{"id":7362,"date":"2025-01-11T15:35:46","date_gmt":"2025-01-11T14:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/?page_id=7362"},"modified":"2025-01-11T15:40:40","modified_gmt":"2025-01-11T14:40:40","slug":"a-story-of-an-archive-love-and-death-in-prison-letters","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/a-story-of-an-archive-love-and-death-in-prison-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"A story of an archive: Love and death in prison letters"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Presentation of Professor Shahla Talebi<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Arizona Estate University<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In one of those endless nights of the summer of 1988, besieged by a strange grief, an Iranian woman political inmate squeezed herself in between the narrow space of the metal shutters of the cell and stared at the mystifying sky.\u00a0 A gulping void was rapidly growing inside her, as if a monster was about to swallow her from within.\u00a0 Her heart seemed to know of the gravity of the loss of which she would only learn months later.\u00a0 Unlike the smooth gliding of the clouds, her hand hastily moved on the paper to accommodate the words which were forcing their way out.\u00a0 She had to however restrain herself and her hand to conform to the boundaries of the seven-line rule of prison letters and to the censorship.\u00a0 Every word, metaphor, and poetic expression had thus to be carefully chosen.\u00a0 The fusion of her intense emotions and prison regulations were manifest in the letter she wrote that night, wherein the trivialities of the everyday interrupt the fantasies of her party in the moon.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In the absence of any news about you, for hours last night, I sat in solitude with you and with the sky of our memories.\u00a0 Such a sky: the darkness intermingled with colors, the moon glided on the shoulders of the bright silvery clouds in the heart of the pouring moonlight.\u00a0 When during such fantastic moments I invite the moon to our party, do you hear the knock of the moon and I on the window of your heart?\u00a0\u00a0 When you sit to watch the moon, do you recognize me riding on the clouds of the far out dreams coming towards you?\u00a0 These days I come to see you more than ever.\u00a0 Your letters do not reach me and with no visits with you, I restlessly await your letters.\u00a0 Write to me.\u00a0 How is your shoulder, your jaw and teeth?\u00a0\u00a0 If you need money please write me about it\u2026I am fine and as always spend my days with sweet memories and treasured beliefs and more than ever am eager to see you.<\/p>\n

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As the opening suggests, this paper offers only a glimpse to the story of love, separation, and death, all condensed in a small archive of prison letters, exchanged in the 1980s between two inmate couple.<\/p>\n

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inmate couple. The husband was executed in the summer of 1988 but the woman survived and now lives in the US. For her and many other surviving inmates, the summer of 1988 embodies a turning point, a referential moment in relation to which other events find a place in their mental and symbolic calendar.\u00a0 Yet, confined by the time limit, I herein neither offer a detailed account of the events of that summer nor of the content or the complex multilayered meanings of the letters.\u00a0 I rather pursue two interrelated and quite urgent goals.\u00a0 The first of these imperatives has to do with the elements of time and justice, or indeed our disjointed time and its injustices and the silences they impose on this particular history of the massacre of political dissidents in Iran.\u00a0 I should point out, at the outset, that I perceive the brutality of political suppression in Iran inseparable from and in fact within the global ideopolitical milieu which enables such grave injustices.\u00a0 I thus take issue with those views that consider the exercise of violence by the Iranian state a manifestation of its assumed anachronistic theocracy or and of the inherent violence of Islam.\u00a0 I believe that this perspective ignores both the complex diversities of modern nation-states, of which Iranian state is albeit a unique example, and the dynamics of power and knowledge of all discursive traditions, including Islam.<\/p>\n

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My second concern stems from the danger posed by our present world system, which is embodied in the ideopolitical and socioeconomic regimes and hegemonic discourses.\u00a0 This danger demands of us the invocation and exposition of all forms of injustices, including the massacre of 1988.\u00a0 It is our task to expose all modern forms of violence for what they are, either disguised behind seemingly antique religious beliefs or under the white mask of liberal notions of freedom and democracy.\u00a0 Both disguises offer testimony to the prevailing yet elusive myth of Enlightenment to having freed human from naked force of \u201cbarbarism\u201d while indeed equipping the mythic barbarism with advanced technologies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Against these injustices, in the spirit of Derrida\u2019s work in \u201cthe Specters of Marxism,\u201d this paper converses with the revolutionary spirits of the past as a way to learn how to live justly in our disjointed time.