Kissing the Sword

June 1, 2013
An acclaimed Iranian novelist's harrowing account of the decade she spent in and out of prisons in post-revolutionary Tehran. When Parsipur (Women Without Men, 1998, etc.) returned to Iran from France in 1980, she knew the country she had fled was in turmoil. She remained on the political sidelines, reading newspapers and magazines from the different factions vying for power just to stay informed. Her democratic neutrality did not save her, however. In 1981, she was jailed after the revolutionary guards who ransacked her home discovered a letter she had written but not sent that expressed her misgivings about the political situation in Iran. With a self-possessed simplicity that cuts straight to the heart, Parsipur details the nearly five years of what would be the first of three incarcerations. Fundamentalist Islamic dress and religious rituals were de rigueur for all prisoners, and solitary confinement or death awaited "nonconformists" like Parsipur. Kindness existed, but barbaric behavior among both inmates and the keepers with whom they often colluded was as much the norm as torture and random executions. "Fear had created monsters willing to do anything and go against any principal to survive," she writes. What Parsipur found most disturbing of all was the fact that most of the prisoners and "officials" were barely out of their teens. After her release, her activities as a writer--and in particular, her novelistic writings on female virginity--led to two subsequent arrests and incarcerations. Harried to the point of illness and eventual mental collapse by the Iranian morality police, Parsipur left the country permanently. Stark and haunting, this book stands as a powerful testament to not only the devastations of an era, but to the integrity and courage of an extraordinary woman.

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September 1, 2013

Parsipur (Touba and the Meaning of Night) originally published this prison memoir in Persian as Khatirat-i Zindan, in 1996. Translator Khalili offers the first English version. The author lived through the Iranian revolution of 1979 and witnessed the country's transformation from monarchy to theocracy. Prior to the uprising, Parsipur served as a television and radio producer. In this book, Parsipur recounts the brutality she suffered while she was imprisoned by Iran's new regime and held for nearly five years without being charged. She describes her life as a political prisoner subjected to mental torture, witness to mass executions, and robbed of her dignity at the hands of a paranoid government bent on stifling dissent by terrorizing its citizenry. Where others may have been silenced, Parsipur boldly decided to write about her experiences. Her books have been banned in her native country, and she now lives in exile in Northern California. VERDICT Parsipur is a gifted writer and storyteller, and the emotion she feels comes through in her writing. Readers interested in memoirs, Iran, human rights, and political science will appreciate this work.--Mark Manivong, Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC

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