Mahvash Sabet on how she smuggled her poems out of Evin Prison with the bravery of the women of Iran.
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Mahvash Sabet was honoured as International Writer of Courage by Michael Longley, winner of the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017, in recognition of her first book, Prison Poems, published in English while she was in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. Last year, in July 2022, Mahvash and her friend Fariba were condemned to another ten-year sentence for being Baha’is. Between her first and second incarceration, Mahvash prepared two more volumes of poetry and began translating her prison memoirs into English.
This extract taken from her memoirs, translated by Azita Mottahedeh, tells the miraculous story of how she began writing poetry, just before her court case, and how she smuggled the poems out of prison, after the contested elections of 2010. The names of the brave women who helped Mahvash have been changed to protect their identities.
Forty years after the hanging of ten young Baha’i women in Shiraz, who refused to compromise their freedom of conscience, and one year after the murder of Mahsa Amini, whose death has sparked a worldwide movement, this story honours the courage of the women of Iran.
We are honoured to announce Mahvash Sabet as an Honorary Member of English PEN and to feature her in our ongoing PENWrites campaign. Please take a few moments to send her a message of solidarity and hope.
~
I have written poetry since childhood. My letters were often written like poems, even my school essays were sometimes in verse. But it hadn’t occurred to me that poetry needed to be nurtured and fostered, trained and developed. I never imagined it would one day become my dearest companion in prison.
One of the first poems that came to me in the Isolation Ward of Section 209 of Evin Prison was dedicated to my father. But I had no means to write it down. No pen, let alone paper. What was I to do? One day, after signing a request form for a phone call, I had the idea to take the pen back with me to my cell, hoping that, if no one objected, I could keep it, but the guard took it away from me. I made several attempts to take a pen back with me, but I was caught every time. One time, the guard let me get as far as the Isolation Ward, giving me the illusion that I had permission, only to ask for the pen back at the last minute, to humiliate me, I suppose.
Having a pen became a fixation for me – where I might get hold of one, who might give me one, how I could get permission. I was so preoccupied with this need that I started looking for pens and seeing them everywhere.
Some time later, sitting in the cell with Fariba, my eye caught sight of something glittering under the sink. My preferred seat in the cell was on the floor, with my back to the wall in front of the door so that I could keep an eye out for the guards, because it was somehow easier to have them spy on you if they saw that you were spying on them at the same time! As I sat there, I thought something winked at me near the door. It was not from the peephole, but in the hole of the drainpipe, under the small steel sink beside the door.
What could it be? I wondered. It looked like the tiny tip of something, its bright little point. A metal something. I looked away quickly as a guard walked past, in case she saw me unusually preoccupied. But as soon as I could, I looked back again. Yes, there it was, still winking at me. It looked very much like the tip, the nib, the point of— Come on! I scolded myself. You’re hallucinating! And I turned away. But no, that bright and winking metal tip kept calling to me, ‘Look back, look at me!’
I had to find out what it was – but carefully, without arousing suspicion. I waited for the quiet hour, when all the female guards took their afternoon rest and Section 209 was as silent as a morgue. When I was sure there were no more guards around, I crept forwards on the ground, inch by inch, on my hands and knees towards the sink.
Fariba was watching. Neither of us said a word. I made sure I stayed below eye level so that even if a guard did happen to glance through the peephole, she would not immediately see me. When I finally reached the sink, I stretched out and groped between the drainpipe and the wall and, very carefully, very slowly, pulled the object out of the gap in the plaster.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was the narrow plastic ink reservoir of a ballpoint pen. A pen! I drew the tip of it across my palm, and to my wonder the ink had not dried up. A pen that worked! I turned round and gave Fariba a jubilant thumbs up and then scuttled back to my seat and hid the pen rapidly under my blanket. It was unbelievable. Incredible. How could I have not seen this pen before? How could I have never noticed that winking tip under the sink in all the time we had been in this cell? It was as though the pen knew how badly I needed it!
I was giddy with joy. Now I had a pen to write with! But what about paper? Where to find something on which to write? The first idea was Fariba’s. She reminded me that strips of newspaper, mainly advertisements, were sometimes left in the toilets, to be used as needed. I began tearing off the narrow empty margins to write some very compact poems.
