"Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman's Story of Survival
Inside an Iranian Prison" by Marina Nemat (Free Press, 9781416537434,
$14.00)
In the early 1980s, in the wake of the Iranian
Revolution, Marina Nemat was a young student convinced that her country
would soon awaken from its sudden nightmare of violence and repression. But
by 1982, at the age of sixteen, Nemat had become an inmate of Evin, a
notoriously brutal political prison holding so-called enemies of the
revolution; once there, she began to wonder if her personal nightmare would
ever end. Prisoner of Tehran, an international bestseller new this
week in paperback, is Nemat’s fascinating memoir of her years in physical
and emotional captivity.
Writing from her current home in Canada, Nemat
splits her book into two streams to describe her life before and after the
revolution. Under the rule of Iran’s unpopular monarch, she was a child
focused on everyday concerns like completing a collection of her favorite
books, The Chronicles of Narnia. Following the uprising that
installed the Ayatollah Khomeini, she quickly became aware that her daily
life couldn’t long remain unmarked by Iran’s political upheaval.
Nemat watched as the trained teachers at her
once-excellent high school were systematically replaced with government
mouthpieces until one day in calculus class, when she raised her hand and
requested that the new instructor teach mathematics rather than the usual
religious party line. The teacher told her to leave if she didn’t like the
curriculum. Nemat did. Most of her classmates followed her, as did the
majority of their schoolmates, and not long after, revolutionary guards came
to Nemat’s home at night and arrested her for inciting a strike and for
subverting the revolution.
Following her interrogation, torture, and sentencing
to life incarceration, Nemat was installed in an overcrowded women’s prison
dormitory ruled by stern matrons and crushing boredom. Her saving grace and
her cruelest torment arrived the figure of one man: an experienced
interrogator convinced that he was in love with her. Over a period of
months, he protected Nemat at times while also forcing her to undergo a
false religious conversion and submit unwillingly to marriage. Nemat
recounts this period with bewildered courage as she describes her
captor-husband’s mad mixture of care and callousness: he regularly promised
to treat her well and make her happy without ever facing the fact that he
had, in every way, made her his prisoner.
Nemat’s story is compulsive, affecting reading, and
she offers surprising moments of inspiration: without ever renouncing her
own convictions, she seeks constantly to find compassion for her jailors and
for all her fellow inmates. Her firsthand account testifies to the necessity
of liberty, even for unpopular opinions, and to the needless brutality and
senselessness of torturing prisoners.
"Prisoner of Tehran" would be an excellent book club
selection, and the new paperback includes a discussion guide, an interview
with the author, and links to relevant Web sites. In additional, the
publisher has offered to arrange conference calls between Marina Nemat and
interested book groups. Contact Watermark for details.
Review by
Mark David Bradshaw,
May 8, 2008
