Review of Marina Nemat’s chilling “Prisoner of Tehran”

Marina describes 1970’s Iran before the revolution as a peaceful, culturally alive country. Her father taught dance, while her mother worked as a hairdresser. Her childhood was innocent and hopeful. She recounts summers by the sea, wearing t-shirts and jeans, eating bologna sandwiches and going to parties with her friends. She meets a boy and they have a sweet but innocent romance. Only months later, he vanishes during a political rally. Horrified and heartbroken, Marina later sees his body in news footage of the protest. With that, her childhood is gone and a sinking sense of change closes in. Her world will never be the same.
The pages of this true story unfold with devastating weight as Marina takes us through the hallways of Evin prison, its torture rooms, cells, and her own execution site. Her Christian faith miraculously sustains her. She prays and tries to forgive. It becomes the key to her survival.

One of her captors, who she is later forced to marry, tells her she was praying when he saw her for the first time. “He said that with my head tilted toward the ceiling and my lips moving slightly in what seemed like a prayer, I had been calm in the middle of a world of fear and despair that surrounded me.” He is her captor, but seems strangely destined to set her free.
Marina and her friends, mere teenagers, live in a world of invisible silence. They think they are forgotten, unseen by the world, with no hope for freedom. Their trials proceed without them. They are found innocent or guilty by whim. It’s as if they are no longer people, no longer human beings created by God. All of that has been stolen from them and it was disturbingly easy to do. One day they were young and free, the next their world changed around them.

In her cell Marina traces an etched phrase with her finger on the wall. Can anyone hear me? She couldn’t tell how long it had been there or who had written it.

On Christmas Day 1983, she stood in the prison’s courtyard gathering laundry from clotheslines. The snow touched her face and numbed her feet. On the same day, I sat under my Christmas tree and opened a package of purple sneakers. When I read the date I knew instantly what I was doing that day. How could this have been happening at the same time?

Though Marina’s life becomes triumphant in time, her story leaves me with a gaping hole in my heart. Evin prison is still open for business today. Even now this story is unfolding again and again within its walls. I wish I could tear it down.