But how to get these to my family without being reprimanded by the prison guards? I had never seen the guards inspecting the blindfolds we had to wear while going to visits, so I tucked the poem inside mine and set off. But that day, against all odds, they checked the blindfold and found the poem, much to my dismay. It was only a poem, but it was humiliating. I felt miserable.
I came up with a new plan. To show the officers and prison guards that sharing poetry should not be considered subversive, I decided to recite one to a family member during a phone visit. But this, too, proved unsuccessful. I was very distressed. How could I keep all this poetry in my head?
Only much later did I discover the use of tissues, and although I had to split each precious and delicate piece in half, with time, trial and error I could write legibly on them; words which had always been a source of comfort to me became a liberation in prison.
~
The first poems I wrote in Evin were rather sentimental. They were on themes of joy and consolation, and lifted my heart even during the writing process. After some time, I began to think I should try and cast my pain, as well as my hope, in poetic form and write a poetic memoir while I still could. Recent events were still fresh in my mind and the details would be forgotten later – if there was going to be a later. With every day that passed, our trial was drawing closer, and, after that, our fate was unknown. It occurred to me that documenting the difficulties of these days might prove useful to others.
I did not decide to write poetry: it decided me. Nor did I even choose what to write; the poems did the choosing. They flowed out of me, like a fountain gushing up from inside, bubbling between my lips. I wrote without thinking, without crossing out or editing. And once a few pages were written, I read them to my friends in my cell, especially Fariba.
I had, on many occasions, suggested to her that we jointly write our memoirs. But as time passed, it became clear that this was not feasible. How could we write in such a small cell, where eyes behind, through and even perhaps on this side of the door were watching us? How could we keep anything we had written safe, when every move, every breath, every look was under scrutiny? How could we ever get our writing out of this cell, let alone the prison? It felt impossible. Despite all that, with the ink refill in my hand and a tissue hidden in the book on my knees, anything seemed possible.
‘In the Name of God, the Peerless Lord of the hopeful dawn, Through Whose tender mercy a whole world was born – Show me how to conjure up this tedious tale, And find more than the dust of words in this storm?’
~
In the aftermath of the 2010 elections, a vivacious young woman joined our group. She was beautiful, a joyful spirit, full of energy and courage. Her friendship was vital to me in more ways than one. Shadi, like hundreds of others, had been arrested during the demonstrations, but was calm despite her interrogations. She was also intrepid and full of humour, capable of playing outlandish games even with the guards.
Now, whenever it snows, I find myself imagining I’m in the Large Fresh Air Yard of Section 209, where that leather office chair, used for outdoor interrogations during the height of the arrests, had been abandoned. I would sit on it and Shadi would pull me round on the snow, round and round no matter how much I protested.
‘Enough,’ I used to beg, ‘the cameras are watching us, for goodness’ sake, stop!’
But that young rebel never listened. She just honked with laughter, like a lively child, and pulled me faster and faster, spinning the chair round in circles.
‘Don’t worry,’ Shadi would shout back. ‘We might make the guards laugh and they’ll show up soon enough anyway, if only for the chair!’ And sure enough one would open the door a minute or so later.
When this remarkable young woman joined us, I had already begun secretly scribbling poems on pieces of tissue paper with my clandestine pen. Whenever I managed to read these to the others in the cell, I would ask Fariba in particular to give me her critique. When, on those rare occasions, she asked me to clarify a metaphor or explain a line, it was a sign that the poem needed rework. I gauged my progress from the tone of her voice and the expression on her face. When the poem was not too impressive, she was infinitely kind. ‘That was good!’ she would say, sweetly. When it had improved slightly, she would respond with warm, encouraging words: ‘That was very good!’ she would nod at me, hopefully. Then, if I managed to write something a little more effective, she would become enthusiastic: ‘That was excellent!’ she would say with a sparkle in her eyes.
Shadi also showed considerable interest in my poems and listened attentively when I read them aloud. One day she asked me what my intentions were. ‘So, now that you’ve scribbled all over these bits of tissue paper,’ she said, ‘what exactly are you going to do with them?’
‘I really don’t know,’ I replied. Indeed, I had never asked myself that question. Perhaps I had not dared. ‘I am just writing for the sake of writing!’ I added feebly.
Perhaps secretly, in my heart of hearts, I was writing because of the trial ahead, the imminence of execution. Perhaps I wanted to leave a trace of myself behind.
