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The feeling of freedom

The feeling of freedom
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (photo: Cian Oba-Smith / FT)

Imprisoned in Iran for six years, the ex-prisoner shares her views on how oppressive states work – and on escaping reality through books. This essay is based on a lecture that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe gave in London about George Orwell.

By: Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe / The Financial Times
Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

Like most people, I always associated freedom with political or civil rights. For me it was an abstract concept. But that changed completely when my rights were suddenly taken away.


In March of 2016, my daughter and I took a two-week trip to Iran to stay with my family for the Persian New Year. On my way back to London, I was kidnapped at the airport, taken to an unknown location, interrogated for months, accused of plotting to overthrow the government of the Islamic Republic, and sentenced to five years in prison.

I spent most of the first year of my imprisonment in complete isolation. My arrest was so sudden that I had no time to perceive it. I was terrified and confused. Everything disappeared: motherhood, home, my whole world. All this, for a moment, was inaccessible to me.

I was a stranger in the world I had been thrown into – isolation, discipline, punishment, uniforms and hunger. All this filled me with fear, doubt, loneliness, anger and hatred.

Sometimes the best way to appreciate something is to be forced to live without it. I was lonely and without freedom. So, my mind began to rewrite these concepts. In order to free myself from the limitations that the prison walls had imposed on me, I had to create a parallel world of my own. Liberation came only when I realized that no one could take this away from me: my mind, the ability to dream and leave behind the darkness that was happening around me.

Everything we create and conceive outside can be reproduced inside. There were many nights in prison when I dreamed of walking into a supermarket, going through the fruit and vegetable section, getting in the elevator and going to the fourth floor to the housewares and clothes section. But every time this happened, I lost my way, couldn't find my way out, and got stuck. In the dream, I wondered that I could freely enter a place outside the prison, but then my subconscious reminded me that I was not free.

For the first nine months of my imprisonment, I was kept in complete isolation. I had minimal contact with people and virtually no access to anything, including pens, papers and books. The only books I was allowed to have were the Bible and a damaged prayer book. I soon learned that other prisoners, depending on the circumstances, charges and length of time in solitary confinement, were allowed to have books and writing materials. But I seemed to present an exception. After months of struggle and many complaints, my family was finally allowed to bring me books.

These books were in English and Farsi. I read them and re-read them, again and again. They pulled me into another world, allowing me to forget where I was. The moments I looked forward to the most in solitary confinement were when, after long hours of interrogation, I was returned to my cell. That's when I could fall into my own fear and sadness through the stories of others.

After those nine months, I was transferred to the ward of women political prisoners, in Evin Prison, where I spent the longest part of my imprisonment. There, many of us found solace in the little things that connected us to the life we ​​had before we were incarcerated. Freedom is not an island; it is related to relationships and conversations, to ordinary human things. We found freedom where it usually isn't found – in these little things that reminded us that life wouldn't end there.

Books played a big role in freeing my thoughts. Without the books and stories that broadened my horizons and gave me wings to fly over the high brick walls of Evin, I would have completely wasted my time in prison.

On arrival, I was given a bed next to the main library, which contained hundreds of books: whole shelves of philosophy, history, religion, psychology – and a collection of novels by French, German, Russian and British writers.

The first night, one of the more experienced inmates gave me the book Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. My mind was clouded and I couldn't follow his stream of consciousness, so I put the book down for another time. But when I went back to find him a few weeks later, he was gone.

I soon realized that there was another world of books in Evin. These books were kept in the prisoners' personal beds and were not on the public shelves. In order for the books to arrive at the ward, they had to go through an arbitrary screening process by the prison authorities. Most of these books had not gone through this process. They were mostly personal books, inherited from former prisoners. You often found small notes written inside them, with the names of the first owners and the date the book had arrived at the pavilion. In a way, those books kept the legacy of ex-prisoners alive through their reading material.

Reading was one of our main activities. We read both alone and in groups. In our library we had three books written by George Orwell: the best known and most widely read was Animal farm, and 1984 and Burma Days. Only the last one was on the public shelf. I had read it 1984-shin before I ended up in prison, but it felt very different when I read it again with my prison friends. It was remarkable how the story took on a new meaning for us.

The story resonated deeply with what we had gone through; we were victims of a totalitarian state that held physical and psychological control over its people. They extended this systematic control to prison as well, constantly subjecting us to increasingly strict forms of surveillance, including cameras and informants.

Prison authorities were particularly sensitive to certain types of books. For this reason, we had to hide some books away from the main library. One day, a prisoner received the book in the mail The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It was only then that one of the prison guards recognized the book and asked how we had obtained it. To our surprise, not only did he not confiscate the book, but he advised us to wrap it in newspaper so the cameras wouldn't shoot it. The waiting list to read that book was long; one of those waiting in line was the guard herself.

I have often wondered where we would be if people did not share their stories of war and disease, political conflict and revolution. No doubt, we would struggle to understand who we are; without these documents we would know nothing about the courage it took these people to survive such tragedies. It has always amazed me that stories written hundreds of years ago were still able to give us refuge from the hardships we experienced in prison.

The Women's Political Pavilion in Evin was no ordinary place – certainly not when I spent time there. Over the past decades, and since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Evin Prison had housed many brave and persistent women who had served long sentences. Under an increasingly misogynistic regime, where women were held to a lower social status than men, female prisoners had to fight much harder than men for their basic rights.

