Ali Dashti 23 Years For Free Public Full

As Matin-Asgari note s, the earliest mem- oirs describing prison culture in modern Iran depict a world wher ein bor e- dom and monoto ny is the primary torment (Matin-Asga ri 693).

It constructs from the prison memoirs of the dissident writers Ali Dashti, Bozorg Alavi, and Reza Baraheni a genealogy of the emergence of prison consciousness in Iranian modernity, across both the Pahlavi and post-revolutionary periods.

The modern Iranian prose of incarceration is situated within an account of the prison as a site where the modern technologies of the state are refined.

As I trace resonances between the long history of prison writing across the Islamic world and the prison literature of modern Iran, I consider how we can better understand the relation between prose and literary representation in modern Middle Eastern literatures.

Prisoners inside Qasr Prison.

Iran Times International, reprinted in The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi, 228.

A communal cell inside Qasr Prison.

Iran Times International, reprinted in The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi, 229.) Figures - uploaded by Rebecca Ruth Gould Author content All figure content in this area was uploaded by Rebecca Ruth Gould Content may be subject to copyright.

Ali Dashti 23 Years For Free Public Full

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The modern Iranian prose of incarceration is situated within an account of the prison as a site where the modern technologies of the state are rened.

For as long as prison s have existed, prisoners have document ed their incarcera- tion.

F rom Boethius to Gramsci, incarcerated writers ha ve regularly linked the act of writing to the quest for freedom.

Whether through polished a utobiography o r fragmented notes, impris- oned writers typically use what they witness in the prison ce ll to make broader claims through language a bout the regime that has incarcera ted them.

As one observer of Iran s carceral system observes, I depend on language to see what I cannot see, to conj ure up the ph ysical site on which torture takes place (Darius Rejali 3).

I t is through language, and the aesthetic deployment of language in lit erary form, that prison s are made real to the world outside.

I t focuses on the prison memoirs a nd other documen- tary forms of prose produced under the reigns of Reza Shah (19251941) and his son Mohammad Reza Shah (19411979), who pioneered the use of political imprisonment as a tactic for s ilencing dissidents, to the Islamic Republic (1979), where this practice has continued to o urish up to the present.

By examining the prose genres genera ted by these dierent carceral regime s side-by-side, I s how how the Islamic Repu blic in many respects contin ued the policies and practices rst developed by the Pahlavi Sh ahs, notwiths tanding its disavowal of the latter.

The modern carceral state Historically, the task of raising consciousness of the experience of imprisonment within Persian lit erature has been the burden of poetry.

T o note just one statistic, when T ehran s infamous Qasr prison opened in 192930, only 18 of its 300 prisoners could be classied as political.

By 1940, this number rose to 200 out of a total of 2000 prisoners (Abraha mian 2528).

Although this perception developed gradually over time and faded once a n entire generation o f leist intel- lectuals had been annihilated, thi s targeting laid the foundations f or the political repression o f both secu lar activists and of Muslims within I slamic Iran.

Being targeted as a group made it easier f or Iranian political prisoners t o organ - ize themselves collectively, through hunger strikes and other f orms of organized political action (Pishevari 7087).

In the earliest stages of this targeting of leist activists, under Reza Shah, the forms of incarceration were less brutal than they were to become in subsequent decades.

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