Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran by Shahla Talebi (review)

One of my earliest memories of post-revolutionary Iran is watching on television the forced confessions of a young leftist woman. It was the early 1980s when in a bloody power struggle, the Islamist revolutionaries consolidated their power by brutally crushing the leftists with whom they had been in alliance. What stood out about this particular confession was the woman’s singular defiance to play along with her interrogators. Usually, by the time the prisoners came on television, they would be repentant, answering the off-camera interrogator’s questions with fake enthusiasm or quiet surrender. But this woman caught the attention of the audience by appearing on television and yet refusing to either confess or repent. Suddenly, the interview ended and some programming was aired to fill in the time. Then she reappeared, visibly beaten and compliant, and began to recant her leftist struggle in a voice devoid of any of the spark that we had witnessed only hours ago.

This memory came flooding back to me as I read Shahla Talebi’s Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran. Talebi’s book is a memoir of her imprisonment twice, from 1977-78 during the Pahlavi monarchy and 1983-1992 under the Islamic Republic. On a basic level, Talebi’s Ghosts of Revolution fits into the proliferation of English language memoirs by Iranians, a trend that is both specific to the literary trajectory of Iranians living abroad, and part of a larger trend of memoir writing in Iran. A large number of these memoirs are written by women, the most famous of which were also penned by women writing primarily about the first decade of the Islamic Republic, such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Iran and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Prison memoirs constitute a smaller subset of these texts, with the ones in English primarily written by hyphenated-Iranians who were imprisoned more recently.

Ghosts of Revolution is a different kind of book, if not project, from the memoirs mentioned above. It is not a chronology of time spent in prison nor an attempt to explain the political events surrounding the author’s imprisonment and subsequent release. Time, Talebi’s account jumps back and forth, as memory does, moving from her release in 1992 to her first arrest in 1977, to her childhood memories, to her second arrest in 1983, to when she first began to write her memories in 1999, to the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988, and to when she returned to Iran again in the early 2000s. All chapters but one are named after four women and one man, tied together in their madness, and it is this madness—whether in the face of torture to confess and repent, or become a collaborator, or the loss of one’s loved ones, or the guilt of survival or in the case of Yousuf, in the face of societal cruelty—that binds together the non-linear narrative of Talebi’s book. Near the end, she notes that she is “writing not to forget but to remember and to understand” (213), and at that point, it is clear to the reader that this understanding is not about the history of post-revolutionary Iran, nor the factors that led to her long imprisonment, nor even what it has meant for her to lose her husband Hamid in the prison purges of 1988, but about larger questions of subjectivity and power.

To accomplish this goal, Talebi sets for herself a rather difficult task of writing a “hybrid text” that fuses the deeply personal and sentimental genre of prison memoir with that of academic writing. Ghosts of Revolution in some ways benefits from what is clearly Talebi’s academic training: Her descriptions of the prison, of the various women with whom she lived, suffered, and struggled (along with the striking drawings that begin each chapter) have a real ethnographic sense...