Majid Naficy was
born in Iran in 1953. His first
collection of poems in Persian, called In
the Tiger’s Skin, was published in 1969.
One year later his book of literary criticism, Poetry as a Structure, appeared.
And in 1971 he wrote a children’s book, The Secret of Words, which won a national award in Iran.
In the seventies,
Majid was politically active against the Shah’s regime. However, after the 1979 revolution, the new
regime began to suppress the oppositions, and many people, including his first
wife, Ezzat Taba’eyan and brother Sa’id, were executed. He fled Iran in 1983 and spent a year and a
half in Turkey and France. Majid then
settled in Los Angeles where he lives with his son, Azad. He has since published three collections of
poems, After the Silence, Sorrow of the
Border, and Poems of Venice, as
well as a book of essays called In Search
if Joy: A Critique of Male-Dominated,
Death-Oriented Culture in Iran, all in Persian. He holds his doctorate in Near Eastern
Languages and Cultures from the University of California at Los Angeles. Majid is currently a co-editor of Daftarha-ye Shanbeh, a Persian literary
journal published in Los Angeles.
Majid’s doctoral
dissertations, Modernism and Ideology in
Persian Literature: A Return to Nature in Poetry of Nima Yushij was
published by University Press of America, Inc. In October 1997.
Among the millions of
Iranian immigrants living outside of the country today, there are a
considerable number who have spent a good portion of their lives behind the
bars of the Shah’s or Imam’s [Khomeini] prisons. Now in exile, far from the
coercive system of their home country, they have the opportunity to write about
the time of their incarceration, and through this process they not only shed
light on some corners of political life in contemporary Iran, but also
demonstrate that political prisoners, in the face of torture and fear of
execution, are able to create a culture, like any other social group, in which
we find joy and humour alongside depression and fear, as well as a passion for
artistic and literary creativity which runs against the ideological
brainwashing system of the authorities.
Unfortunately, what has been
published so far on prison literature often serves merely political aims and
even its best has not gone beyond biographical accounts. Of course, prison accounts should indeed be
used as documentation to lay bare and fight against the system of coercion and
suppression in Iran, but not at the expense of the other significant aspects of
the political prisoner’s life.
How many exhibitions have
been held to date of Iranian political prisoners’ artwork created on peach and
date stones, in broken glass and bread dough, or by embroidering on cloth? How many poems, stories, and plays written in
prison do we have at hand, and how many letters, wills of testament, and
accounts of the writing and drawing on prison walls have been published? The prisoner’s resistance does not show
itself only in the torture chamber and interrogation room, the religious courts
and execution fields: it also manifests itself in elaborate flower beds on the
prison grounds and minute work on broken glass, pebbles, bones, and fruit
stones.
In the following, after a
short survey regarding the letter as a literary genre, I analyse eighteen
letters from an Iranian political prisoner who, for security reasons, must
remain anonymous. The first sixteen letters
he wrote over the course of five years, from 1984 to 1988, from Evin Prison in
Tehran to his wife who in turn had been incarcerated in the women’s ward of the
same prison. The last two letters he
sent outside to his wife’s mother and sister. Our prisoner was executed in the
course of a program of mass annihilation of political prisoners in Iran in
1988. At the end of this article, with
the permission of the present holder of the letters, I translate three samples
of these letters without any alteration.
I hope this work encourages other to publish and evaluate Iranian prison
literature.
The value of a letter must
not be underestimated just because of its political nature. Correspondence by
leaders of political and religious movements have on occasion found its way
into holy books and other canonised literature. Citable examples include St.
Paul’s letters in the New Testament, the Shi’ite Imam Ali’s letters in Nahj al-Balagheh, the collected letters
of the Persian mystic ‘Ein al-Qozat Hamedani, and those of Marx, Engels, and
Rosa Luxemburg.
Furthermore, the use of
letters in literary works has a long precedence as seen in Ramin’s ten letters
to Vis in the Persian romantic epic Vis
and Ramin composed by Fakhr al-Din Gorgani in the 12th century A.D. or
Khosro’s letters to Shirin in another romantic epic called Khosro Shirin composed by Nezami half a Western century later. In
the 18th and 19th centuries in the West, under the
influence of the school of Romanticism, which greatly appreciates personal sentiment,
the writing of novels consisting wholly or partially of letters became
fashionable, such as Jane Austin’s Pride
and Prejudice Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long
Legs and Laclos’s Dangerous
Acquaintances. Among Persian novels,
one can cite Letters by Bozorg ‘Alavi
and from the Other Side of the Wall
by Behazin.
