Surviving Torture through Self Rehabilitation and Love
My entire life is a story of trauma and exile on one hand, and love and happiness on the other. I have escaped tyranny and persecution three times in my life, and I am a victim and survivor of torture, having spent four years in jail in Iran because of my human rights activities. I came to Canada as a political refugee on February 12, 1985. Devastated by my past and living as a refugee in Canada, I experienced both tremendous hardship and unbelievable grass-roots generosity. I chose to work for and with refugees and traumatized people as a way of creating meaning in my life and recognizing that we exist only in relationships to others, and that this interdependency is at the heart of all human connections. I am pleased with my present job as a Counselor and Policy Analyst with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture. Prior to that, I worked for seven years as a Refugee Policy Analyst and later as the Coordinator of the Jesuit Refugee Service of Canada. I found these jobs highly rewarding because of their direct impact on the lives of those most vulnerable people who had experienced similar events as myself.
I was a human rights activist during the late 60’s and early 70’s under the Shah of Iran. I was involved in civil and human rights movements at the University of Tehran, and later some friends and I tried to organize small groups of students and intellectuals to fight against tyranny. There was a notorious secret police in those days called SAVAK. This unscrupulous intelligence service was omnipresent, monitoring each and every citizen. Very little dissent was tolerated, even from the moderate reformists. The Shah was considered the shadow of God and SAVAK committed crimes of torture and murder in his name.
Nevertheless, I found it possible to function as a human rights activist in this environment, provided I was circumspect in my activities and did not attract the attention of SAVAK, or so I thought. Then, one day, I too was arrested.
It was on a beautiful April day in 1973, when two well-dressed and quite nice-looking men entered my office, wearing civilian clothes. At that time, I was working as the Deputy General Manager of Organization, Education, and Methods in the Ministry of Water and Power. They asked if my name was Mr. Mossallanejed and I said yes. Then they ordered me to put both my hands on the top of my head, and began searching me. They were tense and panicky; I could hear the sound of their panting. I don’t know why they were so nervous. Perhaps they were worried that I had a bomb strapped to me. Next, they searched my desk and took some documents, none of which happened to be of a political nature. Finally, I was handcuffed from behind and blindfolded and taken away in a car. I did not know where they were taking me or where I was when they stopped. I was led into a building where the men left me alone for a few minutes. Eventually they returned and the interrogation began in earnest. They yelled obscenities at me for a while before taking off the blindfold, at which point I found myself in a dungeon.
They tied me to a metal bed, spread-eagled, and a large, burly man who looked like a gorilla, began beating me with a wooden stick. I later found out that his name was Mr. Husseini. He struck me so hard that the stick broke in half after four blows. After a few more blows, the remaining stick broke into two pieces. He beat me another twenty times with the thickest part and then exchanged his stick for a thick, black electrical cable. Over the next several hours, I was beaten with a variety of instruments. Every once in a while new people would come into the room, always elegant and well groomed, and I used to think they would surely put a stop to the beating. Instead they would laugh and take a turn. I was beaten on the soles of my feet and forced to run around the room and pushed from one man to another. In that way the interrogators sought to restore the circulation in my feet so that I would continue to feel pain when they hit me.
The object of this beating was to extract information about my friends and associates. I was supposed to give the names of guerrillas and their safe houses, despite the fact that I was not involved with any violent faction and had no idea about their whereabouts. After a while I began to scream. At one point, one of the interrogators held his hand over my mouth and held my nose so I was unable to breathe. He would only allow me to breathe if I gave him the information he wanted. I indicated that I would talk. Then I insisted that they untie me before I would say anything. Finally, I began to talk about myself – where I was born, how beautiful the city was, where I went to school – none of it having to do with politics and none of it the kind of information they wanted. They tied me back down and resumed beating me.
At some point, they took me back to my house and searched it in front of me. I remember one of the torturers, the Gorilla that had beaten me on the soles of the feet, whispering that I shouldn’t be limping because it was shameful; my neighbors would feel that I was ridiculing them. Yet I couldn’t walk normally because my feet were badly injured. They did not find anything in my house except a single pair of hiking boots, which they made a fuss over, insisting they must belong to a guerilla, and quite a few fresh dates, which they also said were there to feed my guerilla friends.
After I was taken back to jail, they blindfolded me again and ordered me to stand facing the wall in front of the torture chamber. I could hear the sound of lashes followed by torturers’ shouting and insults mixed with the pleading, weeping, and screaming of the victims. I waited for half an hour or so – that seemed like an eternity to me – until my turn came again.
