Authors: Marina Nemat
Dr. Meier reminded me of
Bahboo
. When I entered the Common Room of Massey College at the University of Toronto, I spotted her sitting on a sixties-style brown leather sofa that faced a wall-to-wall window overlooking a courtyard where tall trees towered over patches of green grass. She had a subtle smile on her face. Her thin, silky grey hair was gathered in a bun at her nape and a few strands fell onto her neck and shoulders. She was not wearing makeup, and her clothes were practical and simple. Her eyes were different from
Bahboo
’s, though.
Bahboo
’s eyes were full of shuttered sadness; Dr. Meier’s, even though I had no doubt they held their own secrets, were like open windows. She was kind, but not in an artificial sort of way. She liked to get straight to the matter: “Tell me what happened. I’m interested.”
Up to this point in my journey, I had relied on my own experiences and observations to understand how my two years in Evin had shaped me. I had not been able to trust those who had
lived “normal” lives to analyze me and help me understand myself. But I finally felt I had arrived at a stage where I had achieved a good level of self-awareness, so it was time to discuss my findings with professionals.
I told her that for lack of a better term, my writing
Prisoner of Tehran
had been like throwing up; the story had exploded out of me when I couldn’t hold it down any longer. It had been an urgent telling of events. In order to acknowledge and understand my past, I needed to see it on paper.
“Does this make any sense?” I asked.
“Yes, it does,” she said. “One of the meanings of
catharsis
is ‘a purging of the bowels.’”
I explained that I knew guilt was the engine driving me. Guilt was a negative emotion, but I believed it could have positive outcomes. It had made me write obsessively, as if I were living the last day of my life.
“Your experience reminds me of Holocaust survivors,” she said. “Most of them couldn’t talk about their experiences for years, until these people became old and frail. They never shared their memories. Yet their children wanted to know. They needed to know. The experiences of their parents were a part of these children and they wanted to understand them, but it was very difficult for their parents to talk about the past.”
I know that silence, the silence of trauma quietly and carefully handed down to the next generation, I thought. A package of secrets that changes hands. The problem is that the giver of the package is aware of its contents, but the receiver is not. The receiver can only see how it disturbs everything it touches. And it comes with a warning: “Don’t open me or I will explode!” So it sits in plain sight, staring at the children of survivors in its mute, threatening way. Silence saddens me. It breaks my heart. I want to scream,
Tell! Tell! Tell! The children can face it. They have to face it. They need to face it.
Please trust them. They need to understand the human experience of history before they start a war or genocide of their own
.
I asked Dr. Meier why she thought I was telling my story after such a long time. She said that life was not linear; it was spiral. The journey of life makes us who we are. Even our preverbal experiences are important. Events that we remember shape us, but so do the ones we don’t. Unresolved grief manifests itself in many different ways. Some people spend a lifetime running from grief. Some finally face it at a certain point in their lives. Even though the human experience is more or less the same, and grief is grief and loss is loss, every case is different. Every case is unique.
I asked Dr. Meier about memory as I stared at the small pond in the courtyard. A little fountain shot a trembling dome of water into the air, creating ripples that turned sunlight into golden splatters. She told me that memory was like cosmology. The more we look at the universe and study it, the more we discover. The more we peer at a corner of the night sky, the more stars we find.
After my meeting with Dr. Meier, I reflected on our conversation. All roads in my life have somehow intersected the dark void of silence. After Evin, I lived in silence for so long that I almost forgot all about the world of voices. But one doesn’t need to have been tortured or be a Holocaust survivor to be trapped in it. Almost any form of trauma can lead people there. A few months before the publication of
Prisoner of Tehran
, as I stared at its release date on my calendar, the date was like a wall. I felt as though I was going to hit it at the speed of light and disintegrate. That day
had
to be the day of my death. How could I possibly survive such exposure? But I reached that wall and walked right through it. It didn’t kill me. On the contrary, it made me feel more alive than I had felt since I had been a teenager. The Tower of Silence had begun to fill with voices.
As I was writing this book, I had my editor Diane and her husband over at my house for dinner one night. As usual, some
of our conversation revolved around my prison experiences. After we finished eating, we talked about torture—and I found myself fighting my tears. My younger son was sitting with us at the table. A couple of days later on the phone, Diane told me that she had never heard me speak about my torture in front of my children. I had, but she had not been present on those occasions. She also said that I had been more emotional than ever. She was right. Every day, I am able to feel a little more than the day before. The numbness that became a part of me in Evin is a formidable force, and I have to wrestle it on a daily basis. Every day is a small victory.
Why do we, the human race, make the same mistakes over and over? Why do we torture, abuse, wage wars, and commit acts of cruelty? I can’t say it enough: the only way to stop the cycle of violence is to speak out. As long as victims do not bear witness, their suffering will be forgotten. Children should be encouraged to talk about all that is considered unspeakable. Torture should be discussed at dinner tables and in schools. In history classes, we should discuss human suffering and read the memoirs of those who have lived through wars, revolutions, genocides, and dictatorships.
On October 29, 2008, I had an appointment with Dr. Donald Payne. I was very excited about meeting him. Since 1979, Dr. Payne has assessed and treated more than fourteen hundred victims of torture or war. He has testified at refugee determination hearings, has provided in-service training to members of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, and has made presentations and written articles on torture and the treatment of torture victims.
Dr. Payne greeted me warmly in his office. I’m not quite sure what I had expected a psychiatrist who had worked with hundreds of torture victims to look like, but the man in front of me was like someone’s favourite uncle or a gentle grandfather one would meet at the park with a young child, a kind and simple man who has
lived an average life. However, I knew that Dr. Payne’s life could never be described as “average.”
Dr. Payne invited me to sit down. I got straight to the point and asked him if he believed that torture affected teenagers differently from adults.
