Presented at "It Must
Not Happen Again: The 20th Anniversary of Iranian Political Prisoner's
Massacre in Summer 1988", Montreal, Canada 2008
Shokoufeh Sakhi
I'm going to begin by reading some excerpts from a piece I wrote
for an Anthology dedicated to remembering the events of 1988 in
Iran that is soon to be published in London.
A Taste of Mortaddela:
Forgetting and Remembering the Summer of 1988
Does the distance of some twenty years clarify reflection, obscure
sequences of events, illuminate meanings, render names and dates
suspect? Yes. Do any of these effect the essence of the matter?
Not in the least. What then is this experience of memories and how
can I communicate it to you? Muddled by the daily rememberings and
forgettings of the intervening years, momentous events and minute
details jostle one another with the familiarity of nocturnal repetition,
with the poignancy of the return or death of a lost friend, with
the stubbornness of a constant heart. With all this and so much
more, it may be best to begin this remembering of the summer of
nineteen-eighty-eight with the bare facts and let the reminiscences
tell their own story as they unfold…. Where to begin?
Iran is a country with many large prisons. In Tehran there were
two main ones in the city and two more big ones in the suburbs.
In the summer of 1988, I am in one of them: Evin prison, in one
of its five separate compounds. More precisely, I am in ward one
of the three wards of the Amoozesh-gah compound, women's section,
and in room one of the six in this ward, where I live with, at various
times, between twenty and thirty other prisoners. Ward one for the
most part holds prisoners who are kept beyond the completion of
their official sentences, Azady-ha , closed in a cell without toilet
or running water. I remember a day in July….
Friday or Saturday, the 29th or 30th of July, 1988
The door opens; a guard's head appears: "hejab", she orders
and closes the door. One of us starts distributing chadors. The
Mojahedin have their own stash and they distribute theirs. Mandatory
when males are present, we are still putting them on when the guard
opens the door again: "Hurry up, cover yourselves and sit down".
We seat ourselves against the walls around the room. I find a spot
across from the women who have been arrested in relation to the
militant Islamic oppositional organization, Sazeman-e Mojahedin-e
khalgh-e Iran (People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran--PMOI) and
wonder what is going on this time. Yesterday the guards removed
the television sets from the three women's wards . This morning
the guards refused to give us our ration of two daily newspapers,
and now there are officials here.
Why are they here today? Something is happening. What is it?
The room is circled by veiled women sitting on the floor. I know
their hearts are thumping like mine as our faces assume the usual
artificial coolness and the usual overlay of approaches to such
contact. Some dare the presence of the officials, some avert their
eyes; some say we are not here, you don't see us; some say see us,
yes, we are here in your face. Some whisper under their breath;
some lips hint toward a smirk; some even feel playful, challenging
the officials' presence, while others remain serious, grand and
proud. It seems we all sense the proximity of some event; we all
maintain our usual façade, but intensified anxiety is the rule.
The silence is broken only by an isolated cough here and there.
Something is up.
-----
Memory? What an evasive thing it is! Thing? What an ethereal experience!
Experience? What an event it is to remember! I used to wish that
some form of hypnotic suggestion would make it possible to get at
some objective truth, that finally it would be possible to pick
up a pair of tweezers and extract the scattered images and voices
from my soul, line them up and call them 'history'. But now I know
that memory, history itself, is not made up of a series of discreet
events, like beads on a string, each causing the next and the whole
thing being 'history'. No, it is meaning, meaning always intimately
related to now… and it should be. These memories, here and now,
appear in my reflections as snap-shots, as cherished and painful
experiences, as meanings…
Climbing up the iron shelf that covers the east wall and blocks
the cell window that would open on the space behind the building,
we try to get our ears as close as possible to the outside. It is
around one or two after midnight. I crouch on top of the shelf and
extend my neck. My friend hushes everybody; "listen, they are
taking them for execution. I hear men singing the International".