A boy I knew, a second year law student to whom I had given two pamphlets on human rights, was brought in and I was asked to identify him. It was then I learned that he had been arrested and had given my name along with some others to SAVAK, implicating me in guerilla activities. All the information he had given them was false; he must have simply told them anything he could think of in order to end his own torture. So all my pain was over a false confession extracted under torture. When I contradicted him and asked whether he was not ashamed of himself, they immediately took him away and intensified my torture. It was so difficult to stand the pain. With every blow I felt an intolerable pain running through my body. After some time the man who had arrested me (he was, in fact, the chief interrogator) entered, and said my interrogators had permission to torture me to death, and that they should not worry about the consequences.
The beating continued until I could not feel any more pain, only a vague tingling sensation each time I was hit. It was at that point that the Gorilla decided to stop, since there was no point in continuing. All the torturers went away and left me in an agonizing limbo in the middle of the night in the dark torture chamber. After some time two soldiers entered. They took me by the arms and helped me towards a large brightly-lit room. There are moments in life that one never forgets: when I glanced back I saw the trail of my footprints in the bright mosaic of the floor. They were made by blood dripping from my soles. In that room I found the Gorilla and three of my torturers, including the person who had arrested me. He told me:
“I am Dr. Hosseinzadeh. I am the inventor of torture. I will design a torture suited to your nature and character. We’ll extract all the information you have.”
In SAVAK, all torturers called themselves doctors. Later, I found out that his real name was Reza Attarpour, the most notorious torturer and the chief of all interrogators in Iran. He threatened me with burning and said that he would pump boiling water into my rectum. Thankfully, neither threat was carried out.
The moment when I saw my cell was one of the happiest in my life. It was a small room, but it had a mattress on the floor and four pillows, and I knew I would have at least a small reprieve from the torture. Yet, paradoxically, as soon as the door closed behind me, I felt everything that had happened wash over me and I became desperate. If I could have died then, I would have. Every single person I have spoken to who has been tortured has confirmed that there always comes a point when you wish to die.
In the morning, all four pillows on which I had rested my legs were stained with blood. (The cell had probably been occupied by four prisoners before me.) Since I was unable to walk, one of the guards carried me to the prison doctor. When the doctor unwrapped the bandages from my legs, I saw that strips of flesh were hanging off the bottoms of my feet. The doctor said to me:
“You must be an extremely dangerous man, one of the guerrilla leaders, to have been tortured so badly.”
I told him I was merely a human rights activist and had been falsely accused. After that the doctor apologized for having to cause me more pain. He said that he had no anaesthetic, but in order to prevent gangrene he would have to trim the flesh off my legs and feet before dressing the wounds. It hurt, but not as much as the beatings had.
Both of my legs, especially the left one, were completely black right up to the knees. I passed blood instead of urine for 24 hours. For one week I could not walk at all. A guard had to carry me to the bathroom in his arms. For fifty days I walked with great difficulty. Over the next four years I spent time in many prisons and was beaten on numerous occasions, but I was never tortured as badly as that first time.
In time, I learned that they had arrested me because the boy who broke under torture told them I was a liaison between the Marxist guerillas and the fundamentalists, which would have made me extremely dangerous. SAVAK must have realized their mistake soon enough, certainly within a short time of the arrest. Yet I was kept in prison for another four years. At first because they feared that if I were released before my wounds had healed the story of the torture would get out, and later because they hoped I would eventually give them some excuse that would allow them to justify the initial arrest. For four years, I lived in constant fear that one of my former associates would be arrested and would give my name under torture, which would cause SAVAK to make new attempts at extracting information from me. I remain proud to this day that while I gave them bits and pieces of information about myself in order to get them to leave me alone, I never incriminated anyone and no person was arrested because of me.
They kept me in the limbo of torture and interrogation until they sent me to a military tribunal. Although I was a civilian and a civil rights activist, I was sentenced to three years imprisonment. Just before the end of my sentence, the Shah had established his one-party system and ordered SAVAK not to release any political prisoners. Thus, people like me, who had served their sentence, were transferred to a new prison and kept in indefinite limbo. Eventually, President Carter came to power in the United States and put pressure on the Shah of Iran to release certain political prisoners. I fell into this category and was allowed to go free.
