Bahman’s Horrific Night
Night of panic.
Night of fright.
A Bahman Night. [1]
Night of ambush.
Night of trespass.
Doors are banged on.
Hoodlums come and take away lovers.
Thirty years ago.
Three years ago.
Today.
Tomorrow.
They smell your mouth, lest you might have said love.
Now, they are names,
the guys who were taken away,
the journalists who have been arrested.
They are names in cyberspace.
Faces.
Names.
Articles.
Passion.
Trouble.
Love of freedom.
Iran’s flame of love in heart.
Thirty years ago in Bahman, they were not names.
They were spouses,
comrades,
companions.
Men and women who came with caravans of blood and torture.
Little sparrows, who chirped in the wild forest.
That's all.
And, the killers were on their way.
I return back to Tehran.
To Bahman 1361. To Bahman 1391. [2]
Nothing has changed.
Doors were banged on at midnight.
They came to kill the light.
They came to cut the flowers.
Eyes are closed.
Solitery confinement.
Charges: Having had a red rose in heart.
- Spy, give me your flower.
- I am spy of love.
- Who is your boss?
- Hafiz. [3]
- Who do you get your wages from?
- Ferdowsi. [4]
- Where do you meet?
- At the foot of Mount Alborz.
- The password?
- Iran.
- The name of the project?
- Freedom.
The door closes.
The hardest night in the prison, the first night.
From security of your bed to the insecurity of the hard floor.
The doors close on the names on this dreadful midnight,
close on love, on youth.
Thirty years ago, they closed on us, comrades and friends.
And the next day,
the prison guards came with whips and "Carrying a Sword on the Back". [5]
"The interrogator Brother", who is now a big businessman, said: [6]
- It's finished, finished. We stopped the counter-revolution. The agents of East and West are in our custody.
Under the blindfold, I grinned.
Revolution slapped me so hard that I saw stars in my head.
It’s not finished.
It has just begun.
In that horrific night in Bahman 1361, friends and lovers were taken to the gallows.
In Bahman 1391, I return back to solitary confinement in another horrific night,
with all the arrestees.
These doors will open up in the spring.
- Hey guys, the new guests of the "gentlemen", look hard on the walls of your cells, till it becomes spring again. Thousand of lovers have passed through this slaughterhouse.
***
This blog was originally in Farsi, posted by Houshang Asadi in roozonline.com >>>
Translated by MPD © 2013
Notes:
[1] Bahamn is the 11th month in the Persian calendar.
[2] The years are presented here in the Solar Hijri calendar (SH), which differs from the Gregorian calendar by about 621 years. The exact date of Houshang Asadi’s arrest is Febrauary 6, 1983. Thirty years later, more than a dozen Iranian journalists were arrested beginning on Sunday, January 25, 2013.
[3] Hafiz is a 14th-century Persian mystic and poet.
[4] Ferdowsi is a highly revered Persian poet born in 940 AD.
[5] "Carrying a sword on the back" is a cruel form of torture, where one hand is pulled down behind the back over the top of the shoulder of the same side and then the other hand is pulled up from the lower back. The wrists are then handcuffed together.
[6] "The interrogator Brother", or "Brother Hamid", has been identified as Naser Sarmadi Parsa (article) (photo).
Key search words:
هوشنگ اسدی
شب هراس بهمن
نامههایی به شکنجهگرم
ناصر سرمدی پارسا
***
Hi MPD,
A great poem, but it is so sad! The only happy moments I can remember are when the Iranian guy won Oscar for "A Separation" and when Iranians won 12 medals at London Olympic Games! Everything else is sad and indescribable! Lately I am completely fed up by the sad news and bad news!
The poet is right "Nothing has changed!"
I will be back tomorrow!
Thank you mpd. SO very heartbreaking.
Hi MPD,
I just finished reading the article linked to your poem. I remember you blogged on Asadi's book on old IC or you went to his presentation in UC Berkeley sometime ago or something like that. Wow! He and Khamenei were cell-mates. He made a great point:
".......what power does to people, how it turns a tortured prisoner into someone who is in charge of hundreds of torturers and who tortures others through them."
Khamenei was once a prison inmate, but now a ruthless supreme torturer! He and his regime took pre-emptive strike on the young journalists.
They will do anything to stay in power! They really don't care if their journalist prison population ranks #1 in the world!
Yes, Yolanda. I have blogged about Houshang Asadi before, and I have actually met him, aside from the book promotion event. And yes again, in his book, “Letters to My Torturer”, he writes in detail about the time Khamenei and him were cell-mates.
I also remember at the book promotion event someone asked him; if the situation was reversed and if the Tudeh Party had grabbed the power, and the Islamists were the ones in prison, what he thought would have happed. He said, they would have done the same things to Islamists that was done to them. I took this to mean that the time was ripe for violence, and that the idea of respecting everyone’s human rights was not there yet. He also said, if he could go back and relive those days again, he would have stuck with doing cultural work and would have not getten involved himself with politics. He said he was not cut for that kind of things.
Hi MPD,
I sent an e-mail to Khamenei thru his website a couple of minutes ago, here is the entire letter:
___________________________________
Hi! Ayatolla Khamenei,
Do you remember Houshang Asadi who spent time in jail with you?
http://www.roozonline.com/persian/opinion/opinion-article/archive/2013/january/27/article/-046b6b072a.html
http://www.rferl.org/content/In_New_Book_Asadi_Recalls_His_Torture_And_Sharing_A_Cell_With_Irans_Supreme_Leader/2117371.html
Here is Houshang Asadi story:
"On a cold winter day in 1975, I was about to be transferred from the cell we'd been sharing. [Khamenei], who was very thin, was shaking. I was wearing a sweater, which I took off and gave to him. He first resisted and didn't want to take it. When he finally accepted it and put it on, we hugged each other. He cried and told me, "Houshang, when Islam will come to power, not a single tear will be shed."
I would like to ask him, "Mr. Khamenei, do you remember what you said that day? Now that you've become the most powerful ruler in the history of Iran, is no tear being shed? Or, on the contrary, are we witnessing tragedies that are unprecedented in the history of Iran?"
****************
Mr. Khamenei, you spent time in jail, you know it is terrible. Could you please let Nasrin Sotoudeh and the 12 journalists out of jail, so they can spend Nowruz with their families?
http://masihalinejad.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/536937_10151243473741608_867996887_n.jpg
thank you in advance!
_____________________________