Straining, I, too, hear something. Is it some scuffling, maybe men's
voices? Or, I think I hear voices… do I? We are all frozen stiff
on the shelf, mid-way climbing up, or squatted down on the floor
trying to capture a sound wave that might be sneaking into our room
through cracks in the iron-shaded window behind the massive iron
shelf. One thinks she heard noises coming from the direction of
the solitary confinement building (they called it Asayesh-gah, the
"relaxation spa"!). Another thinks she heard guards barking
commands. One is sure she hears nothing and then thinks maybe she
does. Another hears chanting. Silently, an image flows into our
minds: the guards taking a group of our comrades from the male solitary
section for execution, blind-folded, each one's hand on the shoulder
of the one ahead of him, chanting and singing the International,
walking to their deaths. Slowly we retrace our steps, resume our
sleeping places on the spread blankets on the floor. It is quiet
now.
Have you ever seen a panther caged in a zoo? Sometimes it paces
in a straight line: back and forth, back and forth, back and ….
And we paced in our rib-cage, in our minds; we paced the cell floor
back and forth, back and forth, and again. What would you have done?
---
One late fall day (or was it early winter?) all of the Azady-ha
from three rooms in ward one and a number of prisoners selected
from ward three are ordered to pack their belongings and be ready
for transportation. They load us into buses and take us to Gohar-Dasht
prison. There, they send us all into a public ward, one previously
occupied by male prisoners. Gohar-Dasht's warden, giving his blessing
to us, says; "here is where everything began and here it is
going to end. This is the end for you". He asks if any of us
has been given lashes and one of us says she has received them to
the end. He barks: "They did not end; we stopped them and we
will start them up again whenever we feel like it". Then, with
sarcasm, he adds "Here is where we hanged all of your 'jewels'"
and steps outside of the ward. 'Gohar' means "jewel" and
'dasht' means "field": Gohar-Dasht is field of jewels.
I do not remember what else he said. But I do remember that, rather
than frightening, it just felt so unreal being in that ward, walking,
sitting, eating, sleeping, living in those cells and hallways; places
that belonged to others, filled only a few months ago with our male
comrades. The experience of being in that ward is inexpressible.
Even now, twenty years later, awareness, presence, acknowledgment
is still arriving; I don't imagine there will be a time when it
has fully arrived. To say that it was surreal doesn't begin to get
it, actually diminishes the experience of being in a ward where
all occupants, everyone without exception, was suddenly plucked
from life. …As for ourselves, there we were, in a borrowed space
on borrowed time.
Pieces of men's clothing lie scattered here and there. There is
the odd slipper, a sock. Every piece of scrap paper, the smallest
object we find, is a treasure; holding it is holding onto a life,
preventing it from vanishing into nothing. We are here; we know
what has happened here. Sometimes it feels as if we are there with
them, them with us, that we can feel and hear all the daily hustle
and bustle of the hundreds of men. It is like there is a temporal
and spatial gap between us. And we flow through this gap. Does that
make any sense to you?
A friend walks toward me and a couple of others standing by a cell
door talking.
"Who wants a taste of Mortadella?" Her mischievous eyes
brighten up her bony face as she shows us her 'find'. She's holding
a jar containing bits of feta cheese soaked in salt-water, pieces
of dried bread crumbs and a small container of garlic powder.
"Here, try it." She gives us each a piece of bread.
"Soak it in the cheese water and then sprinkle it with garlic
powder…. Now, eat it!" She looks at us with delight.
"Aha! Oh yeah," I say, "it does taste like Mortadella.
I can't believe it."
"Didn't I tell you? Want more?"
Today when I look back I see that the prison wanted to defeat us,
to break our spirit by taking us out of our familiar space and putting
us in the space saturated with the absence of thousands of resisting
souls, with death. And that is precisely what did not happen: we
were alive, stubbornly, insistently alive, unwilling to go out and
meet death before it came to us, unwilling to be cowed by it. We
spent our first hours organizing our daily lives. We sat up our
routines, resumed life from where it had been interrupted: readings,
drawings, telling stories, debating political and philosophical
topics, studying … and we added daily walks up and down the huge
hallway.
