Marina Nemat
A testament to the power of love in the face of evil and injustice.
At 16 years of age, Marina Nemat came to face the destiny that she had long anticipated — she was sent to jail for writing in her school’s newspaper.
Nemat, a Christian Iranian, had always been outspoken, but when the Iranian Islamic Revolution occurred in 1979, she had a lot to say. “The revolution changed everything,” she said. “It replaced teachers who had experience, who had university degrees, with 18 and 19 year-olds, young revolutionary guards. This was a step to brainwash the young generation.”
In Iran, Nemat spoke against sitting through six to seven hours of government propaganda a day by writing articles for her school’s newspaper. Her principal, 18, did not like her behaviour and informed the revolutionary guards. “I knew quite well I was going to get arrested (for writing the articles). I wasn’t the first one arrested from my school. A few other friends had been arrested before.”
Nemat’s belief became reality on Jan. 15, 1982. She was arrested by two revolutionary guards and sent to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison — the same prison where Montreal photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested, tortured and killed in 2007 for taking photographs of students protesting outside the building.
Evin prison, built in the early 1970s during the time of the Shah, was designed to accommodate 320 inmates, though Nemat is confident that thousands of prisoners were in jail with her. “They arrested so many people that they just didn’t know what to do with them. If you gave them the slightest reason to kill you, they would do that without any hesitation.”
Nemat was sentenced to death but, for reasons that still puzzle her, one of her interrogators fell in love with her and reduced her sentence to life in prison. He then approached her asking for marriage.
“He told me that, ‘Well, you are a prisoner with a life sentence and. basically. the world has forgotten about you, nobody cares about you. You are going to become my wife or I will arrest your parents and they will be gone for life.’”
Thus, 17-year-old Nemat married her interrogator and was raped over and over again in the name of marriage. “He took me on short leaves of absence of two to three hours every once in a while to see his family,” she said.
When Nemat first met her husband’s family, she was shocked. “They were very normal, regular, kind, generous people. They were always very respectful to me. Whenever I was taken to their place, they would feed me and make sure I was okay and give me clothes.” Their marriage was short lived because 15 months later, Nemat’s husband was assassinated.
Later, his family intervened in her case and bribed her way out of prison. “After two years, two months and 12 days, I was released from prison and I went home,” she said. Upon release, Nemat married her boyfriend of six years and left Iran.
Today, Nemat is living in Canada with her husband, and two children, aged 15 and 19.
“For 20 years I put my trauma in a bubble. I put it on my shoulder and I walked my life, without being able to feel (much of) anything. I basically just lived,” she said about her life after release.
But in January 2002, she took a step forward. She began writing a memoir. Her book, Prisoner of Tehran, was published in April 2007 and is available in 23 different countries in 20 different languages.
Prisoner of Tehran has been dedicated to various relatives, friends, other political prisoners and the late Zahra Kazemi, the very Canadian woman whose death, Nemat believes, caused the world to take notice, perhaps for the first time, of what was really happening in Iran’s prisons.
In 2000, after her mother’s death, suddenly, memories of prison life began to resurface. Nemat could not sleep. She became obsessed. “I was just thinking about it all the time, remembering every single detail, everything,” Nemat says in a telephone interview from her home. “It really took over my life.”
One day, Nemat went to Business Depot, bought some notebooks and started writing about her prison experiences.
After Nemat’s initial writing frenzy in 2000, the notebooks sat in a bureau drawer in her bedroom for a few years. Nemat had thought placing the memories on paper would be enough. But it wasn’t.
The world had to know her story, she decided. Thousands of people had been jailed, tortured and executed at Evin. Some memoirs by these prisoners had been published abroad in Persian but not in English. The international community, Nemat felt, had refused to acknowledge what had happened to an entire generation of young people in Iran. Even her own family and husband had been reluctant to ask her about her prison experiences crammed into cells with other women, some of them with babies and many with death sentences.
“I wanted everybody to know. I wanted the world to know.”
In 2002, Nemat showed her notebooks to Andre. He had not known beforehand about her marriage to Ali or that she had become pregnant and suffered a miscarriage. He begged her forgiveness for not having asked her more questions.
Determined to get her memoir published, Nemat took writing courses, reworked her manuscript many times and eventually, through literary agent Beverley Slopen, reached a deal with the Viking imprint of Penguin in 2006. Foreign publishers started buying the rights as well.
In Canada, Nemat has met other people of Iranian origin who had similar experiences to her own. Most are reluctant to discuss their past, she says. It is simply too painful. While writing the book and sharing her story has not healed the trauma, it has helped her cope. Her ability to cope, is an extraordinary story of faith and survival.
Sources: http://communities.canada.com/theprovince/blogs/readthis/pages/prisoner-of-tehran.aspx and http://www.oakvillebeaver.com/news/article/215432
