God’s Shadow: Prison Poems is Reza Baraheni’s powerful narrative, 99 pages long, of the excruciating physical and mental torture he suffered in 1973 at the hands of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police. The account is told through a vivid prose memoir and a collection of poems—two of them (“The Doves” and “The Light of Home”) composed while Baraheni was in prison.
In his acknowledgments, Baraheni says of those two poems: “I wrote on prison walls with my fingernails, memorizing each stanza, erasing it so that I wouldn’t get caught, and scratching the following stanzas in the same fashion until the whole poem was completed” (9). The rest of the collection was written during his visit to the United States in 1974. Baraheni wrote all the poems originally in Persian and translated them himself into English. In the acknowledgments he names several friends who read the English versions and helped him to polish them: David St. John, Burt Blume, Michael Henderson, and Denise Levertov.
The introduction is a 26-page narrative that, like a crime thriller, begins dramatically with the abduction of the author by “a tall, bearded young man” who, at a stoplight, steps up to Baraheni’s car and coolly threatens to shoot him if he makes a false move. The man is an undercover SAVAK policeman, it turns out, who gets in the car, thrusts the gun into Baraheni’s ribs, and begins the drama that the rest of the book describes in harrowing detail. Baraheni’s introduction reads like fiction, but it is supported with factual details, national statistics, and notes on the real names and identities of his torturers.
The abduction, search, and seizure of his papers, bloody interrogation procedures, instruments of torture and torture chambers, cells for solitary confinement, cries of fellow prisoners being burned, whipped, and jabbed with heated or hot-wired iron prods, being strung up upside-down, being raped; Baraheni’s experience of unbearable pain and of passing out only to wake up to increased torture—are all described in unflinching detail in the prose memoir.
The poems are no less graphic. Some of them (“Ahmad Agha’s Prison Dream”) are surreal renditions of what happens to a prisoner physically; some of them (“Nostalgia” and “Ass Poem”), of what happens mentally and morally. Each poem unfolds a different nightmarish account of the tormented existence of political prisoners in Iranian jails.
In “Torture Chambers,” for example, the poet compares the rooms in which torture is administered to the shops and offices of commodity brokers. The effect of interlarding the physical description of the trappings of torture with the topics of political discourse carried out by the hideous “toads” and “apes” who administer pain in that setting is shocking and bizarre: “whips of woven wire dangle,” “the electric baton is the stiff prick of a stallion,” a “Dr. Shadi . . . pulls the nails in the cool manner of a manicurist,” and so forth, “and all this happens when the Persian / press vomit White Revolution day and night / every month they torture 2000 people”; “in Iran the bowels / of the earth await your pleasure and the / gates of hell open their mouths wide as the oil / pipelines the lines lead to those / brokers’ chambers . . .” (54–56, spaces in original).
“Barbecue” graphically describes the humiliation of a prisoner whose entire buttocks and anus have been burned raw so that he cannot sit on a toilet or contain his fecal matter (57–58). “The Prisoner’s Biography by His Wife” (from the perspective of the one person who was once the prisoner’s most intimate companion) describes a husband’s nightmares, hallucinations, and waking traumas years after he has been released and the couple is attempting to live a normal life in places far from the bloodied whipping rooms where he was beaten by the “six men” he cannot get out of his damaged mind (76–80).
“What Is Poetry” is composed of 15 short stanzas, each beginning with the words “poetry / is . . .” (73–74), but this is no predictable catalog of characteristics. Instead the metaphors are meant to define poetry in a completely new way: for instance, as “a shark’s fin cutting a prisoner’s throat / delicately and precisely”; as “a cliff where executioners hurl poets into canyons below”; as “the needle used to sew up Farrokhi’s lips,” and so on.
The point of this litany appears to be that an exact and graphic idiom is required to express the inhumanity perpetrated in some prison systems; that to prettify the language is to deprive human beings of the dignity that their suffering entitles them to; and that only by means of poetry (incisively conceived and forceful) can one hope to muster the linguistic wherewithal to speak these outrageous truths candidly.
Like Baraheni’s “Exile Poem of the Gallery,” published a quarter of a century later, the poems of God’s Shadow provide readers with a rich, vicarious sense of how certain worldly realities—including the art and the poetry of others—will appear to a poet who has survived having “a dagger thrust in his throat” (Making Meaning 13).
Bibliography
Baraheni, Reza. “Exile Poem of the Gallery.” In Making Meaning. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2000.
———. God’s Shadow: Prison Poems. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
Categories: British Literature, Iranian Literature, Literature, Prison Literature