Ultimate escapism: The award-winning poet speaks to Layli Foroudi about fighting adversity in prison. Plus,a poem of Sabet’s published in English for the first time

Mahvash Sabet spent a decade in an Iranian prison purely because of her faith. Recently released, she speaks to Layli Foroudi about overcoming religious divisions and how poetry was a survival tool

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Award-winning poet Mahvash Sabet

IT WAS SOLITARY confinement in a Tehran prison cell that turned Mahvash Sabet into a poet. Before her arrest 10 years ago, the teacher did not have the time or the need to write. But in prison, she had feelings of pain, loneliness and love, which she wanted to express and, with no one to speak to, she had to improvise.

In her cell in Evin prison, Sabet, now 65, began writing poems in the margins of newspapers. When she didn’t have a pen, she would write verses in her head, engraining them in her memory until she could note them down.

“Poetry became my best friend whilst in prison,” she said in a Skype interview with Index. “Every difficulty I encountered, I would just write about it, and I knew my thoughts [and] emotions would go beyond the prison walls.”

Sent out via prison guards and during visits with relatives, the poems were published and earned Sabet the accolade of PEN International Writer of Courage in October last year.

Sabet was arrested on 5 March 2008 on a trip to Mashhad, a city in north-east Iran, because of her faith. At the time, she was a member of the Yaran-i-Iran (Friends in Iran), an informal council of seven people who supported the needs of Iran’s Baha’i community, a persecuted religious minority of more than 300,000 people.

Two months later, the remaining six members were arrested in their homes and they were all subsequently convicted for a series of politically motivated charges including espionage, insulting religious sanctities and propaganda against the Islamic republic.

At the time of sentencing, Amnesty International called the trial a “parody” and the verdict “a sad and damning manifestation of the deeply-rooted discrimination against Baha’is by the Iranian authorities.”

Prejudice in the courtroom translated into prejudice within the prison walls. Sabet was not allowed to associate with the other prisoners, who were told by the guards to harass her and the other female Baha’i inmate, Fariba Kamalabadi. It was even rumoured that one of the women awaiting execution had been ordered to kill them.

But this changed as they all got to know each other.

“We would not label ourselves or label others,” said Sabet, whose fellow inmates were imprisoned for politics, writing, sex work and murder. “We learned to live without labels, just as human beings, side by side.”

There was “a feeling of commonality”, she added. “I had an incredible experience from this. People that you never believed you could sit with, or eat with, or have a heart-to-heart conversation with – we would do this there.”

In Sabet’s mind, the divides created by the guards between her and other prisoners, and by the government between her and other Iranians, are “illusory distinctions”.

In a poem of the same name, she writes:

Such frontiers, borders, boundaries of illusion!

Such barriers of fancy, distinctions of delusion!

These confines of time, these limits of space

Create unreal riddles, fences without sense.

At times, Sabet’s poems intimate suffering, and she describes being undeservedly imprisoned as “a kind of agony”.

Yet she wrote her poems as, above all, chronicles of love and hope. The poem published below for the first time in English was written in the penultimate year of her imprisonment and considers how a poet’s heart can find strength in silence. Indeed, her demeanour communicates no self-pity. For a woman who has spent a decade in jail, she is radiant; smiling, and with her eyes glistening, she plays with her long silver hair as she thinks.

She said that her poems were definitely read by the Iranian authorities. When I ask whether she self-censored as a result, she takes her glasses off, shakes her head, and laughs.

“The language of poetry is the language of metaphor,” she said. “It helped me to write in a way that one could read it and understand the meaning, and one could also read it, but not really grasp the full meaning. I always thought ‘Maybe they will come and get me’, that it would create a problem for me, but I took the risk. I would pray and I would write.”

The word

The one who knew to speak

put a word in my mouth.

When no one had anything to say, even a word,

the speaker spoke and passed…

Passed…

from beyond the deserts and valleys,

from beyond the mountains and dust,

from beyond humanity,

from beyond the afflicted being of the half-dead world.

Now, that word is within me constantly.

In its splendour, I am bewildered.

In its power, I am agitated.

My heart is about to roar.

A word is in my mouth and a volcano in my soul.

Light flows from my suppressed word.