A crowd of around one hundred gathered at Innis Town Hall on Sunday for a night of music, art and lectures about women political prisoners in Iraq and the Middle East.
The night, titled Women Political Prisoners: Memoirs and Resistance, opened with Iranian poetry and classical and protest songs sung by Homa Alizadeh, in remembrance of lost loved ones. Dr. Shahrzad Mojab, associate professor and director of U of T’s Institute for Women’s Studies and Gender Studies, organized the event to raise awareness of the situation of imprisoned women in Iraq.
Dr. Mojab called for global reforms. Criticizing capital punishment and the prison system in Iraq, Afghanistan and US, she called it “a form of fetishism; prisoners are commodified. With 525,000 people employed in the [prison] industry in the US, it is the second largest area of employment after General Motors.”
The second speaker of the night, novelist, artist and activist Haifa Zangana spoke from her personal experience as a political prisoner during Saddaam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. She talked about the abuses inside the prison system and how memoirs and the act of writing itself are a dissenting voice.
Over 900 writers have been tortured, attacked or killed because of their writing, affiliation or involvement with political groups, said Zangana. Yet, she continued, these writers, poets, journalists and activists in prison are still a minority group among imprisoned women; the majority of the females behind bars, she said, are held as hostages “in order to force male relatives to give themselves up.”
This method of capturing women and isolating them in prisons is a form of “collective punishment,” Zangana said. When the women are released from prison, they are forced to sign papers indicating that they were “well treated” while incarcerated. Humiliation and shame are then, used to prevent the women from speaking about their experiences. Under these oppressive regimes, women “are sexually harassed and raped to stop [them] from taking part in political activism.
“This silence is what women writers aim to break.”
Zangana said that “[silence] is a double-edged weapon used to intimidate. Storytelling is a method of releasing stored up memories, an act of liberation, a form of rebellion and revolt against authority, fear and powerlessness.”
Courage and rebellion comes in many forms, Zangana concluded. Women should be praised, she said, for going on with daily life in a city under siege. “It is a passive resistance,” she said. “They are surviving by taking care of their children and by going outside to shop with the fear of being shot by American troops, of being arrested any minute and enduring midnight raids. Women no longer trust political parties or American troops. The US is using Iraq as an occupation. They are not defending democracy or human rights. Things in Iraq on a daily basis are getting more chaotic.”
Art was an important part of the event: traditional Sufi music was played and there were several dance performances, including one by wheel-chair dancer Spirit Synott. The memory of a lost sister killed in one of the prisons of Iran’s Islamic Republic was commemorated by a new piece of modern dance; a short documentary, comprised of portraits of women activists who had lost their lives in Iran between 1979 and 1999, drew tears from a riveted audience.