In terms of form, a letter
is typically a text sent from one person to another, consisting of a
salutation, an introduction, the main body, a closing, a signature, perhaps a
subscript, and a date of the letter below or above the text. Three traits can
be attributed to the letter genre:
First regarding the context
in which the letter is written, there is a separation in time and place
between the writer and addressee. The letter is entrusted with filling this
spatial and temporal gap. Second, the letter’s content is usually of a
distinctively personal nature. The more personal issues raised in the letter
may be unintelligible for those other that the writer and the addressee. Third,
the style in which a letter is written may be very different from that of a
book or article.
Since the personal letter is
not an official document and is not written with a view to publication, the
writer is not usually expected to organise his or her thoughts in a tidy
fashion. The occurrence of breaks or
digressions and a lack of adherence to strict norms of grammar are
characteristic of letters. In the Persian letters under survey here, for
example, the influence of the Azeri language in the text is evident, the writer
having been raised in a Turkish family.
Within a literary work,
correspondence gives the novelist or poet the opportunity to penetrate inside
the relationship between the protagonists and to make the passage from the
abstract to the concrete, from universal to the personal.
Writing a letter to
immediate relatives such as spouses, parents, or siblings, who may be either
imprisoned or free, is a right that has been repeatedly denied by the previous
and present Iranian regimes, subject to the changing conditions in and outside
of the prisons. One can see this change
in the tone and the content of the letters under survey over the course of
several years. In the letter dted 1084 refernce is rarely made to anything
other than everyday issues, whereas in a couple of the letters written in 1988
the measure of courage that the writer shows to express his opinions is
surprising.
In these years, the
Iran-Iraq War, tensions between different factions within the Iranian
government, and above all, a policy of moderation pursued then by Montazari,
then Khomeini’s designated successor, and his group had an impact on the
administration of Iranian political prisons, including the policy regarding
letter writing.
However, in general the
length of letter could not exceed five lines during one period and seven lines
during another, and if the mail officer of the prison detected cryptic messages
in a letter it was not sent and the prisoner was punished. Having the proper official stationery for
writing the letter, the prisoner could usually write whenever he or she wanted,
but the postal officer came to the ward to collect letters only at certain
times. Usually the letters received by
the prisoner were not read by others without his or her permission, but
sometimes it occurred that due to the spirit of communalism and lack of respect
for individual rights among the inmates, the letter was passed around and
commented on before it ever reached the addressee.
In the following, I attempt
t identify some of the more salient features of prison letters in light of the
letters under survey.
Conciseness or compactness
is one of the most important traits of poetry, and it is interesting that the
prisoner is forced to make use of this poetic device and express his ideas in
short forms, because of the limit on the letter’s length imposed by the
authorities. A great deal of time was needed for mental preparation, but the
consequence could be a text which, like aphoristic statements, is short but
deep. For example, the second letter
reads, “I must learn to be with while being without.” This aphorism, short and meaningful, sounds
melodic and poetic in the Persian text.
The writer of these letters
was a prisoner of integrity, or “on his platform” in prison jargon. Using a symbolic style, he conveyed his
forbidden ideas to his wife and showed hope for the future and passion for
change. So, in his letters we encounter a style resembling the political
symbolism used in Modern Persian poetry in 1953-79, when in order to circumvent
censorship the poet wrapped his or her social messages in images such as the
struggle between night and day and between spring and winter.
For example, when our
prisoner alludes to the “future infants” in the third letter (see Appendix), he
undoubtedly means individuals or political cells who at the time had split off
from the opposition leftist organisations such as Peykar or Feda’i in or
outside the prison and attempted to find new ways of struggle by studying once
more the Marxist classics and events in Iran’s revolution-stricken
society.
In the sixteenth letter, her
refer to the “dove of thought”, by means of which he wants to criticise the
existing high-mindedness and volunteerism of the leftist movement. In the fifth
letter, on the occasion the their marriage anniversary, which was one day
before the Persian New Year and first day of spring, he uses the metaphor of
the coming of spring and the going of winter and couples his feelings of love
for his wife to the struggle of the new against the old in society.
