An Iranian woman stunned by prison and torture

By Zarah Ghahramani

with Robert Hillman

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

256 pp. $23

Reviewed by Christine Ma

Imagine you're a college student actively involved in political protests on campus against the leadership of your country. You march in the streets and shout a few slogans. One day, police officers stop and arrest you, and you end up in prison, where you're beaten, tortured, and forced to live in a cell barely bigger than a restroom stall.

We think something like that could never happen to us. But it happened to Zarah Ghahramani just a few years ago in Iran.

In her memoir,

My Life as a Traitor

, Ghahramani, with cowriter Robert Hillman, chronicles her monthlong stay at the notorious Evin Prison in northern Iran. It is a place she never thought she'd end up. "We all know it is a place to be avoided, but only in the way that the good people in children's stories know that they must avoid the ogre's castle. It did not truly occur to me that a good person - I! - could be dragged into this bad place. What had I done to deserve this? Voiced a few opinions, handed out petitions, gathered in street protests with my friends."

Ghahramani's chapters alternate between present - her incarceration - and past - her childhood during the Iran-Iraq War. From her tales of growing up under the Muslim regime, we learn that she was raised by middle-class parents who were not strict Muslims and were at times critical of the government. As a result, she was taught to show her loyalty to the regime in public, but could express her thoughts freely at home. She succeeded in living this dual life when she was young, but not later on.

Her criticisms are directed against neither Iran nor Islam. It is the people in charge she despises. "I looked around and saw so many young men and young women, just like me, laughing in the face of the enemy - the enemy this time being the police; the security agents . . . the mullahs, the rulers, the nation's most practiced liars and hypocrites. Harm me? Really? No, they would not harm me, and they would not harm my friends. A great force for reform billowed the sail of our ship. Woe betide those who crossed our bow!"

Ghahramani even feels contempt for those Iranians who called for reform from abroad. "If they cared so much, they would be in Tehran doing exactly what they want us to do, but no, it's so much more pleasant to make money in America and England. . . . They call themselves 'the True Persians.' They are as bad as the regime itself."

Details about Ghahramani's beatings and instances of torture are so vivid they are often hard to believe. But then news stories pop up like the one about a teacher in another Muslim country who was punished for allowing a student to name a teddy bear Mohammed. That's hard to believe, too.

Ghahramani's first beating occurs during one of many interrogations. She had refused to give details of photographs taken of her and Arash, a leader of the student protesters. "Without warning, he hits me, not with his hand this time but with something else, a belt of some sort. The pain runs up the length of my bare right arm, a frightening pain like an explosion in my skin. The belt is barbed. . . . I am conscious even in the midst of the pain of my flesh being penetrated." On another occasion she is blindfolded and gagged and forced to sit in a bolted-down chair alone for hours until she grows delirious and passes out. She begins to entertain thoughts of murdering guards and even killing herself.

A few questions are left unanswered. We never learn what happened to Ali Reza, a fellow university student in a cell above hers whom she talks with. Or what happened to Arash. Ghahramani also never explains how she, who loved her country so much, ended up in Australia, where she lives now, though a simple Internet search provides an answer. Such gaps are excusable. This is real life, not fiction, and real life usually leaves loose ends.