in common with someone you do not know. In Evin, you and I lived literally metres away from one another for many months and maybe more than a year and still far away and unknown to each other. Now we live miles and miles away, yet this close and connected …

  Marina, a part of me is still in Evin. By letting sixteen-year-old Marina speak, you have not only shown her to me, but you have also helped me see the sixteen-year-old me, still in prison, squatting in silence near a wall, looking straight into my eyes, and begging me to give her voice back.

  I want to speak. I need to.

  Anamy

  After Anamy, a few other ex-prisoners from Iran got in touch with me and told me that they wanted to write their memoirs of the prisons of the Islamic Republic. Anamy and my other cellmates who have decided to break the silence are my beacons of hope. I relied on my friends in Evin to find a ray of light in absolute darkness; I now look again in their direction. I am not alone in my journey of trying to document the human experience of those who have suffered at the hands of the Islamic Republic. My cellmates are out there, and they will sooner or later raise their voices. I hope that we will one day stand at a memorial for our lost friends in Iran. However, we will not wave our fists in the air, demanding revenge. No. We will want justice, but if too many years have gone by and justice for our dead friends and for us seems impossible, we will cry and grieve, but we will refrain from resorting to violence, because if not, we will become victims of the never-ending cycle of hatred and injustice that has already destroyed too many lives.

  ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2008, I had a meeting with Dr. Rosemary Meier to discuss the effects of torture on children. Dr. Meier is a geriatric psychiatrist, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and a member of the health committee and network of the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture.

  Dr. Meier reminded me of Bahboo. When I entered the Common Room of Massey College at the University of Toronto, I spotted her sitting on a sixties-style brown leather sofa that faced a wall-to-wall window overlooking a courtyard where tall trees towered over patches of green grass. She had a subtle smile on her face. Her thin, silky grey hair was gathered in a bun at her nape and a few strands fell onto her neck and shoulders. She was not wearing makeup, and her clothes were practical and simple. Her eyes were different from Bahboo’s, though. Bahboo’s eyes were full of shuttered sadness; Dr. Meier’s, even though I had no doubt they held their own secrets, were like open windows. She was kind, but not in an artificial sort of way. She liked to get straight to the matter: “Tell me what happened. I’m interested.”

  Up to this point in my journey, I had relied on my own experiences and observations to understand how my two years in Evin had shaped me. I had not been able to trust those who had lived “normal” lives to analyze me and help me understand myself. But I finally felt I had arrived at a stage where I had achieved a good level of self-awareness, so it was time to discuss my findings with professionals.

  I told her that for lack of a better term, my writing Prisoner of Tehran had been like throwing up; the story had exploded out of me when I couldn’t hold it down any longer. It had been an urgent telling of events. In order to acknowledge and understand my past, I needed to see it on paper.

  “Does this make any sense?” I asked.

  “Yes, it does,” she said. “One of the meanings of catharsis is ‘a purging of the bowels.’”

  I explained that I knew guilt was the engine driving me. Guilt was a negative emotion, but I believed it could have positive outcomes. It had made me write obsessively, as if I were living the last day of my life.

  “Your experience reminds me of Holocaust survivors,” she said. “Most of them couldn’t talk about their experiences for years, until these people became old and frail. They never shared their memories. Yet their children wanted to know. They needed to know. The experiences of their parents were a part of these children and they wanted to understand them, but it was very difficult for their parents to talk about the past.”

  I know that silence, the silence of trauma quietly and carefully handed down to the next generation, I thought. A package of secrets that changes hands. The problem is that the giver of the package is aware of its contents, but the receiver is not. The receiver can only see how it disturbs everything it touches. And it comes with a warning: “Don’t open me or I will explode!” So it sits in plain sight, staring at the children of survivors in its mute, threatening way. Silence saddens me. It breaks my heart. I want to scream, Tell! Tell! Tell! The children can face it. They have to face it. They need to face it. Please trust them. They need to understand the human experience of history before they start a war or genocide of their own.

  I asked Dr. Meier why she thought I was telling my story after such a long time. She said that life was not linear; it was spiral. The journey of life makes us who we are. Even our preverbal experiences are important. Events that we remember shape us, but so do the ones we don’t. Unresolved grief manifests itself in many different ways. Some people spend a lifetime running from grief. Some finally face it at a certain point in their lives. Even though the human experience is more or less the same, and grief is grief and loss is loss, every case is different. Every case is unique.

  I asked Dr. Meier about memory as I stared at the small pond in the courtyard. A little fountain shot a trembling dome of water into the air, creating ripples that turned sunlight into golden splatters. She told me that memory was like cosmology. The more we look at the universe and study it, the more we discover. The more we peer at a corner of the night sky, the more stars we find.

  After my meeting with Dr. Meier, I reflected on our conversation. All roads in my life have somehow intersected the dark void of silence. After Evin, I lived in silence for so long that I almost forgot all about the world of voices. But one doesn’t need to have been tortured or be a Holocaust survivor to be trapped in it. Almost any
form of trauma can lead people there. A few months before the publication of Prisoner of Tehran, as I stared at its release date on my calendar, the date was like a wall. I felt as though I was going to hit it at the speed of light and disintegrate. That day had to be the day of my death. How could I possibly survive such exposure? But I reached that wall and walked right through it. It didn’t kill me. On the contrary, it made me feel more alive than I had felt since I had been a teenager. The Tower of Silence had begun to fill with voices.

  As I was writing this book, I had my editor Diane and her husband over at my house for dinner one night. As usual, some of our conversation revolved around my prison experiences. After we finished eating, we talked about torture—and I found myself fighting my tears. My younger son was sitting with us at the table. A couple of days later on the phone, Diane told me that she had never heard me speak about my torture in front of my children. I had, but she had not been present on those occasions. She also said that I had been more emotional than ever. She was right. Every day, I am able to feel a little more than the day before. The numbness that became a part of me in Evin is a formidable force, and I have to wrestle it on a daily basis. Every day is a small victory.

  Why do we, the human race, make the same mistakes over and over? Why do we torture, abuse, wage wars, and commit acts of cruelty? I can’t say it enough: the only way to stop the cycle of violence is to speak out. As long as victims do not bear witness, their suffering will be forgotten. Children should be encouraged to talk about all that is considered unspeakable. Torture should be discussed at dinner tables and in schools. In history classes, we should discuss human suffering and read the memoirs of those who have lived through wars, revolutions, genocides, and dictatorships.