\u00a0 With Benjamin, I envision articulating the past as a way of \u201cseizing \u201chold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger (1986: 255).\u00a0 Benjamin\u2019s portrayal of angel of history enables me to think about the 1988 massacre at once as a unique event and as part of a catastrophic injustice of our time.\u00a0 The challenge is how to give this event its deserved time and justice, in another words, how to besiege time as if forcing it to stand still, while, in Benjamin\u2019s words, \u201ca storm blows with such violence that irresistibly propels the angel of history into the future we call progress (259).\u00a0\u00a0 In pursuit of a way out, I submerge in love and resilience that emit from these prison letters, as did our woman inmate when she clang to her husband\u2019s letters, read them night after night, first gulping them down, then drinking them sip by sip, and finally letting them dance in her mind as if waves in the ocean.\u00a0 Their melodies softened the torment of those nightmarish months and years; she slept to them as if to mothers\u2019 lullabies, wore the pearl of their words like a talisman and was rescued from her agony and despair by the power of love.<\/p>\n

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OF THE DISJOINTED TIME<\/strong><\/p>\n

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If one could ever speak of beginnings, the beginning to the series of the events leading to the massacre of 1988 was the end of the eight long bloody years of the Iran-Iraq War, which presented the Mojahedin-e-khalgh-e-Iran, an Iranian opponent organization, an opportunity to attack Iran.\u00a0 The offense was immediately defeated.\u00a0 Yet, like the reaction of the US in the wake of the September 11th, the Iranian Regime also rushed to avenge and extended its revenge beyond killing those who were involved in the offense.\u00a0 It too used the offense as a pretext to unleash a massacre which targeted those with the least means to fight back.\u00a0 If for the US these were civilians of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the already marginalized others within, in Iran political prisoners were hit hard.\u00a0 So surreal was the scale of this brutality that when that hellish summer was finally over, the jail was unrecognizable even to its own survivors.\u00a0 From November to the December, thousands of families received the news of the execution of their loved ones. Yet again I will not concentrate on the horror but on the enduring love and resilience that these letters convey which rendered living through that unfeasible period a possibility and an art.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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OF MEMORY<\/strong><\/p>\n

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In his debate with Socrates about memory and writing, Phaedrus suggests that writing is a \u201crecipe for memory and wisdom.\u201d\u00a0 Socrates negated this remedy and argues that writing \u201cwill implant forgetfulness in [people\u2019s] souls\u201d for \u201cthey will cease to exercise memory\u201d and \u201crely on that which is written\u201d (1982: 156).\u00a0 Indeed, writing projects human nostalgia and desire to overcome death, while it is itself derived from a space of absence and death.\u00a0 In response to our humanly desire to overcome death, we hold on to the vanishing traces by employing language.\u00a0 Yet the inherent silence in language and writing urges us to reckon with the new lives that sprout out from ruins.\u00a0 Writing, says Brinkley Messick, \u201cis a remedy and a poison,\u201d\u2026 \u201ca protective against death,\u201d which is itself \u201cpredicated upon a kind of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Of this \u201ckinship between writing and death\u201d the Iranian political prisoners have first hand experience.\u00a0 Writing for these inmates was a double-edged sword which killed with one edge and brought back to life with another.\u00a0 If \u201cScheherazade\u2019s story in Foucault\u2019s reading is a desperate \u201cinversion of murder,\u2026the effort\u2026to exclude death from the circle of existence,\u201d the stories in our prison letters were attempts in simultaneous exclusion and inclusion of death in the realm of sociality.\u00a0 Confronted with myriad faces in which death transpired in prison, many inmates wrote not so much in order to be rescued from organic death, but from the death of humanity within and without.\u00a0 Our prison letters exemplify this simultaneous sacrifice and salvage of writing.<\/p>\n

