From Equator
Generations of organisers and dissidents have kept the Iranian struggle alive
A few hours after I was born, my mother and I were taken back to prison. It was September 1983, four years after the Iranian revolution and three years into a war with Iraq that the Islamic Republic was using to tighten its machinery of repression. My mother was bleeding heavily from a tear sustained during labor, but the Sister – the prison guards went by ‘Sister’ and ‘Brother’ – ignored the doctor’s plea for her to remain in hospital overnight.
Blindfolded, handcuffed, barely able to stand: she could not possibly carry me. It was the Sister who held me in her arms as we were driven through rush-hour traffic back to Evin, a penitentiary complex that sits in the idyllic foothills of the Alborz Mountains in north Tehran. We arrived in the afternoon. As the Sister opened the door, my mother’s cellmates rushed forward, dressed in their best, as if it were Nowruz. The floor of the overcrowded cell had been swept; a bouquet of early autumn leaves shined in an aluminum jar. The women clapped and sang as we entered. The Sister shouted for silence, but they ignored her: laughing, crying, ululating, passing me from one pair of arms to another.
The tender welcome startled my mother, a leftist serving a two-year sentence for political activism. Most days, her cellmates could hardly stand one another and barely spoke at all. They were among the tens of thousands of activists – ranging from socialists and communists to Islamist-Marxists – who the Islamic Republic had imprisoned. Many had helped bring down the Western-backed Shah, only to find themselves, not long after, behind another set of walls. Each came from a different camp; each held the others, to some degree, responsible for a revolution gone astray and for the tyranny that followed. And yet, on that day, they set aside their differences and gathered around something more immediate: a new life.
The fall of the monarchy in 1979 did not end dictatorship; it transformed it. King became Supreme Leader; SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, gave way to the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia. The jails filled again.
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