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Ghosts of Revolution

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Prologue..............................................................21 In the Footsteps of the Giants......................................122 Roya: The Threshold of Imagination and Phantasm.....................543 Fozi: Losing It All.................................................784 Kobra: The Gaze of Death............................................1205 Innocent Cruelty: Yousuf............................................1506 Maryam: A God Who Cried.............................................184Epilogue..............................................................208Acknowledgments.......................................................223Notes.................................................................237Glossary..............................................................253

Chapter One

When I was arrested in 1977, I knew very little of the changes on the horizon that were soon to transform not only the Iranian sociopolitical landscape but its penal system, and hence my own experiences of imprisonment. I was a girl from a modest family background. We had moved to Tehran only about three and a half years earlier, carrying along the experiences and memories of a life in provincial towns and remote countryside, with most summers spent in a village. I had just graduated from high school and entered university as a freshman when I found myself in jail. Yet, from my first day of school in Tehran, in my tenth-grade year, when, shockingly, I heard my classmates making a mockery of the national anthem by twisting its words "May our king live forever" to "The donkey has tail and hoof" to that late evening of my arrest by three SAVAK agents, the world had drastically changed around and in me.

Here I was, now, in the United Anti-sabotage Committee, perhaps the most notorious detention center for political prisoners in Iran at the time, faced with the interrogators whose names I had heard on the underground radio, who had acquired their fame through demonstrations of the utmost brutality against many legendary dissidents. I tried to imagine their heroic resistance and felt so incredibly small in comparison. Even with my insufficient knowledge of the SAVAK and its jails, I was well aware of the fact that one did not need to be a serious threat to the regime to be severely tortured. My pursuit of banned books and dissident views was enough to subject me to torture and imprisonment. Nonetheless, the fact that I had no connection to the guerrilla movement would have to be a factor in easing my interrogation process, at least in that particular historical moment.

When I was delivered to the interrogator, Rahmani, a man who appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties, he received me with the exclamation, "Oh finally, there she is!" and with a joyous tone as if a serious threat had been just eliminated from the face of the earth. His reaction overwhelmed me with a simultaneous sense of surprise, intimidation, and pride. As his voyeuristic gaze violently examined my entire body, nearly undressing me with his lustful eyes—in my mind, even with his widely grinning teeth—and as he moved from advising "this young, pretty, and smart girl to save herself" from the torment of torture to slapping, hitting with his fists, and kicking, I awaited and imagined myself under the "real torture" with which he was threatening me. But he continued offering me more obscene curses spiced by his dirty, sexual, penetrating stare.

This episode was prolonged and turned into a violent orgy of penetrating stares and verbal sexual assaults with the addition of two other interrogators, Riyahi and Rasouli. The metaphorical marriage of sex and violence found a real face when Hosseini, the most infamous torturer in the United Anti-sabotage Committee, sat quietly as an emblem of sheer animalistic violence, while others put on a show of competition of the most penetrating gaze on my body and the dirtiest assaults on my character. I clenched inside as they apparently enjoyed this visual feast, with remarks like, "She looks as sweet as her first name," alluding to the name Shirin, which means "sweet," which the friend who had reported me to SAVAK used to call me; or "She is as edible as her last name," referring to my last name, Talebi, which means "melon." Rasouli kept repeating the words Talebi-e Shirin, or "sweet melon," while blinking with a dirty look in his eyes. Even now, after so many years, once in a while I still wake up in the middle of the night, feeling a sense of choking as if interrogator Riyahi's bottom is covering my mouth, as it did then. About six feet tall, he stood in the narrow space between my chair and Rahmani's table, pretending to talk to him, while bending in a way that his bottom pushed toward and covered my mouth and entire face.

I, however, tried to concentrate on what I assumed to be awaiting me, the real torture. I pushed my nails into my skin as hard and as long as I could to test my tolerance level, angry at myself for not knowing the limits of my endurance. Would I be able to withstand the severe torture that I conjured to be imminent? I wondered. I kept telling myself, again and again, that I needed to remember the poverty, discrimination, and all the injustices I had witnessed around me so the pain could not break me. That my devotion to justice should help me to stay firm, for no matter how excruciating my pain, it could never be as everlasting as that of the dispossessed people who live with constant humiliation and die gradually, I assured myself. Was I going to be able to prove my love and commitment to the people and to my ideal of justice? I anxiously pondered these questions as the interrogators poured their insulting words over me, violated me with their gazes, and belittled my entire existence. As fearful as I was of the menace of torture with which they were threatening me, I felt even more terrified of feeling so belittled. I therefore kept telling myself that, if put under real torture, I had to show them that I was more than a "little pretty girl," as they kept calling me.

I was, nevertheless, sent to solitary confinement, without being subjected to that real torture. For the next four days, I waited, restlessly, for a call to interrogation and torture, nearly disappointed that I was not and horrified that I would be. What if I could not prove my loyalty to my ideals and the strength of my love for the people? The possibility petrified me. I read and touched the writings on the walls of my cell, one of them written by the poet whose poetry I loved, as if hoping that through my touch their magical power would penetrate my body and soul, and I would become immune to the desires and weaknesses of my own flesh. I felt inspired and burdened by breathing in the same space that had once been occupied by the men and women about whom I had read or heard.

But only a few days later the guards took me to the upper floor and put me in a room with five other inmates. It was here that I began to see the rapid changes in that jail. They painted the rooms, cleaned the hallways, fixed the toilets and bathrooms, gave us spoons for eating, and treated prisoners less harshly. But once again, neither I nor the others in jail knew yet of the transforming power dynamics that were forcing the regime to...