----------
I'll stop there… life and death went on, as it does today. What
I want to do now is share some thoughts on the importance of such
experiences of the 80s and their relationships to our present situation,
in particular in relation to the need to do more to bridge the gap
in understanding and solidarity between that generation --mine--
and the present one. My object is not to proffer solutions, much
less to call for some action or another. Rather, it is to suggest
that we need to take the time and energy and maybe the courage to
seriously reflect on the importance for both generations of remembering
our history and suggest some indication of why. Here is what I wrote:
A few years ago I came across a young Iranian new-comer. She was
sitting in a coffee-shop reading a prison memoir named Eye to Eye
with the Monster. She turned to my friend and I with an innocent
astonishment and asked us if we had heard anything about the prison
system in the 1980s. Listening to her, I was stunned to realize
that there could be people who had lived in Iran and had no idea
of what had happened in the 1980s. This was not the last time that
I faced young Iranians who either had no clue about the events of
the first decade following the revolution, or had heard only bits
and pieces of information or if they had heard anything were unable
to face and accept the events of 1980s as part of their heritage,
the history of their country. At the same time I had to recognize
and face the people of my generation's ignorance --including my
own ignorance-- of the "reality" shared by our descendant
generations: we are many people of one country and one history,
yet we exist in mutual ignorance.
I want to say we humans are creatures of both history-making and
forgetfulness. And we Iranians are not an exception to this general
rule but rather a good example of it. A glance at our history over
the last hundred years is striking for the presence of three constants.
Aside from short and exceptional moments, the political power has
been mostly concentrated in the grip of either authoritarian and
dictatorial or totalizing governing apparatuses. Alongside the persistence
and dominance of all-powerful ruling bodies (whether full monarchy,
constitutional monarchy or republic, whether secular or religious)
our history is also rich with various oppositional forces, social
and political movements, strikes and struggles, rebellions and revolutions.
These two constants demand our recognition of and attention to the
third one, which is our historical forgetfulness, discontinuity,
and therefore our relative impotence in the face of these regimes.
This third constant is my concern here today; it is this constant,
I believe, that requires our active attention, reflection and thoughtful
remedy. As the ruling bodies learn from their own and their predecessor's
historical experiences and enjoy a relative continuity, we on the
other side of the social and political spectrum suffer from the
disease of historical disjunction and forgetfulness, both forced
upon us and more or less willfully accepted. Without learning from
and appropriating the historical experiences of our predecessor's,
each generation has picked the banner of struggle up from the ground
and started from scratch. Let us not confuse historical information
with historical understanding. When I speak of historical forgetfulness
I do not mean that we lack knowledge about the date, place and name
of different events, the names of historical figures or the number
of those killed in different uprisings. The history of a human society
cannot be reduced to such a chronicle of events (although I have
to confess that my own grasp of basic historical information was
very limited when I joined our struggle). Even when my generation
of political activists and revolutionary forces were informed about
the events --the constitutional revolution in 1905, Gilan and Azarbijan's
revolutionary movements, or nationalization of oil in the 1951--
we lacked a genuine historical understanding. We were and still
are ignorant of their historical contexts, objective and subjective
conditions, the material necessities and intellectual analyses from
which we might learn. Instead of inheriting their experiences and
their thoughts, their achievements and failures, and instead of
engaging them with a critical and reflective mind and recognizing
the historical continuity between our revolutionary movement in
1979 and its hopes and demands with the previous ones, we willfully
discarded all those struggles as mere relics of the past. We tended
to honestly, and with striking naiveté, believe that "the past
belonged to the past, that our revolutionary movement of 1979 was
something separate and different from all the defeated, compromised,
conservative, traitor-ridden movements of the previous generations".
Unfortunately we were not the last generation with short-term, flawed
and willful lack of memory. The responsibility to challenge and
confront with this persistent, conscious and unconscious tendency
to dismiss and forget the life, the death, the thought that has
come before us, is on our shoulders: I mean we, the generation of
yesterday, the first decade after revolution (1980s) and you, the
generation of today.
In Iran, like anywhere else, as long as there is not freedom and
justice in their full human and ethical sense, as long as we fail
to participate fully and directly in the political sphere, as long
as the decisions in every aspect of our lives, from the political
to the educational, is turned over from one group to another domineering
ruling body, our history will be condemned to repeated cycles of
impotent protests and struggles.
