My Life As A Traitor
By Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman
Bloomsbury/Paperback/250 pages/$33.95 without GST/Major bookstores

The title is provocative but it is not a gimmick. As far as the ruling Islamic clerics in Iran were concerned, Zarah Ghahramani was a traitor.
The Tehran University student made a speech on reform in school, attended political meetings and took part in protests.
As a result, in 2001, she was grabbed on the street and taken to Evin prison, which is notorious for its political prisoners’ wing.
Ghahramani, who was 20 when that happened, gives an unflinching account of the interrogations and beatings which followed and concludes that pain will break everyone.
This is not a tale of unwavering strength and resistance to torture. Yet it is a tale of courage. The courage it takes to lay bare one’s fears and frailties in the face of physical and mental punishment.
Interspersed with these harrowing episodes are her memories of growing up in a privileged household against the changing political backdrop, her passion for the Farsi language and falling in love.
“Young women in vestments that reach from the crown of their heads to their toes fall in love in the same way, by the same process, roused by the same emotions, as young women all over the world,” she writes.
If the Iran on television and in newspaper reports seems foreign and unknowable, books such as Persepolis, Reading Lolita In Tehran and My Life As A Traitor illuminate the country and her people, one story at a time.

If you like this, read: Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler (2006, $25.51 with GST, Books Kinokuniya).
This novel offers a glimpse of another repressive regime as it is set in 1938 in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist purges.
(ST)