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A Writer in Exile

By Owen Perry

Reza Baraheni has been described as “Iran's finest living poet.” He has also imprisoned, tortured and exiled under two different regimes.

“Have you heard about the hit list?” Baraheni, 67, asked after a speech he gave at Ithaca College. “It was published a while ago by the Iranian government, and Der Spiegel published it, and I am at the top of the list,” he said with a somber smile.

Baraheni was granted political asylum by the Canadian government in 1996. Beginning this fall he will be living in Ithaca as the community's second City of Asylum Resident Writer. Chinese dissident, Yi Ping was the first.

Ithaca City of Asylum chairperson Paul Hamill said that the organization is a not-for-profit project affiliated with the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell. It is part of a The International Parliament of Writers, which supports imprisoned and exiled writers.

Baraheni will live in Ithaca for two years and give lectures and speeches at Ithaca College and Cornell University. “I am hoping that in addition to bringing a great deal of literary excitement, he will help to educate a broader community about intellectual and political tolerance,” Hamill said.

During his speech Baraheni spoke about his life as a writer and the role imprisonment played on his work.

Baraheni first went into exile in 1973 after he was arrested and imprisoned in Teheran and spent 102 days in solitary confinement.

Until 1979, when the Islamic revolution toppled the U.S.-backed Shah, SAVAK, the secret police in Iran, worked to silence opposition to the Shah's regime. SAVAK censored the media and tortured dissidents by “electric shock, whipping, beating, pouring boiling water into the rectum and pulling out teeth and nails,” according to a Washington Post article. Baraheni experienced some of these techniques first hand.

“Sometimes they raped the men. Sometimes they actually tortured them to death. The torture chambers were one of the most horrible places you could possibly see,” he said.
But he credits these imprisonments for focusing his writing. “There isn't a single significant writer in Iran who has not gone to prison and has not been tortured and has not interrogated himself or herself,” he said. Baraheni added that that self-interrogation helped him to write honestly and openly.

Best known in the Western world for his works The Crowned Cannibals and God's Shadow: Prison Poems, Baraheni's poetry explores the themes and metaphors of tyranny and imprisonment: personal, political and social.

In the poem “A Double Mask,” Baraheni writes: “Let's forget the dictators for a second/And think of poetry, comrade!/I want the words of a poem to think about the poem/When I think about the words/Dictators walk in; when the words think about/The poem poetry walks in.”

The Crowned Cannibals: Writings On Repression In Iran was published in 1977. It is considered the first feminist book written in Iran. When Baraheni wrote the book, he said he had never heard the word “feminism.” Nevertheless, the book analyzes the oppression of women in Iran and advocates women's liberation.

John Leonard, writing the New York Times, said about The Crowned Cannibals: “It is history mated with literary criticism and written by the light of a torch in 'the dark night'.” That dark night was the rule of the Shah.

Soon after being released from prison, Baraheni went into exile in the United States. He returned to Iran in the early 80s, hoping that the newly formed government of the Ayatollah would create a more democratic country, he said. But the fundamentalist regime was still oppressive and didn't look kindly on dissent.

But dissent was something Baraheni had been familiar with all his life.

Baraheni was born in the Azerbaijan Province of Iran. The province has about three times the population that the Republic of Azerbaijan has, said Baraheni. “But those Azerbaijanis in the republic have something that those in the province do not have,” he said. “That is their own language.”

When Baraheni was a child, a government of Persian-speaking peoples took control of Iran. All languages but Persian were banned, said Baraheni. The Azerbaijanis spoke a dialect of Turkish called Azeri.

Baraheni told the story of when he was ten and given an assignment to write a poem for school. The principal told him in Turkish that the poem must be in Persian.

He could not do the assignment because he did not know Persian, he said. His mother decided that he should write in Turkish. He went to the school put the Turkish poem on the wall. Other students (children of officials) had it written in Persian.

“The principal grabbed the paper off the wall and rang the bell to assemble everyone,” Baraheni recalled. “Then he said in Turkish, 'Who has written this in Turkish?'”

When Baraheni admitted to it the principal asked, “I told you not to write in Turkish, why did you write in Turkish?”.

“He threw the paper down,” Baraheni said. “He said come closer. He grabbed me by the neck and pushed me down, and he told me in Turkish, 'Now lick it.'”

The ink ran all over his face, he said. When he stood up all the students started laughing. He said that he realized after that one must become “a mother and child of a language” for it to have power. That, he said, is why he has fought for so long for the freedom of speech.

Baraheni was a founding member of a group formed to promote freedom of literary expression and the establishment of a writers' union in Iran. He played and was vital in the “Declaration of 134 Iranian Writers,” written in 1994, which called for the end of literary censorship in Iran.

Baraheni translated it into English and smuggled it out to the West.

According to a 1999 Toronto Star article, the response from the Iranian government was swift.

Ali-Akbar Saidi Sirjani, a classics scholar and critic of the clerics, was found dead. So was Ahmad Miralaie, translator of Octavio Paz.

Baraheni clashed with the authorities again in 1996. He and 13 others met at a friend's house to sign the “Charter of 14” calling for unhampered expression of thought. But before the 14 could leave the house, they were dragged out, driven to a secret spot, interrogated through the night and warned never to meet again, he said.

At that point Baraheni and his wife escaped to Sweden and then moved to Canada, he said.

Other signers did not fair so well. Ghaffar Hosseini, poet and professor, was found dead at his home. Faraj Sarkoohi, another writer, went missing, only to emerge briefly, make a statement of culpability and disappear again until 1998.

Baraheni, living in Toronto, and Ron Graham, president of the human rights group Canadian PEN, began an international campaign to free Sarkoohi, who soon sent a letter from Iran, saying he had been tortured and forced to make the earlier statement. He was later sentenced to 12 months in prison for sending the letter, which was deemed propaganda against Iran, according to the PEN website. After his release, Sarkoohi fled to Canada and joined Baraheni and Graham at PEN.

Around that time in Iran, new president Mohammad Khatami appeared to be making progress gaining power over the conservative clergy. Writers were feeling emboldened, said Baraheni. But their feeling did not turn out to be correct.

The Toronto Sun article reported that dissident writer Daryush Foruhar and his wife Parvaneh, were stabbed to death at home. So was their friend, essayist Pirooz Davani, who used as a bait to have the couple open their door. Baraheni's closest friend, Mohammed Mokhtari-a poet, essayist, and translator of Pasternak-was strangled to death with a leather strap. Jafar Pooyandeh, translator of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, met the same fate. Majid Sharif, who translated of Nietzsche, was found dead.

Khatami has forced the Intelligence Ministry to admit that its agents committed last fall's murders. The president has since also honored several secular intellectuals, including signatories of the Text of 134, and he has promised to bring back the Writers' Association.
But when asked if he will ever return to Iran, Baraheni said: “No, not now. I don't think ever.”