My troubles did not end with my release. I felt as if I had been transferred from the small prison of a cell to the larger prison of a police state. I was terrified of being arrested again and felt as if a shadow followed me everywhere. Finding work was impossible, as any kind of job required security clearance, which was routinely denied to former political prisoners. For all of these reasons I decided to escape to India, where I registered for a Ph.D. program. It wasn’t until after the Shah was overthrown that I returned to Iran.
The society I found when I went home was very different from the one I had left behind. There was much upheaval, and the religious fundamentalists had by that point gained a near monopoly on political power. They did not believe in the democratic process and I suddenly found myself persecuted by my former friends from prison who now occupied important positions in government. Often I had to change locations four or five times each day to evade capture and once spent a night hiding out on a battlefield, with bullets flying all around.
Life was impossible in such circumstances and I fled Iran again, this time seeking refuge in Turkey. If things were difficult back home, they were certainly not easy in Turkey either, particularly for an alien with no residence permit. This feeling of living under constant threat became part of my experience and followed me for many years to come. Soon I left Turkey and sought refuge in various European countries, eventually returning to India, where I continued my studies. The situation in India was far from stable, however. I discovered that the Iranian Hezbollah had organized in the country and were busy persecuting political refugees such as myself. Many of my friends were beaten and two were killed when they were attacked by an angry mob. While all this was going on, my son was killed in an accident. Still grieving and in shock, my wife and I decided to leave for Canada. We arrived in Montreal on February 12, 1985.
My first jobs in Canada were all for minimum wage or less. I worked in a bakery from 9:00 p.m. until 10 a.m. with no break, for a wage of $3.25 per hour (The minimum wage at that time was $4.25 per hour). My next job was working on demolitions at a construction site for a year and a half. It was hard, physical labour for which unionized workers were paid at least $15.00 per hour. It could be done mechanically, but the cheapest way for the employer was to use a needy refugee like myself who would do it manually for $5.00 an hour. Very quickly, demolition became part of my psychology. I used to demolish buildings in my dreams and plan various demolitions in my mind. One day, a friend invited me for supper. When I entered his house, I noticed that it was built of stone and concrete. I reacted spontaneously:
“It will be an extremely hard job.”
“Which job?” my host reacted with astonishment.
“Demolishing your house,” I answered.
“You are my friend, why are you going to demolish my newly-built house?”
I realized my mistake and made a sincere effort to convince him of the psychological impact of my job.
In the following years, to 1990, I did whatever was necessary to support my family and myself. For a long time I worked as a mover, which later caused me severe back pain. I was a ditch digger. I worked in a sausage-making factory and even in a traveling circus. Along with a friend, I was responsible for loading and unloading circus materials. We were not permitted to be clowns because that was considered a professional job. I resigned when the racist supervisor harassed and then fired my friend.
Wherever I applied for jobs, they considered me overqualified because of my Ph.D. degree. For at least five years in Montreal, I got used to being overqualified and unemployed.
Throughout my life, when I felt most hopeless and desperate, several things helped to sustain me and give me hope. It is those things I wish to share with you, my beloved readers, in the hope that they may help others, including CCVT clients, who have had similar experiences.
First among these is physical activity. In the four years I was in prison I discovered the value of regular exercise. It may sound trivial, but exercise is also a method of resistance, a way of regaining control over your life. If you are healthy, you are better able to withstand torture. Since the goal of torture is to destroy you as a person, by refusing to be broken you gain a victory over your oppressors. Even when I was so badly injured that I could barely move, I made a point of flexing those parts of my body, such as my arms and my neck, which had not been injured. This regime, which I established for myself while in prison, continued after my release, and to this day, hardly a day passes when I do not engage in some form of exercise.
The second coping mechanism that I found useful was that of task setting. I discovered something important when I first began to exercise in jail. If I set a task for myself, it allowed me not to think about my surroundings and not to worry about the future. During the time it took me to exercise my arms, I was not unhappy, and this occasional escape allowed me to survive the rest of the time. To do nothing in prison, day after day for four years, is to go mad. My friends and I knew this, and so we would invent all sorts of distractions for ourselves. For instance, we would take out the less cooked inner part of our bread, mix it with our saliva by chewing, and knead the bread for hours until we got a dough similar to Playdoh. We would use the dust off the walls, flakes of medicine pills or cigarette ash to color our creations, and we made everything from chess pieces to pipes out of the dough. I never had any inclination towards visual art before my imprisonment, yet in jail I became known among the guards as an artist, and it afforded me some measure of respect.
