Prisoner of Tehran

This non-fiction by Marina Nemat falls into the category of books you should read but can hardly bear to; they’re filled with true agony. This is about her life, when at 16 she was thrown into a political prison for instigating a strike at her high school. She is marked for execution, but is remanded to life in prison at the last minute, at the intervention of her torturer who has fallen in love with her. This torturer ends up forcing her to marry him, and she ends up becoming pregnant to him; but he is assassinated by fellow torturers who despise him. She is eventually freed and goes on to marry the man she loved before prison, but is unable to tell him all that happened to her. Years later, after emigrating to Canada, the memories flood back and she writes this manuscript, showing her husband, who is devastated by it.

It’s an unbearable story that is sadly quite easy to believe – there are too many stories that are similar about girls being beaten, raped, imprisoned, tortured for wanting something different to what is presented to them. The most frightening part is the utter reasonableness of her torturer husband, who was actually imprisoned and tortured under the previous regime himself, but cannot see that what he is doing is intrinsically wrong, that he has become evil.

It was written partly because of the Canadian woman who was arrested and tortured to death after photographing the very gaol that Marina was imprisoned within. The horror of her death shocked the world, but as the author says, it was many women and it still continues.