Word: baraheni
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
William J. Butler, a New York lawyer who investigated SAVAK for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, spoke to Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet who was held for 102 days by the secret police in 1973. Baraheni told of seeing in SAVAK torture rooms "all sizes of whips" and instruments designed to pluck out the fingernails of victims. He described the sufferings of some fellow prisoners: "They hang you upside down, and then someone beats you with a mace on your legs or on your genitals, or they lower you down, pull your pants up and then...
...such a society, Doctorow suggests, it is not surprising that the images in Baraheni's essays on Iranian culture and images of brutality and atrocity, or that the images in his poetry are images of physical contact between bodies. In what is perhaps the most moving poem in this volume, two dead poets meet in the Julfa, a river that runs between the Soviet Union and Iran in which dissidents of both countries are rumored to have been drowned...
When Western writers speak of relationships, they do not generally mean the contact between anklebones; but perhaps, Baraheni and Doctorow suggest, that is the final relationship in a country where physical power is the only dynamic...
...Crowned Cannibals could not have been published in Iran; it is written for Americans, people accustomed to thinking of their nation as free of torture and repression. Baraheni's description of Iran shows the fallacy of that belief: our aid has supported the Shah throughout his regime, as our aid has supported so many other repressive regimes throughout the world since the end of World War II. If they do no more, works like Baraheni's should remind us of the price at which our freedom at home is purchased abroad...
...used to be innocent --From "I Used to Be Innocent," by Reza Baraheni...