Fengselsdikt

by Mahvash Sabet

Innesperret i et av Irans tøffeste fengsler skriver Mahvash Sabet dikt på servietter og toalettpapir. I 2008 ble hun arrestert og to år senere dømt til tjue års fengsel, bare fordi hun er medlem av Bahá’í-samfunnet. Takket være en rekke hjelpere blir Sabets tekster smuglet ut, redigert og utgitt som Prison poems. Diktene er historiske dokumenter over Sabets elendige soningsforhold, men er også unike portetter av iranske kvinne­rs livsvilkår. Det er sterke dikt som reflekterer over desperasjon, håp og ensomhet.

Og her står jeg noen ganger
og ser opp på himmelen
stirrer gjennom den smale spalten
mellom to rustne stålplater
som stenger meg ute fra den vide himmelen.

(fra «Og her står jeg noen ganger»)

Genres: Poetry, Baha I, Nonfiction

128 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

Mahvash Sabet served for several years as secretary of an informal council of seven individuals known as the Yaran, who have been responsible for managing the affairs of the Iranian Bahá’í community. In 2008 she was arrested and jailed for two-and-a-half years without a proper hearing. She was finally convicted and condemned in 2010, together with her fellow members of the Yaran, to twenty years imprisonment. Beneath all the false accusations – those usually fabricated against the Bahá’ís in Iran – there was nothing more than her belief in her Faith and her commitment to running the affairs of the Bahá’í community.

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

Are you geared up for a weekend of rest and relaxation with nothing more serious in mind than choosing which wonderful volume you're going to release from your pile of books, perhaps that favourite writer you feel is certain to help you while away your free time blissfully?
No?
Your weekend is going to be much more active than that?
You’re going to spend some time today with someone special in your life perhaps, or you are taking your children on a hike in the country, or your grandchildren to the cinema, or you plan to cook a delicious meal to celebrate a relative’s birthday?

Or perhaps you’ve gone to a luxurious spa for a real treat, and you're being massaged with hot stones, having mud baths, getting a body wrap, a salt scrub, a Vichy shower?
Hmm, those luxury treatments can sound a little painful, can’t they?
But people pay to have them done all the same...

Other people simply sit on the hot stones of a little courtyard under the blazing sun or the freezing rain, their feet soaking in natural mud baths. But they don’t mind because being outside for thirty minutes in the heat or the cold is preferable to lying in the dark and the stench and the dirt of a crowded prison cell.

Mahvash Sabet is one such person. She sits in a prison courtyard when she is allowed, and stares at the little patch of sky above the high walls and the barbed wire, dreaming of her children and all the other people she knew and loved, perhaps remembering a tasty meal she shared years ago with her family. Mahvash Sabet is a prisoner of faith being held unlawfully in a prison in Teheran.

Today, November 15th, is Day of the Imprisoned Writer.

The Day of the Imprisoned Writer was inaugurated thirty three years ago by PEN International, a non-political organisation founded in 1921 and dedicated to promoting literature and freedom of expression throughout the world.

This year, the imprisoned writers selected for attention are: Mahvash Sabet, an Iranian poet; Dieudonné Enoh Meyomesse, a poet from Cameroon; Gao Yu, a Chinese journalist; Azimjon Askarov, a journalist from Kyrgyztan and Nelson Aguilera, a writer and teacher from Paraguay.
More details about these writers can be found here:
http://www.pen-international.org/news...

You can help the cause of the many imprisoned writers throughout the world by sending an appeal on behalf of the five imprisoned writers being highlighted by PEN International this year.
Here is the Release Mavash Sabet Immediately and Unconditionally page:
http://www.pen-international.org/news...

Alberto Manguel and many other writer members of PEN International have lent their support to this campaign. Here is the letter Manguel wrote to Mahvash Sabet and which appeared in The Guardian on Monday:

Dear Mahvash Sabet,

It’s almost an impertinence, I feel, to write to a poet who is being kept behind bars for her words and beliefs. King Lear, imprisoned at the end of the play with his daughter Cordelia, tells her that they will become “God’s spies”. That is what you as well have become, bearing witness to society’s injustices, prejudices and inability to understand that no matter what society might do to a poet, the poet’s words will still be free in the minds of the readers, and continue to conjure up ideas, engage the mind in conversation. Perhaps there’s consolation in this.
You end one of your poems saying that “You can’t see the sorrow after lights out,” and that you therefore “long for the dark, total black-out.” I hope, for your dear sake, that the end of your sorrow is near but not as that “total black-out” you speak of: instead, as a resolution of freedom, as the free sunlight that is every person’s natural right, a right no one is entitled to take away.
I don’t know if you can find comfort in realising that you have now been welcomed into a vast and honoured company of imprisoned writers, from all centuries and all tongues, from Boethius to Abu Nuwas, Cervantes, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Nazim Hikmet and hundreds of others, and that generations of readers to come will remember your name as they remember theirs, long after the names of your jailers have been swept off the memory of the earth.
I can’t offer you anything in your cell except my devotion as your reader, my trust in better times, and my distant but sincere friendship. I hope that in the very near future we will meet in person, not only on the page.
With very best wishes of hope and courage,
Alberto Manguel

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014...

UPDATE November 2017
Mahvash Sabet was released on the 18th of September 2017 after almost a decade in prison in Teheran.
She was awarded the Pen Pinter Prize alongside poet Michael Longley in October. Her nomination was in the category 'International Writer of Courage: a writer who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty.'
CNN link
BBC link

Further update: Mahvash Sabet was arrested again a year or two later and is still in prison today and in very poor health.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my full review, check out my blog here!

I think I’d like to own a copy of this collection. I think the poems are beautiful, speak to the soul, and they made me feel a range of emotions. I’d definitely recommend the book to anyone who likes to read poetry.

[Carina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Den får deg til å tenke og undre over hva forfatteren vil dele

[Eduardo Rioseco · Rating 5 out of 5]

El dolor atraviesa este increíble libro. Algunos poemas intensos y oscuros, como este, se me hicieron difíciles de leer:

He llegado hasta el final. No queda mucho más.
La sangre en mis venas estrechas es como un viejo cartero
que se queja mientras recorre un sendero oscuro y ruinoso
en una bicicleta decrépita.

Pero de vez en cuando aparecían destellos esperanzadores que ayudaban a sobrellevar la experiencia:

La brisa cantó sus suaves versos
pudorosa en el oído de la violeta
la melodía tierna fluyó sin pausa
hasta que la retraída flor se abrió por completo.

Libro visceral, me removió las entrañas. Inolvidable.

[Brendan Ghazavi-Gill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the imagery I have not come across before in relation to prison and experience. I found moments through-provoking and other poems less so, which is the nature of collections I guess.