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Contrary to Socrates\u2019 view that the written words \u201cseem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything-they say the same thing forever,\u201d words never say the same thing twice.\u00a0 Indeed, they might even stop telling any tangible story and become mute.\u00a0 Like traces, words can also, in Derrida\u2019s words, \u201close their power of signification,\u201d and become testimonial to our elusive relationship to the past.\u00a0 The intricacies we face in recovering the meaning behind these letters mirror the obstacles of reconstructing the traces of a massacred political generation in Iranian recent history.\u00a0 How does one tell the story of a past that is so carefully forced to erasure, which drifts by so fast that one\u2019s scars are deepened by those of the new but already past ones?\u00a0 How does one name one\u2019s pain in the midst of this phantasmagoric political landscape to which violence is so indispensable and constitutive?\u00a0 How does one write about the \u201cevil doings\u201d of one home while it is targeted as the \u201caxis of evil\u201d by one\u2019s other home?\u00a0 How does one expose one massacre without welcoming another?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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OF FADING TRACES<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The crushing of the dissidents which had begun nearly immediately after the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979, was escalated in early 1980s, but slowed down before taking an implausible toll after the Mojahedin-e-Khalgh-e-Iran\u2019s attack.\u00a0 The 1event of 1988 was distinctive first of all because no longer could the state exert and obscure its violence in the foggy revolutionary atmosphere of the early years, but by breaking its own laws and thereby, in Benjamin\u2019s words, making them into laws.\u00a0 Secondly, the enormity of this massacre and the silence that was imposed on it confronted the surviving families with a far greater than danger than the enormity of their loss, the absolute death of their loved ones.\u00a0 For, death in and of itself is not an utter non-existence; nor does it entirely erase one\u2019s social existence.\u00a0 The dead remain in the social realm by and in the traces they leave behind of their once lived life.\u00a0 Compelled to sustain our social existence, we leave traces, write letters, and create archives.\u00a0 Yet memory betrays us; signposts are often lost or shifted, misleading us in our illusive journey back to the \u201corigin;\u201d the return is thus rendered an impossible longing.\u00a0 Of this longing for a return and the desire to move forward the husband inmate writes:
In solitude, I converse with you, try to remember your talks, laughter, pain, and songs, try to engage with you, try to hear and imagine the changes in them after this long time of separation with no visit.\u00a0 Yet, how badly I miss you!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Letters are often exchanged between private parties; they await response and assume an ongoing communication.\u00a0 Relying on this capacity the woman inmate employs the metaphor of a pigeon and writes: \u201cA domesticated pigeon will never experience a higher flight for the horizon of its need do not rise higher than some water, seed, and a little nest.\u00a0 Like a pigeon, if one seeks a mere comfort of a small home and the seed of yesterday, whither the flight of tomorrow?\u201d\u00a0 The husband engagingly responds: \u201cThe pigeon of my mind takes its seed and water from my existence.\u00a0 Its pursuit of comfort resides in my existence, which is itself defined by my relationship to the world.\u00a0 I therefore cannot simply decide for the pigeon of my mind to fly higher, unless I create new conditions for my existence to transform the domain of my being and my flight (May, 1988).\u00a0 In yet another letter: \u201cI\u2019m reading the last line of your letter, but am unable to take my eyes off.\u00a0 Like the cool water that is given to a thirsty person, again and again I gulp it down with my eyes, then my mind begins to fly\u2026.\u201d Here again he is conversing with his lover.\u00a0 Yet, all along, the presence of an intrusive third party haunts these apparently \u201cprivate dialogues,\u201d for their letters are read by inspectors and often shared with other inmates.\u00a0 Occasionally, the inspector\u2019 eerie apparition transpires in the inmates or their families\u2019 letters by introducing a rupture in the conversation, by superimposing a spectral handwriting on their letter and commanding: \u201cDo not write more than seven lines.\u201d\u00a0 Hence in prison letter, the inherent silence of the archive is further augmented.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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OF THE ARCHIVE<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Silence, Michel-Rolph Trouillot tells us, enters the process of historical production at crucial moments from making archive to narrating history.\u00a0 Adding to this is the fact that from the instant that their navel cord is detached from their author, as with that of any text, their authors are lost to the reader, and the letters take the life of their own.\u00a0 In each reader they are reborn not as the letter, but as a letter, read in the here and now and in the presence of a reader.\u00a0 Take the following letter, for instance, where the husband expresses his feeling about receiving a life sentence after anticipating his execution for over four years.
