Elite Hasson, Contributor
Featured image courtesy of Alomar Kocur, Video Editor
As part of Amnesty International at York’s Stop Torture series, an Iranian torture survivor spoke about her experiences growing up in Iran during the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Marina Nemat, author of Prisoner of Terah, spoke to a crowd in the Student Centre in hopes to eradicate torture as a means of interrogation worldwide and in an effort to reach Amnesty’s goal of gathering 100,000 signatures from post-secondary institutions to demand thorough human rights inspections of prisoners in Canada.
In addition to Nemat’s hopeful and saddening story, AIY showcased photography and accounts of other torture survivors.
“When I opened my bathroom door, there were two guns pointed in my face,” recalls Nemat.
There was a moment that transformed then-15-year-old Nemat’s comfortable life into one of torture: when she was taken into custody and sent to Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran.
At the time, the Iranian people fought for the fall of the Pahlavi reign headed by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi who was beginning to execute journalists and citizens who protested against his increasingly oppressive mandates.
Nemat was a teenager who became acquainted with Marxism and was encouraged to protest by her peers, but acknowledges in hindsight that she barely knew what she was doing at the time and fought only because “fun was taken away in life, no skirts, no music, and no books.”
Despite this, Nemat’s affiliation with people whom the government felt were a threat to its rule was enough to flag her as a danger to national security.
Nemat describes life in Iran before the revolution as a “hopeful, energetic, young atmosphere.” She was a teenager concerned with celebrities, school, and which bikini she would wear to the beach.
Suddenly, she found herself blindfolded, taken through a maze of hallways, and tortured until she divulged the location of an acquaintance she hardly knew.
Being that her wrists were too small to fit into the handcuffs, the interrogation officers locked one cuff around both wrists causing one wrist to snap immediately.
“The torture had not even begun,” says Nemat.
Not being able to tell them the location of her acquaintance, she was imprisoned for the following two years. During her time in prison she was threatened, malnourished, physically tortured, and put in an overcrowded cell where “people [were] sleeping all around [her] like sardines.”
After being repeatedly raped, she was forced to marry one of the prison guards.
“If the devil was so kind to appear and told me to sell him my soul, I would have sold my soul with whip cream and a cherry on top. But that was not an option.”
She was released when the family of her then-husband fought for her release.
Nemat’s memoir Prisoner of Tehran was published in 2007.
Today, Nemat is an active member in the human rights community where she sits on the board of directors at the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture and works with her Catholic church’s refugee committee. She is also a professor at the University of Toronto, and sits on the board of Writers in Exile PEN Canada.
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