Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir

Ottawa Citizan: Two Revolutionary Guards came to arrest Marina Nemat on Jan. 15, 1982. She was at home in Tehran, about to take a bath. It was 9 p.m. Marina was just 16.

Marina's problems, as detailed in her new heartbreaking memoir, Prisoner of Tehran, had started two years earlier when she had asked a preachy school teacher to stuff the politics and stick to calculus. Marina was ordered to leave the classroom. Most of the other students trailed after her in solidarity.

Later, Marina attended rallies protesting the Islamic government of Ayatollah Khomeini. She also wrote for a rebellious student newspaper. She was definitely travelling with the wrong crowd, according to the authorities. And she was definitely being watched.
Friends began to be arrested. Marina knew her turn would come. Her sweetheart, Andre, an electrical engineering student, urged her to flee. But there was nowhere to go.

Wrapped in a cashmere shawl and clutching a string of Catholic prayer beads, Marina was taken to Evin Prison, the infamous hellhole where Montreal photo-journalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested, tortured, raped and killed in 2001, simply for taking photographs of a student protest outside the building.

At Evin, Marina was whipped into unconsciousness and then sentenced to death during a secret trial. Just before she could be shot, she was rescued by a guard named Ali she had met the night of her arrest. The world suddenly got even stranger.

For reasons that still baffle Marina today, Ali had fallen madly, obsessively in love with her at first sight. He proposed marriage. Marina had no choice. If she refused or tried to escape through suicide, Ali vowed he would hurt her parents and Andre. Marina was also forced to pretend to convert publicly to Islam from Christianity. She and Ali were married July 23, 1982 in the home of Ali's parents. After a brief "honeymoon" of repeated rapes, Marina was sent back to prison and put in solitary so Ali could visit and spend nights with her.

The marriage was brief. Ali was fatally shot, most likely because of a feud among prison officials. Thanks to the efforts of Ali's parents, Marina was released from Evin, 26 months after her initial arrest. She returned to her own parents' home and soon wed Andre in a Christian church despite a law forbidding her, a supposed Muslim convert, from marrying outside her religion.
The couple arrived in Canada on Aug. 28, 1991. They have two young sons and live in Aurora, near Toronto. And it is from the safety and tranquillity of that suburban home that Nemat wrote her memoir.

Prisoner of Tehran is just now hitting bookstores across Canada. Soon it will be in 16 countries, including the United States and United Kingdom. A British television movie is also in the works. Nemat is writing the screenplay for the prominent London production house, Tiger Aspect.

Nemat is one of the headliners of the eight-day Ottawa International Writers Festival, beginning today at Library and Archives Canada on Wellington Street. The woman who was once simply known by her neighbours as the friendly waitress at a suburban Swiss Chalet is about to become a literary celebrity plus a living symbol of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in post-Shah Iran who were sent to Evin, tortured and, in many cases, executed.

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.
At the festival, Nemat will be rubbing shoulders with such literary heavyweights as novelists Barbara Gowdy, Rawi Hage, C.S. Richardson and Lawrence Hill, poets Dennis Lee, John Barton, George Bowering and David O'Meara, environmentalist David Suzuki, religion writer Tom Harpur and Ottawa-based social commentator Roy MacGregor...read more

You can order her book by clicking on the picture above or here.

*Watch the movie "A few Simple Shot" about the Iranian Political Prisoners:
by clicking here.

*(Warning: Not for the Squeamish)

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