We Lived to Tell: Political Prison Memoirs of Iranian Women (review)

middle east journal M 173 scribing the experiences of Moroccan women political prisoners under the reign of King Hassan II, andAisha Odeh’s Dreams of Freedom describing those of Palestinian women political prisoners under the Israeli occupation . We Lived to Tell records the experiences of three women political prisoners during the Cultural Revolution in Iran in the 1980s. The book is introduced by Shahrzad Mojab. It is divided into three sections that document the stories of Sousan Mehr, Azadeh Agah, and Shadi Parsi as experienced and written by them. The three narratives go beyond the individual stories to constitute a testimony to those of friends and comrades in prison. The book addresses the question of what it means to remember and record these experiences and the wider political implications of such acts. It also raises the question of how state and religion collude in disciplining women’s bodies and sexuality.Women political prisoners were “tortured, denigrated and vilified for being women and claiming an oppositional space. These women ruptured the boundaries of patriarchal-religious submissiveness, pushed their sexualized bodies into the public sphere and claimed rights” (p. 9). The book depicts the differences as well as the bonds between women in prison. It relies on reflexive methodology and on diary and memory to record these experiences. We Lived to Tell provides a detailed description of torture that included an assault on women ’s political agency and autonomy. Torture in this context is gendered as the women were targeted by the Iranian authorities for opposing the state and for doing so as women. As the prison authorities controlled the minute details of these women’s lives, they “thought of the prisoners as godless creatures that did not deserve to live like human beings” (p. 78). Their goal “was to make us as miserable and obedient as possible. Anything that made us happy or kept us busy and creative became an object of punishment” (p. 88). The authorities “believed we all needed to come to terms with our past, repent our ‘sins,’and form new beliefs and attitudes toward the system. Any ‘distracting’ activity was deemed not conducive to positive change” (p. 112). The book depicts the variety of modes of resistance that the women employed to survive that ranged from faith and devotion to their the end of the long 18th century. In Chapter 5, “From Nature to Disease,” Mikhail explores the dimensions of disease, specifically plague, and how conceptions of this disease changed in relation to the modernizing trends in the late eighteenth and early 19th centuries. Here and in the sixth and final chapter, we are provided with a description of the process of change in labor management and how it reflected broader issues of transformation of institutions and social structures in general. One might take Mikhail to task for his categorization of environmental problems. While mismanagement of the irrigation system may have led to a temporary retraction in agricultural productivity, it is doubtful that this can be classified as long-term environmental damage. Minor caveats such as this aside, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History is an impressive work that tackles new issues in an innovative fashion and uses new sources creatively. The book is well written and, for those interested in the subject, a page turner. It is hoped that Mikhail’s approach to this subject matter will elicit further studies in this fruitful area of research. Stuart Borsch, Department of History, Assumption College, is the author of The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study. IRAN We Lived to Tell: Political Prison Memoirs of Iranian Women, by Azadeh Agah, Sousan Mehr, and Shadi Parsi. Toronto, Canada: McGilligan Books, 2007. 239 pages. $22.95. Reviewed by Isis Nusair With the increasing participation of women in recent revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, We Lived to Tell is an important contribution to thinking about women’s agency and resistance. It is also an important addition to recent publications of memoirs of women political prisoners. These include Fatna el Bouih’s Talk of Darkness de- 174 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL beliefs, crying, consoling, and confiding in each other. The main challenge was...