In the seventeenth letter,
written to his mother-in-law on the occasion of his wife’s birthday on the
night of the winter solstice, he employs Zoroastrian metaphors such as this:
Each year on this night, I try to imagine the long and cold night of autumn in which the cold winter wind lashes madly at nature’s body and the darkness of night tries in despair to forestall the dawn, but in spite of all this, there are mothers who burn in the fever of labour and heroically bear a night of hardship. Finally, the dawn in its entire beauty prevails and the night goes away, the wind subsides, the mothers calm down in triumph, and the children come to the forefront of existence.
Then, the writer compares
his wife to a narcissus, which for him has both a personal and social
significance. First, before being incarcerated he had always sought the durable
beauty of the narcissus in his wife and sometimes even called her by that name.
Second, the narcissus begins to grow at the end of winter and comes to the city
in the hands of flower-vendors to usher in the joyous message of the Persian
New Year [Eid] and the advent of spring, in the same way that his wife, who was
born on the longest night of the year, had brought the message of growth and
hope both for him and her family.
And you, my mother, on the same day see a narcissus at your side, as full of light as the dawn, and as immaculate as a snowy mountain cap that with the radiation of the springtime sun (melts and) runs with the transparent streams into the heart of society. Let us all be congratulated on the occasion of _____’s birthday.
Perhaps the most complicated
case is when the writer mentions his wife’s interest in clouds and avalanches
in the ninth letter (see Appendix). If
the reader does not know that “avalanche” in Persian (bahman) is also the name of the month in which the Iranian
revolution of February 1979 occurred, he will undoubtedly fail to grasp the
writer’s message, namely that he wishes that the revolution, usurped by the new
Islamic regime after the downfall of the monarchy, would go on.
In these letters nature
plays an emancipating role. The moon,
clouds, and migratory birds in the sky are not only the harbingers of freedom
and release from prison, but they can also provide a point of contact and
reunion between two imprisoned lovers. Our writer and his wife were
incarcerated in different wards of the same prison, and if they both looked at
the moon on the same night they could make a connection beyond the bars. One
can clearly observe this feeling in the ninth letter (see Appendix).
I myself have heard this
feeling voiced by my own mother and sister. When my mother was still not sure whether
my brother Sa’id had been executed, in a poem she asks the moon to be a point
of eye contact between their gazes. Similarly, before their imprisonment, my
sister Nushin and her late husband Hussein had promised each other that, should
they ever become separated, they would reunite each night by looking at the
moon at nine o’clock. It seems likely
that Nushin continued this habit for years following Hussein’s execution.
In addition to methods of
suppression and torture, the authorities attempt to brainwash prisoners with
ideological programs and force a new identity upon them by wiping out their
memories. To fight this indoctrination, the prisoners usually strive to hold on
to their powers of memory and imagination. Like the archaeologist who unearths
a potsherds and has to rely on his or hers powers of memory and imagination to
revive a lost civilisation, the prisoner, when looking at any object, must
excavate, revive and explore the land of memory and dream that lies behind it.
A good example of this can
be found in the eighth letter (see Appendix) when the writer is temporarily
transferred to a ward which was previously occupied by his wife. He clings madly to the bars on the windows
and tries to look at the sky through his wife’s eyes and to revive his wife’s
presence with the help of material objects that at one time had been under her
touch and gaze. In the seventh letter,
he pictures himself in an “illusory meeting” between his wife and her parents
behind the bars of the visitors’ area, and, imagining the two parties’
dispositions and conversation for a long time, travels to the land of visions.
It should be said that in
prison, it is not only things considered junk in the outside world, such as
peach pits and pebbles, that find a new value and are transformed into artwork
in the creative hands of the imprisoned artists; it is every thing and word
that finds a new depth and dimension with the aid of the prisoner’s
memory. In fact, the physical
limitations in the prison lead to the honing of the prisoner’s mental powers,
and, like Charles Baudelaire’s albatross which is dropped on the deck by the
ruthless sailors with its legs bound, the prisoner can fly like a poet, with
the wings of imagination.