From my little figurines I learned the next lesson of survival; that no matter what happens, we must always look for alternatives. I was not an artist. But when it became necessary, I found myself capable of creating art in order to survive, and seeing the finished products in my hand gave me great joy. Such experiences help me to appreciate the Art Therapy Program of the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture. Under this program, survivors of torture and trauma express their feelings by involving themselves in visual arts and receive counseling in the process.
I also learned that aesthetic appreciation is yet another way of discovering some goodness in our surroundings. Singing, for instance, was a common pastime and those with good voices were considered a blessing. We would all join in with them as they sang their songs of love or resistance. The second day after I had been tortured, as I lay in my cell I began singing songs about courage to give myself heart and the will to survive. I always used to tell myself that I must not give up, no matter what.
Whenever we were transferred to a new cell, everyone would exchange information: who you were, what had happened to you, who you knew. We never shared more than we had told the torturers, because we knew that there were informers in every cell, but nevertheless, it was a valuable source of information for us. It was a paradoxical situation living as we did in tiny, crowded cells under extremely harsh conditions. Our cellmates were our only source of support, yet we also knew that we could never fully trust anyone in case they turned out to be an informer. Immediately after the exchange of information an exchange of song would follow. I remember one particularly good singer who used to go to the bedside of a severely ill cellmate and sing the most beautiful songs. That inmate was a very young boy, perhaps eighteen, who had been arrested at random and severely tortured by burning before the interrogators realized he simply didn’t know anything. He was ill for a long time, and also severely traumatized by his experience, and the singing was one of the few things that seemed to make him happy. Ever since then I have valued music as a way to overcome feelings of depression. I listen to cheerful music to make myself happy and sad music if I want to find some outlet for my feelings.
I myself have no talent for singing, and so in prison I learned to tell stories instead. I found that humour in particular was valued and that by laughing at things we could relieve our tensions. We could make ourselves feel better by making our oppressors appear ridiculous. For example, when I was transferred from my first cell, I told everyone in the new cell about being tortured. They all laughed at the stupidity of the interrogators and the Gorilla before telling me their stories. When I think back on it, it seems that my time in prison was full of this kind of contradiction; torture on one hand, humour and satire on the other, mistrust and friendship at the same time. I remember one time when we were all led to the showers together, people began to sing and dance spontaneously, for no reason. On another occasion, we were all told that we would be executed in the morning in retaliation for the assassination of a government official by the guerillas. We thought we only had a single night left to live, and chose to spend it telling jokes and laughing about our predicament.
Satire was a form of humour particularly suited to our situation, since it is as much about pointing out the absurdity and injustice of a system as it is about laughter. In this way it became another form of resistance and it minimized the amount of power that our torturers and interrogators held over us. Again, the lessons I learned about humour in prison helped me survive later on in life. I published my first satire shortly after the death of my son, when I was suffering and in pain, because I felt I had to have some way of conveying the absurdity of human existence to others. Throughout life, I have continued to cultivate a sense of the absurd, which stems from the knowledge that in the end things have no meaning other than that which we ourselves create. Realizing this has made me able to appreciate the humour and irony in life and literature alike, and to live for the moment, enjoying small things as they came my way.
Humour, music, work and physical activity helped me survive in prison and afterwards. But, the most important thing that helped me to survive, was love. Love for me is a general and profound feeling of passion and good will and devotion towards the universe. Love is the free manifestation of the depths of human – and also animal – nature. It may bring with it an intellectual ecstasy that can surpass personal suffering and bitter experiences. I agree with Hegel when he says, “The true essence of love lies in forgoing one’s consciousness of self. Forgetting one’s own self in another ‘I’ and yet, in this very disappearance and oblivion, winning one’s self and taking possession of one’s own self for the very first time.” (Footnote needed)
Love lifts you to the top of the world. You are yourself and at the same time you are not yourself. You transcend your ‘self’ and anxiously seek a unity with the subject of your love. Rumi (1207 – 1273 AD) depicted the healing impact of love in his masterpiece Massnavi:
So shrinks from love the tender heart
as from threat of being slain
for, when true love awakens, dies
the Self, that Despot, dark and vain
then let him die in night’s black hour
and freely breathe in dawn again.
As a survivor of torture, if you feel that you have suffered for a cause you loved, you can deal with your trauma in the context of love and understanding. Love opens up a vast horizon before your eyes. Love provides you with a generous gift that can heal most wounds. Saint Paul is right when he declares that
Love is always patient and kind: it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in others people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes … There are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.
