Torture and Tres Leches in Iran’s Most Notorious Prison
The Evin House of Detention, in Tehran, is among the world’s most infamous prisons. It was built by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, to hold around three hundred political prisoners, including some of the ayatollahs who campaigned against the monarchy. After the 1979 Revolution, Iran’s theocracy expanded the gruesome compound, which includes gallows and an execution yard. It now holds fifteen thousand people.
During reporting trips to Iran, I sometimes stayed nearby, at the former Hilton—renamed the Esteghlal, or the Independence Hotel—in what was an otherwise upscale and leafy neighborhood in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. I got nervous just driving by Evin. I had friends, including Americans, who were jailed there, usually in Ward 209. It housed political prisoners who were often detained on illusory charges, such as “spreading corruption on earth” and “enmity against God,” or ill-defined offenses like propaganda against the Islamic state. There are solitary-confinement cells without beds or toilets. Across the prison, wards are crammed with wall-to-wall double or triple-decker bunks. Even whispering can be punishable. Ward 209 has been a repository for detainees leveraged as pawns in Iran’s sadistic foreign policy. Journalists, diplomats, academics, businessmen, and environmentalists have been traded in lopsided deals for weaponry and money.
Sepideh Gholian, a thirty-year-old activist, details the desperation of prison life in Iran—and pays tribute to other female inmates—in an unusual, haunting new book called “The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes.” Gholian, once known for her blue hair, has been imprisoned three times since 2018. The first time, she was arrested for acting as an amateur publicist for laborers who were striking to protest unpaid wages at a sugarcane factory. She was forced to confess on national television to crimes against the state, which included having ties to an unlikely combination of the first Trump Administration and communist groups. After being released on bail, Gholian detailed the beatings, interrogations that lasted days and nights, sexual taunts, and death threats that she endured. She was arrested again; she spent more than four years in Evin.
In 2023, Gholian joyously walked out of Evin, removed her hijab, revealing wavy hair, and shouted condemnations of Iran’s Supreme Leader to bystanders. “Khamenei the tyrant, we’re going to put you in a grave!” she yelled. A video of the protest went viral. She was sent back to Evin within twenty-four hours. She’s now been there for more than six years in total, and has become one of the most famous activists and political prisoners in Iran, which is currently jailing more female writers than any other country, the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based group, reported last week. “Poets and writers are not criminals—they are the moral memory of a nation,” the report said. “When a government targets its writers and poets, it wages war on culture itself, and reveals the depth of its insecurity.”
“The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club” is part memoir, part exposé, and part cookbook. Chapters include heart-wrenching accounts of other women inmates’ past lives, and of their physical and psychological torture in prison, including coerced vaginal tests. The inmates brace themselves for these encounters based on the pace of the prison guards’ steps and smells. Their stories are mixed with brief respites: they bake pastries for one another. “You might well ask Isn’t prison . . . prison? How the hell could you be making confectionery there?” Gholian writes. “But if baking badly is an inalienable part of who you are, then you can do it anytime, anywhere, and—yes—in any kind of prison.”
In 2024, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian British woman who worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation and was jailed in Evin for six years, said that prisons were reluctant to give women basic rights, but “we were determined to fight for them.” She went on, “We fought for everything, from convincing them to give us a weekly mother-and-baby visit to raising money to buy an oven for the ward so we could bake our own bread which was not drugged with sedatives. Our power against them sometimes surprised ourselves as much as them.” (Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who had a toddler at the time of her arrest, had been in Iran to visit her parents during Nowruz, the Persian New Year.)
Gholian recounts her own campaign—alongside Niloufar Bayani, a wildlife biologist who was sentenced to ten years for espionage—to get cooking utensils. “They were plainly not going to release us so we were going to get a tart tin out of them, at least,” she writes.
Iran’s prison system, as in many other countries, is corrupt. Rich or famous prisoners have manipulated the system to bring in televisions, furniture, even what are locally known as “temporary” wives for sex. Prisoners often leave their goods behind upon release. Gholian managed to set up a piece-meal kitchen. Amid her tragic accounts, she provides recipes for sixteen delicacies, including tres leches cake, cream puffs, scones, and lemon-meringue pie. She often suggests whimsical ways—for those who are free—to eat them. Her recipe for apple pie is dedicated to Maryam Akbari Monfared, a mother of three whose three brothers and one sister were executed in a massacre of some five thousand political prisoners, in 1988. She was imprisoned on a charge of “enmity against God,” in 2009, for contacting an Iranian opposition group. Seven years later, while still in prison, she issued an open-letter demanding justice for her siblings. At the end of the recipe, Gholian recommends putting on a song. “Bob your head in time with the music” and lip-sync the words. When the pie is ready, “dance a while longer. If you have a companion, whirl around together and then tuck in with a cup of tea. If you don’t know any dances, watch a couple of videos online. There’s no need to be professional. Toss your head, rejoice.”
