Qarchak Women Prison

Behnaz Amani

For Mary who dreamed the Moon-like murdered girl while awake,

Calling Her name, ‘Mahsa!’, ‘Mahsa!’

‘Did you see Her? She was in the kitchen. Where did they take Her?

Mahsa?’

Injection

Dead paralysed in the corridor

Two days.

For Tahmineh who was not Sohrab’s mother anymore

Yet standing in the middle of riots

With her hands covering her ears

SCREeeeeeAMING ……… nein!

This Tahmineh was afraid

And shitting her bed almost every night

Night, night, night

Every morning Marching in a plastic basin

Cigarette on her lips

Pretending to conquer the world

Courageous!

Indifferent to all the hatred in the world

For her mixed-up pills by the warden

On the ‘Trolley of Happiness’!

All vividly, viscously appealing.

For sparrows whose wings were cut off

By our poisoned prison food!

For the lice in our hair

And the bleach in the water.

For the cats on the rooftop waiting for our leftovers

And the fool of a guard wondering to whom those Kisses were thrown!

And the despondent, monstrous walls

Sequestered Hope

In the back of beyond

With their telephone booths

And the two minutes calls

In bottomless queues.

For the smell of rain

In the background of the bars

And all the rack outs while

The lights were still On!

For all the riots,

Hunger strikes

And crackdowns.

For all the sighs, sorrows, sought-after hopes.

For the shaved head of a girl

Who under acute compulsion rips her head,

And for the bleeding iron pole afterwards.

For all the Imposed forfeited court appearances

And all the enforced disappearances.

For Mahsa, Mohammad, Nika,

For Sarina, Siavash, Sasan,

For all the hundreds of thousands

For Us all in EXILE!

I‘m from the Middle East, the cradle of civilisation, yet ironically the place that each day reminds me of this part of Dante‘s Inferno Canto iii "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here". As a woman, a poet and a literary scholar, I can paint the 21st-century human condition and his/her hopes, endeavours, devastations, and beliefs with my words; my audience can see each like an Alice who dares to enter the rabbit hole. I am a former political prisoner of Iran’s recent revolt Woman, Life, Freedom who spent almost two months in Gharchak Women‘s Prison and only bailed out due to her uterus cancer. I used to teach English Literature at the university but after my imprisonment, they expelled me from university and prohibited me from publishing anything academically or non-academically. Thanks to dear Mr. Charles Bernstein and other American poets who ran a petition for me, my voice was heard first by PEN America and then by PEN Germany.