I am not happy for the sheer fact of being alive.\u00a0 That in and of itself is no the reason for my happiness.\u00a0 But when [if] I live in a world of human joy and pain, I will be happy and your presence in my life has always given me confidence that with you I would not merely age but live.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Surely, each of us will translate the above passage into our own sociopolitical and cultural language, which varies from the socio-historical ambiance within which it was produced. The enigmatic nuances of the words which are chosen not merely for their literal and poetic connotations, but also to circumvent the censorship, cultural taboos, and the seven line limitation\u00a0\u00a0 are further obscured when attempting to translate them in and from their different localities and from a gone by past.\u00a0 In the absence of the thing, we employ language which is always already a substitution.\u00a0 To assume a single reading to these letters is thus to ignore Marx\u2019s insight that \u201cthe unity of the commodity is also its internal and irreducible difference,\u201d for translation, in Rosalind Morris\u2019s words, \u201cis marked by the fact of identity\u2019s absence\u201d (2000: 18-9).\u00a0 Note the following excerpt from the husband\u2019s letter, which is written in the midst of the bombing of the Iranian cities by Iraq.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Today, especially since the evening I have missed you so much.\u00a0 I have a strange feeling.\u00a0 At first I told myself that perhaps your letter was on its way, but now that it is almost one in the morning and I\u2019ve lost hope to receive a letter, I am worried; what if you are sick?\u00a0 I know that I will no longer be able to sleep tonight.\u00a0 Imagining that you might now be suffering from pain drives me crazy; I lose the ability to do anything.\u00a0 I have no visit with you, nor do you yourself tell me about your well-being,\u2026 The lack of news and my worries about you frustrate me.\u00a0 Perhaps, for many, this might not be comprehensible that, under such conditions, while time after time, distressed with and horrified by the sound of explosions, people search for their loved ones\u00a0 in the ruins of bombings, in the midst of thousands of heart- ranching scenes of bombings of schools, factories,\u2026, I worry about a narcissus.\u00a0\u00a0 I find no words to explain this.\u00a0 What is to say?\u00a0 How can I explain that this narcissus is the flower of my soul; she is my whole life,.. that I give my life for the blossoming of this flower?\u00a0 How can I not be worried!\u00a0 And you, while knowing that I have no news about you, you simply write: \u201cdo not worry about me at all.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To unpack the ideas, emotions, and symbolic expressions congealed in this short passage one has to decipher not merely the political culture of his time and place but also their unconventionality.\u00a0 Indeed, as a political activist of that era, he is himself conflicted and wary that his personal concerns and romantic feelings would be stigmatized both by his own comrades and the Regime.\u00a0 Mindful of the intrusive presence of the inspectors, he deploys the metaphor of narcissus also as a secret code, for only the two lovers know that Narcissus was the nickname he had chosen for her, resembling her to the narcissus flower with its strong stems but delicate petals that grows in and withstands winter, but is the harbinger of spring.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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To do justice to the complexity of his expressions which strive to at once smart out the censor, respond to the anticipated criticisms of his comrades, and cope with his own conflicting emotions is an undertaking that belies beyond the scope of this brief intervention.\u00a0 Suffice it to hint at the recurring metaphors in these letters which affirm the consistency of their unwavering love and humanity.\u00a0 The reiteration of the imageries and poetic expressions in another letter of his might illustrate the point.\u00a0 \u201cAt nights, through the bars of the window, I stare at the moon to feel your smiling gaze for I know that you watch the clouds.