It is the generations of today and tomorrow who carry on and will
continue to carry on this struggle for Iran's future. It is my hope
that you of the present generation will not follow us with another
"honest but strikingly naïve" judgment about your predecessors,
dismissing your historical heritage, maybe with such slogans as
"they were idealists but we are pragmatists".
The decade of 1980 is a critical decade in our recent history and
that is not just because of the exceptional unleashed brutality
of the prevailing political power, not just the astronomical number
of people they imprisoned, not just in the number of people they
murdered, not just because the same regime is still in power. It
is also because of the enormity of lived experiences, of the thoughts,
hopes, needs, and dreams, of the stupidity, fear and defeats, the
political, philosophical and psychological manipulations. It is
because there is something to be shared in solidarity and to be
learned from.
The decade of 1980 in its entirety is an unimaginable trauma affecting
the body of Iran, a body at the time without the resources or the
time to deal with its trauma, concentrated as it was on daily survival.
Though this experience was similar in many ways to the previous
historical trauma of Shah's coup d'état 1953, we Iranians succumbed
to the continuation of the politics of suppression, censorship and
threat. After the 1980s we Iranians either learned to adapt and
survive by adopting and internalizing the culture of silence and
forgetting, denying our connection to the reality of the next generations,
or we simply remained trapped in that 1980s reality and ignorant
of the historical reality of the those who came after us.
This historical rift will not be remedied without the willing participation
of both sides of the 80s, in an open, inquisitive, thoughtful, and
of course painful, dialogue. The experience of 1980s is neither
of the past, to be forgotten, nor is it a property of the 80s generation.
It is part of our living history and belongs to all of us.
Today, politically motivated arrests continue to be part of the
daily routine. Women's activists, lawyers, students, teachers, bus
drivers, factory workers, intellectuals, journalists, blogists,
professors, the young and the elderly are all subjects to threat,
imprisonment, physical and psychological torture and death. It is
true that the regime's violence against its citizens is not as wild
and savage as the 1980s, but it is also true that there are no structural
barriers built into the system against the full use of that level
of power and violence. There is no institutional protection for
those who get locked behind the doors of a prison in Iran. Those
of you who have had a taste of prison during the last decade, were
you sure that you weren't going to be tortured? Did you not have
a sense of what your parents' generation experienced and did you
not perhaps harbor the fear of tasting something similar at the
hands of the same regime? If you did not, perhaps you should have:
we all know that the present regime revels, domestically and internationally,
in their unpredictability and lack of restraint and we should take
that seriously.
We, in my generation, have experienced what they are capable of.
But more importantly we have also experienced what we are capable
of. Not everyone died in there, nor everyone broke beyond recovery
and redemption; we also resisted their torture, their terror and
their project of tavabization… and survived it, not just staying
alive but keeping our humanity whether or not we stayed alive. We
learned something about humanity, about resistance to inhumanity.
The present generation can learn both from our successes and our
failures, our insights and our failures to comprehend. Although
during the last decade and more through arts, literature, political
and human rights campaigns and the insistence of the families of
prisoners and the executed ones in Iran we have managed to prevent
its from falling in the cracks of history and to oblivion, this
is no longer enough. The generations must learn how to learn from
each other.
The point I'm driving at is a simple, but I think, crucial one.
For our part, to understand the depth and heart of what happened
in the prisons of 1980s we must go beyond description and explanation
of what the prison did to us, it requires moving beyond heroism
and victimization discourses and beyond antiquated factional infighting.
The present generation must decide what they are going to do, but,
I am arguing that it would be a shame to remain so enclosed in your
own perspectives that you --and we--failed to find a common ground
of engagement. To do this and to prevent this part of our collective
history, human knowledge and experiences from disappearing from
our living memories, becoming another useless and ultimately meaningless
phase in the cycle of dismissal and forgetting, followed by the
next one --yours--, we all, the generation of the 80s and the generations
of today and tomorrow have our share of responsibility. Consider
this an invitation.