“There are so many factors here,” he said. “Younger victims are more vulnerable, but they’re also more resilient in some ways. Older people don’t have much life ahead of them, and it’s harder for them to begin a new life after a traumatic experience, but those who are in their late teens still have a future.”
“What if the victim is fifteen or sixteen years old?” I asked.
“This can be very difficult, but it also depends on the young person’s level of development and maturity. For example, an overprotected sixteen-year-old kid who’s arrested because of a family member can feel completely devastated.”
I explained that in Iran, thousands of teenagers were arrested in the 1980s because they had read certain books or newspapers, had pamphlets of illegal political groups in their backpacks, or had gone to protest rallies. They weren’t exactly what could be considered “political.” They didn’t have the ideological or practical background to support them through torture. Older prisoners strongly believed in a certain ideology, but most of the young ones didn’t. They rarely got angry at the guards and interrogators who hurt them. Instead, they blamed themselves and became shameful and withdrawn.
Dr. Payne agreed that self-blame was common in young victims, whereas the older prisoners who were politically involved had a strong sense of commitment that was like a religion to them and had become a part of their persona. If adults break under torture, they lose a part of who they are. However, this is not true for teenagers; ideology and political commitment are not fundamentally a part of them.
I talked about the silence surrounding political prisoners, and Dr. Payne told me about one of his young patients who had been in prison for four years. Later, she escaped and came to Canada. She didn’t want to talk about her experiences with her friends because she wanted to be like everyone else, but she was aware that her not sharing her past with anyone affected her relationships and made them shallow. Her friends had no idea who she really was—but she wasn’t ready to tell. Dr. Payne gave me another example of a husband and wife from Argentina. The husband had been detained and tortured. After his release, he left the country with his wife and they had children, but he didn’t want the children to have any knowledge of his past; his wife, however, believed that it was important for them to know the truth. Dr. Payne also reminded me that many Second World War veterans never spoke about their experiences of war.
I explained that many Iranians, including me, were consumed with getting rid of the current regime in Iran, but the problem was that no one had a clear idea what would replace it. Thirty years ago we had a revolution whose results were catastrophic. We wanted democracy, so we deposed the shah and brought Khomeini into power—and one dictatorship replaced another. I disagree with those who say things cannot get worse. Neither Marxism nor Marxist-Islamism nor any other ideology can bring democracy to Iran. Like the Islamic regime, they have proven that they have no tolerance for those who think differently. We, the Iranian people, are suffering from some form of traumatic stress disorder. I believe that the same way an individual can suffer from it, so can a country as a whole. We Iranians lived through the terrible 1980s: not only were we at war with Iraq and people were dying in cities as a result of Scud-missile attacks or young soldiers were being killed at the front, but thousands of teenagers, boys and girls, were being tortured and executed in prisons. We were a nation destructing
from the inside and the outside, and our cemeteries were getting bigger and bigger.
After the war, people talked about its horrors. This dialogue could take place because the war had been a collective experience: we had been attacked and we had fought for our sovereignty. But the suffering of political prisoners was never publicly discussed—at least, not until the unrest that followed the 2009 presidential election in Iran. Yet even then, the discussions were limited. To openly bring up the issue of torture is, of course, painfully difficult. In homes during private get-togethers, no one ever talked about prisoners. It was as though the country was suffering from some form of collective amnesia. Before the unrest of 2009, members of a few political groups in exile in the West wrote about the horrors of Iran’s political prisons, but their publications had tiny print runs. Most Iranians chose to look the other way and ignore the situation altogether. The majority of ex-prisoners are still silent because they are traumatized. Even though torture has a political aspect, it is also terribly personal and isolates its victims. On the other hand, like my friends and family, “normal” people want the prison experience forgotten, as if it had never happened. Because not only do they wish to be safe from the pain of remembering atrocities, they also wish to avoid any responsibility associated with acknowledging that an atrocity like torture occurs. Someone might ask, “Where were you when it happened? Why didn’t you stop it?” No one likes facing tough questions like that.
I told Dr. Payne that I feared for the young generation in Iran, the children born after the revolution. They have always lived a double life. The middle and the upper classes in the country are well educated, and their kids love Western music, movies, fashion, and technology, but the government constantly tells them the West is “evil.” The kids don’t care. They listen to Western music and they want to dress like Western pop-culture icons. In Tehran, more
women enter universities than men. Many Iranians have satellite dishes, and they watch the latest foreign films. They connect to the West through the Internet, even though the government tries to control it. At home, most young people can listen to music, read all sorts of books, and watch movies, but when they go to school and are in public, they have to behave the way the government expects them to or they will be punished severely. Even very young children have adapted to this duality.
I was trying to understand post-traumatic stress disorder, so I asked Dr. Payne about it: “Like the American soldiers who come home from Iraq, do many PTSD sufferers have a tendency to become violent?”
“No,” he said. “Soldiers are trained to be violent. It’s their job. They’re supposed to kill, and they’re rewarded for killing, but once they return home, they can’t be violent anymore. Their violent behaviour is not a symptom of PTSD but a reaction to it. The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are usually quiet. They’re nightmares and flashbacks that refuse to let go.”
“But can there be a gap?” I asked. “I mean, can an individual who has experienced extreme trauma begin having nightmares and flashbacks years after the event?”
“Yes,” he said. “This is quite possible. Actually, it’s common.”
I told Dr. Payne about how normal I had seemed for years—how I had been a dutiful wife, a good mother, and an attentive waitress. No one could have guessed anything was wrong with me.
“Yes,” said Dr. Payne. “The false self.”
He didn’t need to explain the concept; I had lived it. After the prison, I created a new “Marina,” a carefully constructed fictional character. She had never experienced torture, rape, and humiliation, and she was going to live happily and normally ever after.