A Student Reflects on a Presentation by Author Marina Nemat

Lauren Anderson, Grade 12 Student
By Lauren Anderson (‘18)

Marina Nemat, the author of Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir and human rights activist, visited Greenwood to speak about her time in Ivan prison in Iran during her youth. Marina was born in Tehran, Iran during the 1960s. As a child, Marina spent her time doing what any young person would do: shop, see movies, dance on the beach and spend time with her friends. During this time Iran was not yet an Islamic republic. Iran consisted of a population that was 98% Muslim and 2% other religions such as Christianity and Judaism. She and her family were Christian. Women were allowed to wear whatever they wanted and the street outside Marina's window resembled that of a street downtown Toronto.

In March of 1979, a referendum on creating an Islamic republic was held in Iran. In Canada, the average voter turnout for a political election is around 61%. The voter turnout in March of 1979 in Iran was nearly 98%. While the voter turnout was enormous, Marina, who was too young to vote, recalls speaking to friends, family, and teachers who would be voting about what the Islamic Republic was. Their answer consisted of the words, “I am not sure” and “it is a good thing.” That mentality seemed to be shared with the general Islamic population as 99.3% of them would go on to vote for the new Islamic Republic.

However, horror doesn’t grow overnight. Marina describes it as a tap in the background of her life that is dripping water: drip, drip, drip, too quiet to notice for some, and for others too insignificant to care about. So, with the tap dripping in the background, life continued. Marina continued to spend time with friends and found fun in her time without rules while a new constitution was being written.

Time passed. Marina experienced her principal and friends disappearing, later found out to have been sent to Ivan prison, and later executed. The government outlawed things such as music and dancing, which to a 13-year-old such as Marina they, “outlawed fun”. Marina describes herself as someone who cannot stay quiet about the things she believes in; at an early age she went to protests and rallies against the new government and even wrote an article about her views on the Islamic Republic in her school paper. On January 15, 1982, at 16 years old Marina would lose every aspect of the life she knew. She was sent to Ivan for life in prison where she was interrogated, tortured, raped and forced to marry a guard who she would later find out to be a former victim.

Upon realizing this, something became clear. What is good and evil? Most people, including Marina, believe they are two separate things with a clear line in between. In Marina's case, she always believed that she was the good and the people of Ivan were evil, which seems true. The guards of Ivan beat her feet with cable as she screamed the Hail Mary until the pain took over her entire body and she forgot the words. They slapped her feet with the cable until they turned indigo blue and as big as balloons, and when she saw them she couldn’t do anything but laugh. They took away her dignity, her joy, and her security until she was left with nothing. But her guard was put in the same position. The person holding the cable was once on the other side of it. Marina wonders what she would do if a cable was put in her hand and the guards of Ivan were strapped on the table in front of her. Who would be evil? Suddenly, the line becomes blurred. Marina chose a quote from Einstein that outlines this: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Good will never come from evil, evil will never come from good. More often than not our lives are lived on a hamster wheel running nowhere in search of defining the two.

At the end of the hour, Marina left us with something. A thought. She told the students that we are the future but we are also the now. The root of a revolution is teenagers, the people who will inherit the earth. It is our responsibility to vote, it is our responsibility to be educated on what we vote for, it is our responsibility to pay attention to the tap when it is dripping. We can all learn something from Marina’s experience, whether that is courage, honesty or gratitude for the life we lead.

The insight that I received from Marina Nemat's talk was that writing is something that can be very healing. Marina spoke about how she used writing as a form of therapy to help express her time in Evin prison and the post-traumatic stress that came with it. I also learned that the best writing is done when it is done for yourself. In her therapeutic writing that later became her memoir, it is clear to see that the writing was so strong because she put herself into it. She relived the experiences again and wrote about them as if she didn't know what was happening next. She wrote her experience for herself, to help herself heal.

I feel as though if Marina wrote it with the intention of publishing it, the story would have been told from an outside perspective rather than from the same room as the experiences were taking place. As a writer, I learned that when writing, even though it is just ink on paper, your heart, emotion and rawness shine through if you allow it to. If you write to heal or write to escape but above all write for yourself, chances are someone somewhere will connect to it. If you are strong enough to put yourself into your words, people will see themselves in you. This happened to Marina when after her book was published she started receiving letters from other women who shared the similar experiences to her. The talk was very informative and influential both as a writer and as a person.
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