Just as blindness can lead
to strengthening of the sense of hearing, the walls and closed doors of prison,
too, lead to the emergence of new sensory windows within the prisoner’s
spirit. In his ninth letter, our prisoner
says he has dreamt of his wife in convulsions, and in his fifth letter, after
complaining that he has not received a letter, he takes refuge in his sixth
sense as such:
Today, especially from the
evening onwards, I am missing you. I have an odd feeling. I said to myself, maybe your letter is on the
way, but now it’s around one o’clock in the morning and I’ve become
disappointed. I have become more worried
that you are sick, perish the thought.
Also, a few times, including
in his fifth and eighteenth letters, he writes that his heart beats to his
wife’s breath; and his words should not be taken allegorically. When two people
think of each other deeply, their hearts grow close and a telepathic current
beyond the five senses connects them.
I myself remember that on
precisely January 7, 1982 I felt that the heart of ‘Ezzat, my late wife who had
been detained for four months, was no longer beating, and when two days later I
heard by telephone the news of her execution, I was not surprised. The prison walls were not able to separate
our hearts.
What is especially
impressive in these letters is the courage of the writer to express his love
for his wife. His wife was also a person of principle and integrity, and
inevitably the love between this couple strengthened their resistance against
the authorities. Nevertheless, this dynamic love was persistently questioned by
some prisoners. Our writer was criticised for having a lack of idealism because
in his letters he spoke of his wife’s beautiful eyes or called his love for her
the motive force of his life. In his fifth letter he writes,
Perhaps it is not intelligible for many people how in these circumstances, when people time and gain, to the sound of explosion search in fear and panic for their loved ones in the ruins left by bombardment, and with thousands of heartbreaking scenes created by the bombardment of schools, factories, and so on ... that you are worried about the narcissus like this. I cannot find a word or phrase which can clarify the question. What can I say about this narcissus, the flower of my being, my whole life and ... My life is the least thing I can sacrifice so this flower can bloom. How can I not be worried?
Our prisoner cannot find a
phrase to defend his love, but the mere expression of this love is obviously
its best defence. For the intolerant within the leftist movement, there exists
no individuality, and the expression of sentiment between lovers is branded as
bourgeois individualism. It is not accidental that this romantic account that
the writer has written about his first visit with his wife in the prison is
condemned equally by the prejudiced prisoners and the prison authorities:
An Animating joy of a moment of unexpected meeting, and dizzy, stunned, and upset how rapidly this moment passed and I did not know what I said or what I heard. But at that moment your open face and your warm gaze sliding down my being showed the sign of your pure and spotless love, a reflection of you laughing at all hardship, the mirror image of pains and separations that you suffer. And it was not surprising for me that you had always been that way. [From the seventh letters.]
The prison guards,
especially in the women’s ward, would mock prisoners on and off with words of
love lifted from their letters, accusing them of moral corruption. Of course,
under a regime which sees everything from a narrow religious point of view and
prefers women to remain under the veil, it is only natural that no room remains
for lovers to express their sentiments.
However many years have
passed since these letters were written, one can still feel the heat of passion
between these two lovers. Not only did this love enable them to stand firm
against the theocratic regime in Iran, but it also helped them safeguard
themselves against losing their individuality, a trend so prevalent in the
Iranian leftist movement at that time.
The philosophy of
imprisonment is based on the notion of keeping the prisoner separated from the
outside world, and for this reason, as one of the few means of communication
available to the prisoner, the letter plays a central role in prison life and
comes to subordinate all other activities.
Through a letter a political
prisoner could not only have a hand in organising prisoners’ struggles in other
wards and prisons and harmonise between the world inside the prison and out,
but the letter also serves as a notebook for his or her ideas, a channel
through which to continue an otherwise interrupted marriage, and sometimes even
as a vehicle for the prisoner’s literary talent. It occupies the prisoner’s mind when he or
she is either waiting for letters from others or writing his or her own.
In this connection, one can
mention the short remarks our prisoner’s wife jotted down below the text of her
husband’s letters shortly after receiving them in which she expressed the
immediate affect which the letters had on her or the circumstance of the ward
at the time she received them: “What a
longing heart!”, “How refreshing after doing the laundry [by hand]!”, and
“I was going to the (prison) shop to
carry back some supplies.” If the
letters of the prisoner’s wife to him are unavailable to use, we can at least
observe the direct effects which his letters had on her, and become more
acquainted with the role that the letters plays in a prisoner’s life.