Based on my experience in jail and exile and as a frontline worker helping refugees and survivors of torture, all the components of love mentioned by Saint Paul have healing impacts: hope, faith, forgiveness, patience, compassion, gentleness, devotion, trust, peace of mind and stoicism.
You cannot have healing without hope. After twenty-eight years of hard work and frontline experiences, the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture (CCVT) has made it an essential part of its mandate to provide its clients with “hope after horror.”
I will never forget an engineer who became totally dysfunctional as a result of the tortures he had undergone. We made a desperate attempt to take him out of his self-imposed isolation. Our complete failure made some of our friends believe that the poor victim was suffering from paranoia and schizophrenia. A few weeks passed and a man from his town was brought in. He started caring for the so-called lunatic engineer. They spoke the same dialect and shared sweet memories about their town. The new inmate took it upon himself to wash the engineer’s clothes and persuaded him to eat well. He provided him with love and hope. Within a period of two months, an unbelievable miracle happened. Our engineer was completely cured.
Loving others and being loved by them have frequently saved my life. When, for example, I lost my son in India, I received support from many Indian and Iranian friends who went far out of their way to show my wife and I their love and affection. Without that genuine love we would probably not have survived.
I am a living witness to the positive impact of the CCVT befriending program for survivors of torture, war, and organized violence. This program has proved to be effective in bringing meaning to the lives of both CCVT clients and its volunteer ”befrienders.” One of our clients had gone through such a devastating trauma that the befriender was unable to teach him English. The befriender became so committed to his friend that he learned his friend’s language and was able to communicate with him in his own mother tongue. The befriender is now an expert in that language and is enjoying the friendship of many people from his friend’s ethnic community.
On another occasion, we matched a client suffering from PTSD with a befriender who was a poet. Our client is now in good condition and has just started composing poetry again in his own language.
We are by nature social beings; we do not exist in isolation. We cannot exist at all without the help and support of others, and the acknowledgement of this interdependency lies at the heart of love.
Prison taught me that survival means depending on the love of others and having them depend on yours in return. And this insight, born as a survival strategy, gradually became part of my character so that I was able to worry more about others and less about myself. Just as one can discover places, one can also discover people. There is beauty in human relationships.
I remember one day I received forty lashes on the soles of my feet. When I was brought back into the cell, many people rushed over to try and help, giving me strips of torn fabric for bandages and offering backrubs to ease the pain. It is such exchanges that give rise to enduring friendship, and such love that gives rise to the willingness to make personal sacrifices. It is because of this passion for others and the idea of reciprocity that I became involved in refugee protection long before coming to Canada. In India, I was the founder of the Union of Iranian Refugees and became active in the People’s Science Movement there.
In my experience, sharing common goals and understanding can be extremely helpful in recovering from trauma. It is part of what I think of as cultivating a general passion for life. Sometimes it seems as if we are living in a heartless world and in a spiritless situation. It is important for survivors of torture and war to create an atmosphere of love, sympathy, and support among themselves. There is a saying in Farsee, that “one who is sorrow-hearted knows sorrow.” If nobody understands us, we should try to understand one another. During the years of working with CCVT, I have frequently observed the effectiveness of our mutual support groups organized for our clients in their own native languages.
Another aspect of the same passion is recognizing the importance of a unity with nature. We are all part of nature; we cannot exist without it, and to disrespect nature is to disrespect ourselves. I frequently read and pause on the prophetic message of Chief Seattle to the U.S. President:
But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfathers his first breath also receives his last sigh. And the wind must also give our children the spirit of life. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.
Some may laugh to hear it, but nature is beautiful to me and spending time in it and developing an appreciation for aesthetic beauty, has helped me survive many hardships. I will never forget an early morning during the first week of my arrest. The shadow of death was hanging over my head. A soldier entered my cell. I could not move due to the severity of my wounds and the loss of blood as a result of torture. He carried me in his arms. In that atmosphere of panic the brave soldier revealed his compassion to me by his comforting words. To my surprise, I soon found myself in the jail’s garden behind my cell. The prison’s doctor was waiting there to change the dressing on my wounds. I saw the sunrays coming to me generously through the thick branches of the trees. It was the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen in my life.
When I first moved to Canada, I used to plant flowers on a bit of public land along the street in front of my apartment building. I didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood, but people used to stop and ask me if I was from the City. When I told them no, they asked me why I was planting things. I told them it was just because I liked to do it. Gradually, they began to come by offering me tea, giving me flowers, and talking to me about their dogs and their memories of home. Suddenly, I had friends.