From time to time, we had some small victories, like winning the right to have our own kitchen to cook in, or to wear ordinary clothes instead of prison uniforms when we were taken to court or hospital. But we were not always successful. Books remained a dangerous and controversial issue. We were adamant not to lose the right to control what we read or think; to win the war, sometimes we had to lose the battle.

Life under the constant surveillance of prison cameras was disturbing and, in some ways, inhumane. The authorities could monitor what we discussed, what we read or watched, and that was scary. Every corner of the pavilion was equipped with cameras, except for the toilets and showers. The guards did not need to leave the screens to monitor us because the number of cameras in the ward was greater than the number of prisoners.

However, to defy the cameras, we found a solution: we put curtains around our beds for more privacy, moved our political discussions to the corner of the yard, and found ways to listen to jazz and pop music through more unusual channels. On holidays, we would hit the kitchen pots and laugh out loud when some of the girls did Zumba for the first time. Big Brother could be watching us, but we continued to discuss politics and dance.

One of the most frightening things for totalitarian states is freedom of thought, and this is precisely what the prison authorities, as a mouthpiece of the Islamic Republic, tried to control and influence in every possible way. They viewed our reading sessions and discussion groups as a threat to the ideology they were trying to impose on us.

In his 1941 essay, Literature and totalitarianism, Orwell tells us: “Totalitarianism has eradicated freedom of thought to a degree never before heard of … It not only forbids you to express – even think – certain thoughts, but dictates what you should think, creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well... And, as much as possible, isolates you from the outside world, closes you in an artificial universe where you have no standards of comparison".

In such circumstances, freedom of thought is destined to fail. Therefore, the prison authorities were so determined to control what we read or discussed. They often found ways to interrupt our lessons – such as our weekly reading sessions Phenomenology of the soul from Hegel – to the point where it was difficult to continue. But we found ways to hold fast to what we could control: our thoughts.

For a long time I struggled to believe and accept that I ended up in prison. I was not there for any crime I had committed, but as a victim of a political conflict, which became increasingly clear as time went on. Once the truth came out, there was no way to deny it. But it was not simple. They had turned me into a commodity, with a certain value that changed, from time to time, depending on the political climate. And, it cast a huge shadow over my truth. At first I had thought that my truth was so obvious that it was impossible to ignore. But it was a symptom of my naivety. To them, I did not exist as a human being; I was just a number.

It took many conversations, conducted through the constantly difficult lines of short allowed calls (which were regularly interrupted by a recorded message reminding us that "this call is from Evin Prison, the caller is an inmate") , to be convinced that what happened to us could happen to anyone. The question "why me?", although it was impossible not to ask it, made no more sense than asking it after an accident or the loss of a loved one.

It wasn't until I stopped looking for reasons that I found peace and freedom within myself—something they couldn't stop me from. It was a long and challenging process, full of doubt, uncertainty and the pain of being separated from my child. This pain was compounded by the fact that the unknown history of my case was vast and unclear.

While I was peeling potatoes in the prison kitchen, the then British Foreign Secretary was giving incorrect information about me to the British Parliament. Meanwhile, the Iranian government's propaganda machine churned out false and fabricated stories about me. I can't claim that I fully accepted this state, but I can say for sure that there finally came a time when I allowed myself to relax again, to laugh and sing and dance and appreciate the things I still had, and not just to focus on the things I had missed.

It was a long road, but the truth finally triumphed and, after six years in prison, I returned home. It was another incredible experience; they kept stopping me on the street, greeting me and giving me flowers. People would stop their cars in the middle of the street to get out and hug me, sometimes in tears. All this love and care was present throughout. But at the same time, there were lies on social media about me, with the constant claim that I had not been taken hostage to recover the historic debt that, once paid off, led to my release. I realized that people lived in different bubbles and that I was an object around which different stories were told. Now I was both known and unknown.

When the euphoria of moments of freedom wore off, life looked very different. I was myself, imperfect and scared, suffering from depression, anxiety about public spaces, strangers and police uniforms, holed up in our tiny apartment, most of the time freed from my responsibilities as adult. Rehabilitation is a journey that takes a long time.

It is easy to become indifferent to the world and its pleasures, no matter how long you have been away from it. Deep down, I'm still completely terrified. I feel filled with a great sense of awe about the world we live in, with its advanced technology and constant changes. It's still a challenge for me to navigate a website, find a new street or choose food from a restaurant menu.

However, I do not underestimate the value of freedom. It's just about being able to do normal things again. The freedom not to be controlled by others, but to have the opportunity to choose and enjoy life as it is, is a blessing. It may sound trivial, but being able to freely walk into a supermarket and take things off the shelves, drinking as much coffee as you want, not having to wait in line to take a shower – these things still fill me with joy, for every day. Now I can use the washing machine all the time without having to wait a week for my turn. I can eat my meal in peace, without rushing to go to the line to wash the dishes. I don't have to worry about my teaspoons getting lost. I can go to bed when I want without worrying about a curfew (although I'm still the first person to go to bed in our house, but now completely pressure-free).

We all deserve to know that "freedom is not something given, but a choice". The true sense of freedom is the ability to set aside the judgments imposed by the world and society in which we live, to free ourselves from unhelpful ways of thinking, limiting beliefs and stuck feelings that come from unchangeable circumstances. It's about accepting and embodying every little bit of freedom we have while fighting for the greater truth.

Freedom is a choice. /Telegraph/