In short, a letter which in
the outside world serves merely to exchange information, ideas, and sentiments,
takes on a pivotal role in prison to become the prisoner’s most significant
means of communication as well as a tool for unifying the past, present, and
future.
September
1995
Appendix
The
Third Letter
February 6, 1987
Dear_______, my dearest,
Hello! The night before last I got your fourth letter
which you wrote a few days after your birthday, and I was still in the mood of
that day [i.e., of your birthday], which revives sweet memories and wishes in
me. These days, I have become more
submerged in myself than ever. I have been thinking about you, your birth, and
the passion that you showed while talking about birth and emergence; and I
remember the birth of infants which we witnessed a while ago before our arrest,
and how much I wanted to be able to provide you with conditions in which you
could try to raise and educate them with your entire passion, and I know what a
good mother you could become, were, and are. And I try to imagine and figure
out how much those infants must have grown. Most likely, after three or four
years they will have been walking, talking, laughing, crying, taking steps, and
running in the heart of society. How are
your illnesses? I think due to recent
hardships, they must have grown worse. I
am very worried about that. If only I
had all of your pains, how comfortable I would be, and you would be relieved
for a moment. Give a warm hello to Mother _____ and Dad, and kiss the moon-like
face of ____. My hellos to all friends and relatives.
Your Husband
________
May the fire of our love
glow more and more brightly!
[Note of addressee:]
Received Tuesday, February 20, 1987 at 5 o’clock. I was very depressed.
Eighth
Letter
June 4, 1987
Dear ______, my good
partner,
Have a good day!
Throughout these four months that have passed so far this year I have
not received any letter from you. I do not know if you will receive this letter
or not. Anyhow, for the sake of writing
a letter, I have been going over our life together for hours. From the first day we met on that sunny day
by the reservoir on Azerbaijan Street, until we met at the visitors’ area [of
the prison] last March, its every moment passes through my mind, so that your
warm gaze and your beautiful voice I could feel in my soul and remembrance of
your illnesses shakes my body. Only for
the memory of your happy spirit and your overflowing love for green and
beautiful plains releases my soul. It
has been around seventeen days since we were moved to the new ward, a ward that
for a while had been the shelter of my ________, a ward you spent some time in. When your memory makes me impatient, I take
refuge in room #2. I cling to the
bars. I stare at the hills, sky, and
clouds, and at whatever I think you might have been gazing at through the bars
and been drawing into your thoughts, and I try to penetrate your thoughts. I press your kind and generous hands to my
heart. Say hello to Mom and Day and
convey my heartfelt love and respect to them. By any means tell me about your
physical conditions. My heart beats to your breath.
Your husband,
______
325 Ward Upper 2
[Note of address:] Received Sunday, July 4, 1987 at 10.30 a.m.
Ward 2, formerly 325
May 17, 1987
My soul’s dearest, my good
____.
The last letter I received from you was on the last days
of last year. From then on, I have only
the most meagre news from you, and you know how unbearable that is for me, and
I know that this is the case for your, too. When the expected time for
receiving your letter has passed and I am waiting for the letter, I lose the
strength to do anything and then I take refuge in the moon and stare at it at
night behind the bars on the window so that I can feel your laughing gaze,
because I know you watch the clouds and you love the rain, snow and avalanches.
With your warm gazes you please the moon, and then I can see a narcissus in the
moon’s burning face. But my soul still finds no relief, and I think about where
I can find you again. I take refuge in
your letters and read them time and again. Finally I see that I must return to
my heart and my soul, that you have a place in my heart and I can hear your
voice with the ear of my soul, “as long as the tale of loss and gain hinders
unification, one should bear the hardship and suffering of love.” My soul finds
relief, and in loneliness I sit to talk with you because conversation with you
is the source of life for me and I regret that I did not take advantage of
every moment of that one year of the spring of our life to talk with you and
that I let the time pass by. I am very
worried about your health. A few days
ago I dreamt of you in convulsions. I wish I could buy all your pains with my
soul, then how relieved I could be. My
warm hellos to all of my dearest. The
remembrance of your gazes fills me up.
Your husband
____________
Hall 3, Room 16
[Note of addressee:] received Thursday, August 21, 1987 at 6
p.m. How refreshing after doing the
laundry [by hand]!