Author Marina Nemat gives us a first hand account of what it was like to live through the early years of Iran's Islamic Revolution and her ordeal as an inmate at the notorious Evin Prison (where nightmares are born and, nurtured on the souls of human beings, flourish in perpetuity).
It is the story of so many of the innocents in so many of the revolutions throughout modern history: In 1982, Marina Moradi-Bakht, a 16 year-old Christian girl of Russian background, was arrested by the Revolutionary Guards on suspicions of counter-revolutionary activity. Alerted by a list from her school's newly appointed ideologue principal, the Guards took Marina and several of her girlfriends to Tehran's Evin Prison. There Marina was beaten, questioned and sentenced to death. If not for the intercession of Ali Moosavi, one of the Guards at Evin who had become infatuated with her, Marina would be dead today. Ali used his family's connections to Khomeini to have the girl's sentence reduced to life imprisonment. In return for his help Moosavi would demand conversion to Islam and marriage from Marina, compelling her with threats to her family and her friend (and true love) Andre.
The ordeal this abused and exploited child was forced to endure is told in chapters alternating with others that describe her life prior to the revolution. In those alternate chapters she recalls her life as precocious but slightly introverted girl, living with a self-involved mother and an even more emotionally distant father. Marina had the misfortune of losing those few who deeply loved and cared for her: such as her doting Russian grandmother who passed away, and her first boyfriend Aram who was killed during a demonstration against the Shah. Indeed, she admits the irony of finding in Ali's family the warmth and closeness she never experienced from her own. Until meeting Andre, Marina was a lonely girl whose only outlet was in books and stories.
Marina's book documents the suffering of those who are often the most abused and exploited in conflicts: the women and the children. At a time when Marina and her friends should have been daydreaming the universal wishes and fantasies of all teenaged girls, they instead were being beaten and raped, tortured and murdered.
What is most extraordinary about Marina Nemat's story is its testimony to the brutalization and dehumanization of both aggressors as well as victims under the fanaticism of ideological revolution - and despite the Islamic Republic's theological wrapping, it is all about politics and ideology. She is very fair and understanding to the memory of Ali Moosavi. Marina writes of his own three years spent in Evin as a prisoner during the time of the Shah. She writes about his frustration for not being able to save the girls from the sadism of some of his colleagues. Marina has the honesty to show us the humanity in this flawed and troubled man, who was eventually himself betrayed by the evil into which he had naively put his faith and service. I further appreciate the way Marina portrayed Ali's family; she remember's Ali's father as a man of honor and principles, who welcomed her -and would later protect her- as if she were his own child.
Marina Nemat isn't another "Persian Princess" inviting you to her own pity party. Nor is she like Betty Mahmoody, distorting perceptions of Iran and Iranians for selfish melodramatic effect. To the contrary, Ms. Nemat has much love for her fellow Iranians, as she writes of their struggles to hold onto their dignity while enduring one of the most oppressive regimes existing today. I strongly recommend this book.
Caesar Warrington
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