The text of the book was snuck out of Evin, in scraps, by unnamed allies. The pieces were passed to Maziar Bahari, an Iranian Canadian documentarian who was himself detained in Evin for a hundred and eighteen days during the Green Movement protests. (Jon Stewart made his directorial début filming Bahari’s harrowing prison account, titled “Rosewater,” for the scent of his prison guard.) Bahari now heads IranWire, a news website, in London. “For security reasons, I cannot tell you exactly how I received the different chapters of this book,” Bahari writes, in the introduction. “All you need to know is that it took several people and multiple phone calls with different individuals, including Sepideh, to receive separate chapters by text or photos showing scraps of paper.” Bahari’s team at IranWire typed up the passages and then had to figure out how to fit them together. The English-language edition, Bahari told me last month, made Gholian’s stories “much more bearable” than the original Farsi manuscript. For example, the word rosvaee, or رسوایی, translates in English as “disgrace” or “scandal.” But in Persian, notably in Khuzestan, Sepideh’s home province, it implies immoral conduct that can lead to so-called honor killings of females by their own families. “Thousands of women have been murdered by their fathers and brothers because of scandals,” Bahari said.
One of the book’s story lines involves an unnamed young prisoner who was picked up by “a pack of card-carrying murderers” and dumped in a freezing prison cell with no window and no water. She was given foul-smelling blankets overrun with bedbugs. Suffering from severe nausea, she initially thought that she had COVID or food poisoning. She eventually realizes that she is pregnant—she’d had sex, for the first and only time, shortly before her capture. “She had never really known what intercourse was,” Gholian shares. “She had never really known what pregnancy was. Nobody had taught her anything.” During an interrogation, she is ordered to write things down, only to throw up all over the papers. She later writes three letters, in her imagination: to her lover, to a female inmate who was hanged for killing her rapist, and to her unborn child, whom she refers to as her “halva” fish. (Halva is a Persian confection.) She signs the letter to her child, “Your Mother, Who Loved You So Much She Did Not Give Birth to You.”
The woman explains her plight to her sister, who is able to visit her in Evin. The sister then hides suppositories, meant to help induce a D.I.Y. abortion, in the seam of a pair of trousers that she sends to the prison. One night, when the woman’s cellmates are asleep, she tries them. The resulting pain is excruciating, as is the story. “Finally, a foetus the size of the palm of a hand leaps out of her womb,” Gholian recounts. The young woman screams. She tries to flush it down the drain, but has to crush it with a toilet brush. Here, again, the English translation fails to capture the historical and cultural connotations of the Persian, Bahari explained. In Persian, the word for “crush” is widely used by the theocracy as a threat or a tool of repression, so “it conveys the whole history of humiliation and suppression at home, school, and by the regime,” he said. The young woman is subsequently consumed by images of the fetus—and the fish. Gholian wonders, “What do you do with a woman who’s cold, disconsolate, and haemorrhaging after a DIY abortion? Kachi. Kachi pudding is the best cure I know.” And then she provides the recipe.
G holian also writes about famous inmates, such as Narges Mohammadi, a women’s-rights activist who had been convicted of “spreading anti-state propaganda.” Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, but couldn’t accept it in person; she was still in Evin. Gholian pairs her story with a recipe for pumpkin pie. (Mohammadi was the second Iranian winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The first was Shirin Ebadi, a human-rights lawyer, who received it in 2003.)
Gholian writes elliptically. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether particular stories happened to fellow-prisoners, whose identities she is protecting, or to Gholian herself. Bahari explained, “When she talks about an experience, the reader should understand it could be her experience or another’s experience. As a man editing, I wanted to ask her. It was quite futile. She doesn’t think it’s important. This is the experience of women going through the Iranian prison system. It could be Narges, who won a Nobel Prize, or someone subjected to sexual abuse. They all had similar experiences. That’s the genius of the book.” At the same time, the fragmentary assembly can make for a disorienting read, especially when trying to track characters or understand basic facts about their alleged crimes and Iran’s judicial system.
Last March, on International Women’s Day, the Center for Human Rights in Iran released a statement condemning the Islamic Republic’s draconian laws enforcing gender apartheid. Girls in Iran can be held criminally responsible from the age of nine, the dictated age of maturity, while boys are considered minors until the age of fifteen. “The oppression of women in Iran is not just discrimination—it is a deliberately designed, institutionalized system of domination intended to enforce the subjugation of women to maintain the state’s grip on power,” Bahar Ghandehari, the communications director at the center, said. Yet Iran’s women have demonstrated courage. The movement in 2022, under the banner “Women, Life, Freedom,” was the first time in modern history that girls and women have led a counter-revolution.
Gholian’s recipe for madeleines accompanies the story of the journalist Marzieh Amiri, who was sentenced to ten and a half years in Evin and a hundred and forty-eight lashes on charges of “collusion against national security” for covering labor strikes in front of parliament. “Bake it the night before, stick it in your pocket, stride down the pavement, let your hijab hang lopsided so you’ll feel some wind in your hair, and take a bite out of the madeleine with the rap playing for you,” Gholian writes. “Carry out a tiny act of feminism in the name of Marzieh Amiri.” Gholian is from a tribal family in southwest Ahvaz, where she was first jailed. “One day, when our people are victorious,” she writes, “I’ll bake you a cake in the streets of Ahvaz.” To her fellow-Iranians, she adds, “That day isn’t far off now. I hope we can bring it about together.” ♦
Source: The New Yorker
