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we lived to tell: political prison memoirs of Iranian women
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Book Review
we lived to tell: political prison memoirs of Iranian women
2010
Overview
Despite the markedly distinct voice, perspective and project of each author's contribution, the narratives share many features because they write from the same place and time, and Evin's strategies were forced on all of them: executions (counting gunshots); torture, especially flogging of the soles of feet; violent institutionalized misogyny; extreme overcrowding and underfeeding; blindfolds; camphor in the tea (to suppress sexual longings); babies and young children kept with and then removed from imprisoned mothers; a preponderance of prisoners in their late teens; 'trials' that defy any notion of justice - that would leave Kafka gasping; hours of enforced 'educational programming' each day that turn the jailhouse version of Islam into something unrecognizable, unwelcome to the devout and the secular alike. [...] memoirs that present themselves as part of a 'depressingly familiar' oeuvre may prove controversial in their truth claims, as scandals of the last years have proven all too well.3 One of the texts reviewed by Wildman, Marina Nemat's 2007 Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir, has been greeted with angry scepticism by some of her fellow survivors of Evin for what they describe as self-serving distortions and inventions: these critics claim that much in her memoir was fabricated.4 Second, the commonalities among the three essays assembled in We Lived to Tell are not merely depressing.
