By Sandra Lynn Hutchison
“My pen’s broken/and it’s not in my hand,/ They took my voice/ as a spoil of oppression…” — so PEN Pinter Writer of Courage and longtime Baha’i prisoner of conscience Mahvash Sabet writes from the depths of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. What does it take to survive a 20-year-long prison sentence as a member of a persecuted minority? How does a poet write when she has no pen or paper?
Launching National Poetry Month at the Bangor Public Library on Tuesday April 1 at 6:30 p.m., this reading from Mahvash Sabet’s second volume of prison poems will highlight various aspects of her powerful testimony about a life of letters lived against all odds, as set down in “A Tale of Love” (GR Books, 2024), which has been translated into English by Dr. Sandra Lynn Hutchison of Orono and Shahin Mowzoon, with an introduction by the 2023 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Narges Mohammadi.
Offering accounts of hardship and deprivation as a result of torture and isolation, Sabet’s prison poems also tell a tale of love and transcendence. In the poems of this volume, Sabet writes of the stirrings in her own soul as she imagines hearing the footsteps of the renowned nineteen-century Persian poet Tahirih echoing in the corridor outside her cell, of the hope she takes from watching a weed break through a crack in a cement floor, of the comfort she feels when she catches a rare glimpse of the sun and stars. How does Sabet find light in the darkness of a prison cell? As the following except from Narges Mohammadi’s powerful introduction to the poems puts it: “…it is with certainty that I now say that it is her beliefs that bestow upon Mahvash the strength to meet persecution with words of peace, to find light in the midst of a dark prison cell, to offer love in a place rife with suffocation and hatred, and to embody compassion in the midst of the most inhumane conditions imaginable.”
Solitary confinement is, as Mohammadi describes it, “an abyss of absence, a complete void.” For Sabet, the only way to scale the walls of her prison cell has been to write poetry, so she has scribbled words on whatever she could find, napkins and towels, and tucked them into the pockets of visitors so they could find their way out of the prison and be read. At first, Sabet says, she wrote poems to cheer up her family.
“But soon,” she explains, “poetry began to lighten my own heart too.” For her, poems became a way of expressing her deepest feelings, of giving vent to loneliness and despair, of recording moments of crisis and victory.
While the poems of “A Tale of Love” recount a gruesome tale of life in an Iranian prison — executions, torture, and the struggle against the worst enemy of all, loneliness – they also, through the elixir that is art and faith, tell the story of unimaginable resilience. “Of the threats, humiliations, and insults Mahvash Sabet has had to endure,” Narges Mohammadi writes, “she has made dark pages on which her mind can set down words of resistance to affirm life.” As Irish poet Michael Longley, winner of the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize said of Sabet, “Her imagination is rhapsodic. Her poems want to soar.” Her incarceration can only be described, he asserts, as a “sin against the light.”
Released in September 2017, after serving 10 years of her 20-year-long sentence, Sabet was arrested again on July 31, 2022, just as work on the translation of this volume began. She remains in prison today and, no doubt, continues to chronicle from her cell the injustices faced by so many Baha’is in Iran – the confiscation of property, the shuttering of businesses, the destruction of Baha’i graveyards, detainments, imprisonments and executions – even as she affirms the power of love through words of light. As she herself makes clear, Sabet’s story is not hers alone: it is the story of every Baha’i in Iran, of every victim of such injustices. “Compatriots! My story is yours,” she writes to her fellow Iranians. “Please do not ostracize me.” All Sabet asks is that her countrymen, indeed all who have ears to hear, do the following: “Listen to our narratives in our own words.” This reading of poems from “A Tale of Love” will do just that.
Sandra Lynn Hutchison is a writer, teacher and the editor of elixir-journal.org. She lives in Orono and teaches in the Wilmette Institute and the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education. Her translation of Mahvash Sabet’s second volume of prison poems “A Tale of Love” was published in 2024 by George Ronald Books in Oxford, England.
