White Collar Dreaming

Prisoner of Tehran:
The End of a Childhood in Iran

When Marina Nemat walked out of class after refusing to listen to her teacher preach government propaganda, she never imagined how her life would change and her childhood would end.

“Last night I had a yoga class. This is in a very large room, and there are mostly women, and we have our yoga mats. At the end there is a relaxation time, we just lie down on our yoga mats and the lights are turned off. And always when that happens, I feel like I’m back in Evin. And it doesn’t scare me at all. It actually is very peaceful to feel that.”

When Marina Nemat was 16 she was imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Her wrists were so small her hands had to be secured together in one handcuff. It was 1982 and the revolution she had been looking forward to turned out to be the most brutal and oppressive regimes Iran had seen. Marina was tortured on and off for a week and finally led out in the snow with four others to be shot. She had heard the nights crackling with gunfire but never imagined it directed at teenagers tied to wooden posts. On the way there one of the prisoners had tried to run, her black chador catching round her ankles. She was shot dead in the back. Her body lay in the snow as the others were lined up. But Marina was lucky – though lucky has its own connotations in Evin. She had caught the eye of an interrogator and was plucked out of the firing line. As she was driven back to the compound, Marina heard gunfire. For the first of many nights, she knew what it meant.

Prisoner of Tehran: The End of Childhood in Iran is the breaking of a twenty-year silence. In 1991 Marina emigrated from Iran with her husband and small son to Canada. In Richmond Hill, an outer suburb of Toronto stacked with condominiums, she worked at a McDonalds for three years. Later the Nemats moved to Aurora, a small town away from the city and again Marina worked as a waitress - this time at the Swiss Chalet restaurant. It was here in Aurora when memories of Evin began to return. She was 36 years old and not even her husband knew the secrets she had lodged in the back of her mind. Marina wrote at night, her health deteriorated but she couldn’t stop putting the words to her past down on paper. The smells returned - the camphor the guards put in the girls’ tea to stop them from menstruating.

Finally, one morning in July 2003, Marina knelt down to pick up the Toronto Star from the doorstep and saw the front-page photo of 54-year-old Zahra Kazemi. A Canadian photojournalist, Kazemi had been taking photographs outside Evin during student-led protests when she was arrested. Three weeks later she was dead. The Iranian government claimed she had a stroke and refused to return her body to Canada. Instead a doctor arrived in Canada and called an immediate press conference. He had examined her body at the Tehran hospital. Kazemi had been brutally raped, her skin was gouged from lashings, and her skull flattened from severe beatings. Marina’s memoir suddenly became less personal - the international silence had been broken.

“Iran is still the same dictatorship it was back then,” says Marina on the phone from her home in Aurora. “Yes, some things get a little better every now and then, women can wear their scarves a little more loosely, people have cell phones and will watch movies they buy on the black market – but it is still the same government that killed thousands of innocent teenagers and didn’t even blink.” After Marina escaped execution she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Prisoner of Tehran is her account of life before, during and after Evin. “I have changed names and combined cellmates into one person to protect people’s identity – but every single event in the book is absolutely real. There was a girl who wrote all over her body with pens we stole for her, there were the girls who committed suicide, and the girls who had babies.”

Four months before Marina’s birth in 1965, reputed followers of Shi’ite fundamentalist leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, assassinated Iranian Premier Hassan Ali Mansur. Already, there was general unrest over the repressive regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi. When the Shah was forced into exile in 1979, people celebrated in the streets. The gates of Evin prison, where political prisoners had been held and tortured for years by the Shah's secret police, were thrown open. Khomeini returned to take up the reins of Iran – Marina remembers the day he arrived. A news reporter had asked the new leader how he felt about his return – Khomeini replied that he felt nothing.

His words repelled me and made me feel sick to the stomach, writes Marina. Many had lost their lives to pave the way for his return in the hope of making Iran a better place, and he felt nothing? And so the new regime began and the Islamic Republic began enforcing strict laws - women could not be in public without covering their heads, intimate gestures such as holding hands and dancing was forbidden. The eight-year war with Iraq began, and once again, the cells of Evin Prison filled with political prisoners.

Marina’s own nightmare under Khomeini’s regime began when her schoolteachers were replaced with young revolutionaries. As a young girl, she had buried herself in books, mainly with the help of a bookstore owner who lent her books her family couldn't afford to buy. To be honest, Marina wasn’t all that interested in politics to begin with - if she could read ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ forever she might have been content. But after she accidentally instigated what would become known as ‘the strike’, Marina was propelled forward on a path she found impossible to stop. She challenged her calculus teacher to instruct something other than government propaganda, the teacher said if she didn't like it, she could leave. She did, and the rest of the class followed.

She started a school newspaper and secretly attended human-rights rallies, including one at which a fellow protestor was shot by government guards; he died at her feet. The end of Marina’s childhood had begun. The Islamic Republic guards arrived at her home on Jan. 15, 1982, to take her away. “In real Islam, punishment has its limits, but in Evin there were no limits,” Marina says of the compound. “Fundamentalists interpret the Qu’ran whichever way they want.” When she was tortured, the soles of her feet were lashed. In Islam, this form of punishment is called tazir. “In the Qu’ran it says when you are lashing someone, the person doing it has to put a copy of the Qu’ran under their arm so they cannot wave their arm too high, so they cannot lash too severely,” Marina laughs. “I never saw a Qu’ran under anybody’s arm in Evin.”

“I was put in room 246. The building had six rooms upstairs and seven rooms downstairs, with about 60 girls to a room. Four years after I was released, there was a big massacre in Evin. I have checked all available lists of those executed, but haven’t found the names of my closest friends. I am just hoping they survived and maybe I can find them through this book. That is, if they got out of Iran.”

When Marina returned home in 1984, the woman she had become was irreversible. She had been sentenced to death, sentenced to life, forced into marriage with her interrogator, into Islamic conversion and ironically, found the love of a family-in-law who embraced her with more affection than her own family. She made friends she will never see again. She learnt about good, evil, and the many shades of grey between. Marina Nemat’s honesty is breathtaking.

There is quiet purpose to Prisoner of Tehran – Marina Nemat has not written a memoir that reads like a cathartic spillage, rather her voice is controlled, written with measure and wisdom. She reveals the different levels of silence, how mouths can be shut from the inside as well as by the outside. A friend once told me how the black cloths girls are forced to wear in Iran reminded her of the covering dropped over birdcages to silence songbirds. In this silence and permanent night, Marina’s story feels as if it has coagulated into ink over time.

Twice a week Marina says she dreams of the Caspian Sea. “I dream I am there with my husband and my sons and we have a dog and we are laughing. But the Iran I miss does not exist for me anymore, I know that.” But maybe, when the black veils are lifted and the tortures are revealed, Marina’s memoir will be slipped under the border, beneath the radar of the Islamic Republic guard, and this Iran that Marina once knew, before she turned sixteen, can exist for the young women and men of Iran still there today.