“My pen’s broken/ and it’s not in my hand./ They took my voice/as a spoil of oppression…” — so PEN Pinter Writer of Courage and longtime Bahá’í prisoner of conscience Mahvash Sabet wrote from the depths of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. What does it take to survive a twenty-year-long prison sentence as a member of a persecuted religious minority? How does a poet write when she has no pen or paper? This reading from Mahvash’s Sabet’s prison poems will highlight various aspects of her powerful testimony about a life of faith and letters lived against all odds, as set down in A Tale of Love (GR Books, 2024), which has been translated from Persian into English by Dr. Sandra Lynn Hutchison and Shahin Mowzoon, with an introduction by the 2023 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Narges Mohammadi.
Offering accounts of hardship and deprivation as a result of torture and isolation, Mahvash Sabet’s prison poems also tell a tale of love and transcendence. In the poems of this volume, Sabet recounts the stirrings in her own soul as she imagines hearing the footsteps of the renowned Persian poet Tahirih echoing in the corridor outside her cell, the hope she takes from watching a weed break through a crack in a cement floor, the comfort she experiences during rare glimpses of the sun and stars. How does Sabet find light in the darkness of a prison cell? As the following excerpt from Narges Mohammadi’s powerful introduction to the poems puts it: “.. it is with certainty that I now say that it is her beliefs that bestow upon Mahvash the strength to meet persecution with words of peace, to find light in the midst of a dark prison cell, to offer love in a place rife with suffocation and hatred, and to embody compassion in the midst of the most inhumane conditions imaginable.”
Solitary confinement is, as Mohammadi describes it, “an absence, a complete void.” For Mahvash Sabet, the only way to scale the walls of her prison cell has been to write poetry. And so Sabet scribbled words on whatever she could find–napkins, towels–and tucked them into the pockets of visitors in the hope that they would find their way out of the prison and be read. At first, Sabet says, she wrote poems to cheer up her family. “But soon,” she explains, “poetry began to lighten my own heart, too.” Poems became a way of expressing her deepest feelings, of giving vent to despair and loneliness, of recording moments of crisis and also of victory.
While the poems of A Tale of Love tell the gruesome truth about life in an Iranian prison–executions, torture, and the struggle against the worst enemy of all, loneliness–they also, through the elixir that is art and faith, tell the story of unimaginable resilience. “Of the threats, humiliation, and insults Mahvash has had to endure, she has made dark pages on which her mind can set down words of resistance to affirm life,” Narges Mohammadi writes. As Irish poet Michael Longley, winner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prize, said of Sabet: “Her imagination is rhapsodic. Her poems want to soar.” Her incarceration could only be described, he asserts, as a “sin against the light.”
Released in September 2017, after serving ten years of a twenty-year-long sentence, Sabet was arrested again on July 31, 2022, just as work on the translation of this volume began. She remains in prison today and, no doubt, continues to chronicle from her cell the injustices faced by so many Bahá’ís in Iran — the confiscation of property, the shuttering of businesses, the destruction of Bahá’í graveyards, detainments, imprisonments, and execution — even as she affirms the power of love through words of light. As she herself makes clear, Sabet’s story is not hers alone: it is the story of every Bahá’í in Iran, of every victim of injustice. “Compatriots! My story is yours,” she writes to her fellow Iranians. “Please do not ostracize me.” All Sabet asks is that her countrymen, indeed all who have ears to hear, do the following: “Listen to our narratives in our own words.” This reading will do just that: tell Sabet’s story in her own words.
Sandra Lynn Hutchison is the author of two books of poetry, The Art of Nesting (GR Books) and The Beautiful Foolishness of Things, which was a finalist for the Poet’s Corner Chapbook Contest, as well as of an award-winning memoir about China, Chinese Brushstrokes: Stories of China (Turnstone Press). Hutchison serves as the editor of e*lix*ir (https://www.elixir-journal.org), an online journal of the arts she founded in 2015 to showcase art that celebrates the power of spirit. She is currently completing a memoir about her journey as a reader of Bahá’í scripture. Her translation, with Shahin Mowzoon, of Mahvash Sabet’s second volume of prison poems, A Tale of Love, with an introduction by Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi, was published by GR Books in 2024. She is the author of numerous essays. Her stories have appeared in publications such as Chinese Pen: Western Ink, the Oxford anthology of stories about China.
Hutchison holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto and has been the recipient of various academic recognitions and literary awards, including a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, an Emily Dickinson Poetry Award, and a Jane Kenyon Poetry Fellowship from Bennington College. She lives in Orono, Maine, where she teaches scriptural exegesis and mentors writers in courses she offers through the Wilmette Institute. She also serves as faculty for the BIHE (Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education), an online university in which she teaches journalism and storytelling to Bahá’í youth who are banned from attending public universities in Iran.
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