Finally, there is the idea of ”travel.” By travel I do not mean getting on a plane and going to the other side of the world. Rather, I mean what in Arabic is described as t’aamol, the action of seeing something, pausing and considering it very carefully before taking action. For me, the purpose of education is to discover yourself and to explore things and phenomena in order to further your own knowledge. Since we are always changing, it is a continuing process; each day we discover a new person in ourselves. Travel, whether through space or in our thoughts, is an essential part of this educational and rehabilitative process.
After the death of my son in India, I began to attend the lectures of Krishna Murti with a doctor friend of mine. Murti talked about the need for education to be a completely voluntary process, without any element of coercion. He was completely non-judgmental, asking questions and allowing people to debate them freely, each individual contributing a different point of view. People of all sorts were welcome. Once, I saw a beggar dressed in rags, being addressed with great respect by my doctor friend. I asked my friend if he was simply making fun of the man. My friend said no, the beggar had been a very respected professor and the dean of homeopathic medicine at the university. Nobody knew quite what had happened, only that he had left his job and family one day, and had taken up begging. He wouldn’t accept money, only some food, and because of his former status nobody questioned him about the reasons for this change in lifestyle. All this was very novel to me, and different from my previous educational experiences, which generally consisted of the presentation of a series of facts to be learned.
These sessions made me realize the extent to which truth is constructed. Opposites can sometimes be equally true and a single thought can be arrived at from many different directions. I began to think about my own suffering in this way, to understand what had happened to me from a global perspective. Philosophy allowed me to recognize that my trauma was not somehow separate and unique, but part of the ongoing struggle of humankind. It made me question human nature and human values, but it also made me notice all the things that were right and beautiful with the world. I came to recognize that everyone suffers, and that sadness is part of our human condition. At the very root of this suffering is the recognition of our own mortality. Yet we cannot surrender to sadness, but must try to be as happy as possible given the circumstances
In this way, I came to see happiness as a virtue, but also to recognize that it was counterproductive to think only about myself and my own suffering. Rather, I felt I needed to use my own experiences to help others in order to address some of the root causes of the tragedy that had taken place in my life. I think that it may sometimes be easy to become trapped in one’s own suffering, remembering things over and over and dissecting them to the point that even once the original suffering is forgotten, we create new sources of pain in our lives. Recognizing our underlying mortality, on the other hand, leads to a kind of acceptance both of sadness and of our own limitations. It is important to recognize that there are, inevitably, things we cannot change as individuals; that some events are beyond our control, and that even those things we can affect sometimes take a long time, years or even generations, to change. This understanding has helped me to see patience and tolerance as an effective way of coping with personal tragedies.
I do not belong to any organized religion, although I grew up among people whose religion was strong and well-organized. My faith stems from the belief, perhaps irrational, in the ultimate emancipation of humankind, in the idea that, for all the mistakes we make and all the atrocities now taking place, we are moving towards a future when people will no longer inflict suffering on one another. This faith, along with the drive to continually assimilate new experiences and to see exile not as a prison but as an opportunity to understand and appreciate different people and ways of life, gives me the will to survive and strive continually for my own happiness and that of others.
In conclusion, let me reiterate that the after-effects of torture are not something that can go away. The scars, especially the psychological ones, remain for the rest of the victim’s life. When I used to be under torture in jail, I often dreamed that I had returned to my childhood, working in our family garden. It was a beautiful garden of date palms and citrus fruit where my brother, father and I worked together. My mother and sisters used to bring food and sweets, and we had pleasant family parties. Then, years before my imprisonment, the trees died due to a very cold winter and the garden turned to a wasteland. It was surprising to me why it appeared in my dreams so frequently in jail. The worst part of this dream was when I woke up and saw myself imprisoned in the limbo of torture. My dreams still continue, albeit in a totally opposite way. Now after more than thirty years, at least twice a week, I see myself either in jail under tremendous torture or waiting on death row or among my family members in Iran (alive or deceased) while authorities are looking for me in order to arrest me. The best part of these nightmares is when I wake up and see myself in my safe home and comfortable bed. I heave a sigh of relief.
In attempting to cope with my trauma of torture and exile, I have tried my best to acquire internal richness and strength. I strongly feel that if we train ourselves to go beyond the self and see the source of love and life in nature, society and other individuals, no burden will be too heavy and no suffering intolerable.