Shadi suggested a solution – an audacious one, a shocking one – and like a wanderer lost in the dark who suddenly finds a lantern thrust in her hand and sees the path before her feet, I welcomed it without thinking, certainly without grasping the consequences. It was a time when the whole country had election fever, when we were waiting to be summoned to court and sentenced to death under cover of the turmoil at any moment; I was living in a trance, a dream. I accepted Shadi’s solution without realising how much it put her in danger.
She proposed that we slip twenty-five of my poems into the torn lining of her overcoat so she could just walk out of prison with them. She said it could easily be done, and we just needed a needle and thread, that’s all. But how and where could such things be found? Asking to thread one’s face offered a limited resource. Requesting a needle to repair clothes was also a short-term option. The guards had become particularly vigilant and exigent at this time. But I took the chance and asked. The needle was on an hour’s loan. The thread was black, the exact colour of Shadi’s overcoat. We were in business! I even kept back some extra thread before returning the bobbin. But what was the use of all this thread without a needle?
During one of those tension-filled days, as I walked back from the bathroom in a daze, I suddenly noticed something glittering on the floor before our cell. I glanced quickly away so as not to draw attention to my interest, but as I drew nearer, I saw with amazement that it was a real needle on the ground. Very calmly, I bent down as if to adjust my plastic slipper and picked it up. Coolly, I stepped into our cell expecting someone to follow me, a guard asking what I had picked up. Nothing escaped scrutiny in Section 209. The guards watched everyone, noticed every gesture. But nobody came. I stood with the needle in my sweaty palm hardly daring to express my glee. I took a deep breath.
‘Look what I’ve found!’ I whispered to the others. Was this mere coincidence or something more, this miraculous needle lying right before our cell door? It was a sign, surely, a green light! Or it was a trap, which the guards had placed in my path to catch me red-handed. But whether it was a trick to deceive me or a means for my poems to escape, my options were clear. I had to use it.
When Shadi left us some fifteen days later, she took everything that I had written so far, carefully sewn into the lining of her overcoat. I kept the needle, hidden under my blanket, like gold, as a symbol of her fierce bravery. When I think of the risk she took to deliver all those pieces of tissue to the places and the people I had asked her to find, I am still astonished. She literally put her life on the line for the sake of my poor words.
~
The poems kept accumulating, and soon another heap of tissues was covered with tiny writing. Every time we went out into the yard for exercise, I panicked lest the guards inspect our cell. Every gulp of air I breathed was thick with anxiety. For a while I kept the poems inside my brassiere, but the layers gradually grew too bulky even for that. I had to find alternatives.
I was most afraid that the poems might create trouble for others as well as myself. Had I always been this suspicious in the past, or was prison making me so? Did I really care about the discovery of my doggerel verses, or was I becoming paranoid? As the post-election tensions mounted and our court date kept being delayed, I wondered if the authorities were waiting for an excuse to twist the knife deeper. I did not want my poems to be their excuse.
In spite of everything, however, the poems still flowed, still buoyed me up with a sense of destiny. A pen had winked at me from under the sink. I had learned how to write on tissues. Enough black thread was in my possession to erase the facial hair of all the women in the General Ward of Evin, and I had even found a needle shining at my feet! Confirmation as well as doubt, hope as well as fear steadied my spirits. Poetry kept my equilibrium.
~
A little while later, when dozens of protesters were being rounded up in the streets and crammed into the overcrowded quarters of Section 209, where solitude no longer existed and almost all cells were shared for lack of space, another young woman called Bita joined us. She too was highly intelligent as well as very engaged. She too was open minded as well as kind. But her stay in prison would be short, because she had what they called ‘connections’.
‘One of the wonders of the age,’ she used to say, ‘is that someone like me could have been born into a family like mine!’
Bita soon noticed that I was writing surreptitiously between the pages of a book. One day she asked me to read some of my poems to her and was very moved. When she asked me what I planned to do with them all, I confessed that the only solution I could think of was to destroy them. It was unwise to hoard them in the cell much longer. We might be summoned to court at any moment. My poems were a danger to everyone.