\u00a0 I know you love rain, snow and avalanches [note that the term avalanche, Bahaman in Farsi, also implies the Revolution for the 1979 Revolution occurred in the Iranian month of Bahaman].\u00a0 The letter goes on: I know that with the warmth of your gaze you please the moon so I can see a narcissus on the blushed face of the moon.\u00a0 Yet, my soul does not rest.\u00a0 I wonder where I can find you.\u00a0 Again and again, I read your letters.\u00a0 In the end, I realize that I must revisit my heart and soul for there you reside. With the ear of my heart I hear your voice: \u2018as long as the story of exchange-benefit is preventing our unity, we must embrace all the suffering and torment of love.\u2019\u00a0 My soul feels appeased.\u00a0 In solitude, I carry on a conversation with you since conversing with you is the source of life for me and I regret why I did not use every moment of it while together.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The persisting love and resistance underlying these imaginations and imageries supersede and overcome the distance not only between the lovers but also between them and us.\u00a0 Notwithstanding the fact that the precise meanings of these words fly away for, in Bakhtin\u2019s words, \u201cevery utterance brings into being a distinct accent, denotation, and a new imprinting in the memory,\u201d like migrating birds, the spring of shared humanity brings these letters back if not to their original home, but to a home, to us.\u00a0 As human we often live our lives nearly oblivious to our mortality.\u00a0 Every now and then, however, when death steals away our loved ones, or is about to knock on our door, we are pushed out of our whimsical slumber; reminded that soon we might too be cut off from our unfinished kisses.\u00a0 It is from this space, upon hearing of her husband\u2019s execution, our woman inmate writes to her husband\u2019s brother.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Today it\u2019s been three days, no three years, or perhaps only three seconds.\u00a0 I do not know since when these stares are trying to convince me of living without a soul.\u00a0 Do you believe this?\u00a0 Do you believe that the sun of a compassionate and ever concerned gaze would no longer follow our footsteps, that the shimmering spring of his soothing and serene words would never again tell us of our wrongdoings, that the fruitful hands of a lover would no longer channel the stream of love into our souls; that never again he would teach us to love with our entire being?… Yet this belief is seeping through and spreading its wings inside me: \u201che did not pass by in the refuge of the shadows.\u00a0 Can\u2019t you see the brightness of the sun on his path?\u201d<\/p>\n


Let\u2019s end this paper with the words of the ghost-husband from another letter of his which offers yet another testament to an unwavering resistance against injustice and to the hope and love that cry out from the space of despair.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tonight my heart has missed you so much that it will not calm down.\u00a0 Right at this moment, the moon, with all its beauty has captivated everyone under its gaze but I am burning with longing to see you even for an instant.\u00a0 I am surprised at why this fire that is inflaming my soul, does not burn my body.\u00a0 Perhaps, no, certainly because of the deeply rooted hope in our hearts, hope for a tomorrow when the bodies could be happy with their work, when you and I will could gleefully hold hands and wonder around on the green heart of meadows, filled\u00a0 with narcissuses and jasmines.\u00a0 With these hopes we embrace the fire of separation in our souls.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Presentation of Professor Shahla Talebi Arizona Estate University \u00a0 In one of those endless nights of the summer of 1988, besieged by a strange grief, an Iranian woman political inmate squeezed herself in between the narrow space of the metal shutters of the cell and stared at the mystifying sky.\u00a0 A gulping void was rapidly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7364,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7362","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7362"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7371,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7362\/revisions\/7371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}