My Life As A Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani

From The Week of July 11, 2010

After watching from afar while Iran's 2009 Green Revolution was brutally suppressed, I found myself in need of a better understanding of that most influential and mysterious of Middle Eastern nations. How could a country of 70 million people, many of them enlightened, educated, rational, fall so deeply under the sway of a group of ruthless and despotic mullahs? Though the scope of My Life As a Traitor is too narrow to provide adequate answers to such sweeping questions of the how and the why of Iran's recent history, it does offer up a chilling portrayal of life inside authoritarianism, a life lived far too courageously for despots unwilling to tolerate dissent.

Born into a family of modest means, Ms. Ghahramani had a surprisingly normative childhood. Part of a Middle Eastern baby boom, she is raised up in the shadow of the Iran-Iraq war which consumed those two nations for most of the 1980s, bringing them both to the brink of social and economic ruin. And though the parents do what they can to keep her and her generation from having to experience the inevitable scars of war, it becomes clear to Ms. Ghahramani, early on, that life in the postwar Iran is very different from the life her parents grew up with. The story then jumps forward to the early aughts where, after growing increasingly frustrated and upset with her country's theocratic rulers, she joins her fellow university students in a series of 1960s-style student demonstrations designed to shed light on injustices and usher in appropriate reforms. For her efforts, Ms. Ghahramani and many of her friends were arrested -- really, kidnapped -- and imprisoned in Evin, one of Iran's harshest detention centers. There, her life gets exceedingly grim as she attempts to withstand an experience the likes of which most Westerners will never know.

This is a powerful recount of a life irrevocably altered by tyranny. Ms. Ghahramani's chilling description of the ruthlessness of her arrest, the depravity and humiliation of her captivity, and the cruelty of those who try so hard to keep her silent is moving and inspiring. Unprepared for her ordeal, lacking any formal training in techniques that might have helped her to stay sane, Ms. Ghahramani's capacity to endure is an exemplar of the near limitless strength of the human spirit. Equally, this book left me with a clearer picture of the Iranian authorities, a picture which does not leave much hope for positive change. We see, here, how they have become masters of the art of retaining power, deploying a mixture of military and religious force to dominate and control a country of unarmed citizens who find it difficult to organize and fight back against a regime perfectly willing to beat, shoot and torture them. An excellent but disturbing read. (4/5 Stars)