‘Maybe I should stop writing,’ I concluded, lamely. Bita rejected this option and proposed that we use the same system I had with Shadi. But by then I had woken from my dream. What a risk it would be if she was caught, how severely she could be punished, how terrible that would be for her, for me, for all of us! But she insisted on throwing caution to the wind. The only problem was that her overcoat did not have a lining. Unlike Shadi’s capacious cloak, in whose lining a wad of tissues was invisible, Bita’s coat was light and elegant, with only a strip of burgundy velvet around the cuffs, neck and hem. Could my tissues be stuffed under this delicate trim?
Every evening, I sat covered by that elegant coat, under the pretext of warming myself, and very slowly and carefully unpicked the velvet trim stitch by stitch. Once it was unpicked, I folded a few pieces of tissue under it, and sewed it up again. By now, the number of sheets of tissue I had accumulated exceeded a hundred. I had to make sure the burgundy thread remained intact when I unpicked it and took great care to put the needle into the exact holes of the earlier stitches with the original thread so they would be invisible. And since we were in a double cell with two doors, I had to keep one eye on the peephole to the right and the other to the left – I must have been looking at the needle with a third eye!
During that hectic post-election period, as emotions rose higher on the streets and protestors were being detained in greater numbers behind the walls of Evin, as the fate of the Yaran-i-Iran hung ominously in the balance and our trial date was delayed, I unpicked and re-stitched the velvet trim again and again. Each night, I placed the coat under my head like a pillow, to press the poems flat, and every day when we went out for fresh air in the yard, Bita would wear her coat and walk in front of me so that I could double-check my stitching.
Twice, I undid the stitches of the hem and sleeves because the trim looked too bulky. Twice, I stitched everything back up using the same thread, which by then had worn as thin as a spider’s web. But however hard I tried, the velvet still looked lumpy, and the places where I had been forced to use black thread were suspiciously discernible. Finally, when it would no long have been wise to undo one more stitch, I gave up. Would the guards notice?
‘My dear girl,’ I told Bita anxiously, ‘it isn’t normal looking. It isn’t right!’
In a tone I will never forget, that brave young woman answered, ‘One has to feel right in one’s self to look normal to others!’
When they called her the following morning and she prepared to leave, I was in a wretched state of self-reproach. If anything should happen to this courageous girl, it would be entirely my fault. I was trembling from head to foot when she approached to bid me farewell. She knew, without my saying anything, everything that I was unable to say. She took me in her arms and gave me a tight hug, with her mouth close to my ear.
‘If nothing happens and there are no problems,’ she whispered, ‘I will shout goodbye in a loud voice on my way out, then you can finally relax!’
We kissed each other and she walked out of the cell with her head high. I noticed that she was talking to the guards in the corridor rather loudly. By then, Section 209 was no longer under the same pall of silence it had been in the past. The demonstrations and arrests had led to overcrowding in the cells during those summer months. So Bita was raising her voice in a rather cocky fashion, trilling away like a noisy bird, to be heard. I guessed she was trying to establish a ‘goodbye’ voice, so that the guards would not be suspicious later.
Her bravado did nothing to allay my stress. Would they stop her, search her? Would they notice the unwieldy trim and rip those stitches apart? It was not a human heart in my chest, but a beating drum, a war drum, a warning drum thumping at a pace that made breathing difficult. The minutes passed. It was agonising. Time stretched unbearably. Nothing happened.
Then suddenly a clear voice rang out – It was Bita, shouting from afar, ‘I’m going! Goodbye!’ and then silence.
That was how this extraordinary young woman left our cell. That was how almost all my poems left the prison. It was how everything I gave her reached its destination a few days later. This precious girl bore the weight of my sufferings into the free air, like a queen. I thank my God for the generosity, the audacity and pluck, of the women of Iran.
Mahvash Sábet Shahríyárí was born on February 4, 1953 in the province of Ardestan, Iran. She went to school in Tehrán and received a bachelor’s degree in psychology at university. After her marriage to Síyávash Sábet on May 21, 1973, she began a life-long career in education, as a school principal and teacher of psychology, and served on the National Literacy Committee of Iran. Like thousands of Baha’is, she was barred from work after the Islamic Revolution but served for fifteen years as the director of the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education, (BIHE), established to meet the needs of Baha’í students denied access to university. Her first arrest took place in 2005 and her second in 2008, as a member of the Yárán-i-Irán, an ad hoc group responsible for the Bahá’í community. She was released in 2017 but arrested again last July and condemned to another ten year sentence.
Edited/adapted by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani.
Translated by Azita Mottahedeh.
