Philosophy Hope In A Jar

Memories from an Iranian prison

Occasionally, something will jar Shahla Talebi’s memory: Turnips in the grocery store. Pigeons on the street. A particular sound. A smell.

They bring fleeting images of a past that she is still coming to terms with, a past that haunts her and has changed her forever.

Talebi, an assistant professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, spent 10 years in prison in Iran, in two different stints: the first in 1977 and 1978 under the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the second from 1983 to 1992 under the Islamic Republic.

Between her two imprisonments, she was married, and in the second, was forced to watch as her husband, Hamid, was tortured. She was a witness as fellow prisoners succumbed to madness or suicide – or resisted. She clung to words from the poetry of Rumi, Hafiz Shamlou and others as she struggled to survive.

In her new book, “Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran,” Talebi tells the stories of some of those ghosts:

Fozie, who shrieked at the top of her lungs for three days and nights without stopping; Kobra, who went mad in her cell and killed herself. Youself, her nephew, who was disabled mentally and physically, who endured a prison of his own – the constant torture and taunting of his relatives – and his unsuccessful struggle to find his place in the world – and who simply disappeared. And Hamid, who survived the brutality only to be executed during the massacre of 1988.

“Ghosts of the Revolution” is neither memoir nor history, but a very personal and meditative look at Iran from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, a period marked, and marred, by bloodshed – more than 12,000 people were murdered in 1981 and 1982 – torture and upheaval.

The book, which started as an undergraduate honors thesis at the University of California, Berkeley, also is a questioning essay on why she should or should not write the book, and the realization that she could not possibly write the same book in the late 1990s as she could have upon her final release from prison.

And she questioned whether she could meet the expectations about the book, both her own and that of others. “What if I wrote something that was either trivial and meaningless or impossible to live up to? What if I could not face my new challenges? Fear captured me, and I was desperately seeking a way out.”

After much introspection, Talebi discovered that she was “not writing because I felt the obligation to give voice to those who had been silenced. In fact, I could never have been able to do justice to those voices.

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Elementary treatise on natural philosophy

A classical dictionary, containing an account of the principal proper names mentioned in ancient authors, and intended to elucidate all the important points connected with the geography, history, biography, mythology, and fine arts of the Greeks and Romans, together with an acount of coins, weights, and measures, with tabular values of the same