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Maziar Bahari used to feel sceptical when people talked of the way that books can change lives. Such statements always seemed like so much hyperbole to him.
But when Sepideh Gholian, one of Iran’s most famous political prisoners, came into his life, everything changed. “If anyone wants to know why writing matters, her book is the best example,” says Bahari, a London-based journalist, documentary maker and the founder of the news website IranWire.
“In its pages, she takes us to places that are out of the hands of the interrogators and the prison wardens. Writing empowers her. It allows her to think of things that are hers alone, and which no one can ever take away from her. It shows the power of literature to liberate the mind and the soul.”
On his phone, he plays me a seconds-long message from the 30-year-old, recorded on one of the mobiles that are periodically smuggled into Evin, the Tehran prison where she is held, which is best known in Britain as the place where Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was incarcerated.
In the clip, she is smiling broadly and whispering something – a barely audible whisper that is clearly highly practiced (prisoners are often required to be silent). Bahari shakes his head. “She’s so vivid, and it’s this – her laughter – that attracts me and millions of others to her story. She is an individual in a country where the regime wants the population to be one mass under the supreme leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei]. To be an individual in Iran is an act of resistance.”
Gholian, who is celebrated by a generation of younger Iranian women for once having bright blue hair, was born in Dezful, Khuzestan, in the south-west of Iran. In 2018, when she was still a student, she began helping to organise support for the Haft Tappeh sugarcane complex strike (since 2015, when the factory was privatised, workers had been fighting against job losses, unpaid wages and poor working conditions).
Although she was not a worker herself, Gholian reported on the strike, planned meetings and built solidarity in the community and beyond – until, during a peaceful protest, she was arrested, after which she was detained without trial for 30 days.
But Gholian was undaunted. On her release, she revealed to the world what had happened to her. She had, she said, been tortured. There were beatings and floggings, and during interrogation sessions lasting into the small hours, she was subjected to sexual insults and told that her family would receive information that would lead to her murder for so-called honour.
The public response to this was fierce – it was on her side – but it also brought the state broadcaster to air a documentary in which a distressed Gholian was seen “confessing” to crimes against the state. It also led to her rearrest and imprisonment. In 2023, she was again released, but almost immediately, footage of her denouncing Khamenei went viral (“you tyrant,” she said, “we’re going to put you in a grave”). A day later, she was arrested once more. She has been in prison ever since.
Bahari set up IranWire in 2013, following his own run-in with the Iranian regime: in 2009, he was imprisoned for 118 days, an experience recorded in his best-selling memoir Then They Came For Me.
To date, IranWire has helped to train some 6,000 citizen journalists inside Iran, and it was thanks to this network that he heard Gholian was writing a prison diary – a book IranWire published in Farsi in 2020.
“After that, she knew I was someone she could trust,” he says. “So we stayed in touch as much as possible, and then she told me she had an idea for a second book, this time about cooking.” Bit by bit, the text was sent to him. Even piecemeal, it was electrifying. Next month, it will be published in English as The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prison in 16 Recipes.
British readers will perhaps find it strange that in a system so severe – as Gholian recounts, ill-treatment, torture and the use of solitary confinement are all routine – the possibility exists that prisoners may cook. But it seems that cracks appear all the time.
“In Persian, we have a joke,” he says. “A prisoner is asked whether he wants to go to a German hell, or an Iranian hell. What’s the difference? he wants to know. Well, he’s told, in the German hell, they flog you and they pour cold water on you every day, whereas in the Iranian hell they flog you and they put your head in boiling water over a fire, and it’s much more painful.”
The prisoner hardly needs to think: he chooses the Iranian hell. “When he’s asked why, he says that in Germany, everything will always work. But in Iran, one day there won’t be any water, and on another, there won’t be matches.”
Corruption is rife. Bribes may be paid. High-ranking prisoners arrive with furniture and kitchen equipment, and leave it behind when they’re released. Above all, prisoners are highly resourceful. Gholian’s recipes are not only very sweet – the women crave sugar – they are also surprisingly elaborate.
The book arrives garlanded with praise from Shirin Ebadi, the human rights lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, and Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and it is not hard to see why.
If the stories it tells are often horrifying – the most agonising concerns a woman who has to secretly abort her baby in prison – the solidarity it reveals somehow inflects the entire narrative with hope.
The women come from all social, ethnic and political backgrounds. Outside the prison, their unity would not be encouraged; many of them would doubtless never even cross paths. Inside it, however, they are, as Bahari puts it, “practising for the kind of Iran they’d like to see in the future”.
And sometimes, of course, a prisoner will be released. The book includes a description of Zaghari-Ratcliffe in a brown apron, baking ginger cookies for the daughter she misses so desperately. Before her release in March 2022, she and Gholian became friends. To this day, the smell of cinnamon makes Gholian think of her.
But her writing has a deeper purpose, too. Each recipe is dedicated to an individual. The pumpkin pie is for Narges Mohammadi, another human rights campaigner and Nobel laureate, now serving her 10th year in prison; the date crumble is for Fatima Muthanna, a long-standing dissident whose current sentence is 15 years; the madeleines are for Marzieh Amiri, one of 50 reporters who were arrested during pro-democracy protests between September and December 2022.
More significantly, still others are written for names that are less well-known, both in and outside Iran. “There’s a level of protection that anonymous prisoners do not have,” says Bahari. “One of the beautiful things she’s doing in the book is to tell the stories of women less famous than she is.”
Last year, it was reported that Gholian had been on hunger strike, but Bahari says she is now doing well. “She seems to be in good spirits.”
When is she likely to be released? “There is a general amnesty before the Persian New Year on 20 March. We don’t know if she’ll be part of that. If she isn’t, in theory, her release should be some time next year. But it’s all quite arbitrary, and that serves its own purpose. They want to keep people on their toes.”
Last time she fell foul of the authorities straight away. If she is released, isn’t she likely simply to get herself in trouble all over again? “I really hope not,” he says.
“It would be better for her if she didn’t. She is so young and so talented. She wants to be a lawyer, so she needs to study.”
Bahari lifts his hands: a gesture in the direction of the wide world. “She has a whole life ahead of her. She needs to hang out with friends, to play sports, to live a normal life in Iran.” A pause, and then he checks himself.
The word “normal”: in case I’m wondering, in this instance it requires inverted commas.
