Again, I was alone with a pen and a paper. With the only difference that this time I was in the interrogation room. You have to choose the words of your answer to the interrogation question obsessively too, because they are going to determine how old you will be when you will be released from prison. And the question was: What was your intention of translating these texts?

I had to explain for hours the content of the book I translated and published with legal permission.

I had to defend translation and a book in front of people who could not even say the author's name correctly. They even asked me to translate my interrogation question. Maybe this way they wanted to say that the only thing I am allowed to translate is my interrogation questions.

And then the same people wanted punishment for me. In their written punishment request the word "translation" is repeated many times for persuading the judge. In the punishment request, they write that I have translated insolently against things that I should not have, and the word insolently is misspelled. The fact that my words have been corrected with spelling mistakes has a bitter irony for me.

Also, they write that I have cooperated with notorious publications, and then the names of publications that all have legal permission are given. According to a public verdict that was issued in the year of the beginning of the Woman Life Freedom movement for the cases related to Zhina Amini, my six-year prison sentence should have been canceled, but it was not, and it was only reduced to three years and six months. After searching for the reason for a long time, they write that my case is special because I have translated for a feminist opposition website which has taken an active role in the Woman Life Freedom movement.

Yes! I confess that every time I saw that my words were not allowed to enter the upper floors of the culture building, I did not leave this building, I went to its underground, the underground of the websites that attempts have been made to lock them by filtering. But every lock also has a key, just like every oppression has a resistance. I confess that I have preferred my words to be free and myself to be a prisoner.

In the detention center, when I called my mother, she informed me of the publication of my first book. It was like I was freed. An author can be blindfolded and put in an interrogation chair facing the wall, but not the words of the writer. When I returned to our cell crowded with female prisoners of Woman Life Freedom movement and told them the news, soon the jailer came to silence our happy screams. I had heard the news not in the best place, but definitely among the best collective.

Here, when you finish the translation of a book and you send it to the publisher, the publisher sends it to the Ministry of Guidance to obtain permission to publish it. There, your book will be examined, and they will decide whether it will be released or not. If the book is released, it will be time to interrogate its every word. Strange things happen in this interrogation, for example, words are dealcoholized, beers become soft drinks, and prostitutes, not allowed to live in books either, are removed. Interrogation of the words that are in the headings are more sensitive and the freedom of all the words after them are tied to them.

Publishers too are regularly interrogated about the books they have released, and for example, if they have freed anti-war words in the middle of the war, they and all their forthcoming books will be suspended for a while.

As a precaution, they have launched a website where every citizen has the possibility to become an interrogator and blow the whistle on books or words that have not been properly interrogated from their viewpoint. Despite this extensive censorship apparatus, my interrogator believed that the brothers in the Ministry of Guidance are asleep and are not aware of what is being published.

Today, as of October 9, 2024, I have been in prison for 521 days. But there has not been a single day that I have not written anything, there has not been a single day that I have not stressed myself out crazily about not reaching my translation schedule. Because I have never wanted to allow my life to be just the scene of oppression even for one day. You should always find a pen and paper and write. In solitary confinement cell number 31, I wrote the word "we" with the blood of my lips on the wall. I wanted the next people in the cell to remember they belong to a collective and they are not alone.

Aren't words originally made to convey this message?

In prison, you have to obtain permission for more things in your life, and of course, one of them is your books. It's not like they'll let you have every book that's printed with a legal license. The contents of the books are inspected here once again to determine if they are suitable to be placed on the bookshelves or should go to the same unknown place for the books taken from you at the time of your arrest. Here, there are people who decide for you what book to read, people who do not recognize Simon Bolivar from de Beauvoir, and thus they do not hand over Bolivar's books to feminists.

In the prison, they also inspect the translations that you want to send outside to get legal permission for publishing them. That is, they have put an additional small Ministry of Guidance in the prison called "Cultural Affairs Department". That is, when you become a prisoner, they put another checkpoint in front of your words, which allows the appropriate ones to pass and returns the inappropriate ones back to their author in prison.

Writers' shoulders do not pass through the small windows of iron prison doors, but the words of the writers can. Words eventually find their way out somehow. And you can't stop the fugitive words.

The anxiety of self-censorship is more deadly than the anxiety of resistance and writing books that are probably going to be banned. You cannot sleep many nights after taking part in even the smallest censorship. Maybe it is better to sleep in prison, but sleep comfortably.

What is resistance in the time of relentless repression? Insisting on existence and self-expression. If you exist and express your existence, others who have taken risks for your collective dream will be assured that even if one day they are not there, there is another person who will continue writing your story.

Resistance is being committed to writing for those immigrant children who will be displaced, if they utter words that they should not. Resistance is being committed to writing for them so that the power of fighting for life is kept alive in them. Resistance is making words cross borders. Your words are your hands, and they have the power to hold another hand to help them stand on their feet again. Words were made for disobeying solitude, not obeying isolation. Humans' survival depends on the words of their disobedience, the words that convey them and their disobedience to another.

Resistance is being committed to narrating resistance, describing moments of collective power, explaining escape routes, and discussing the next steps and the details of tomorrow.

Resistance in writing is refusing to implement the decisions that were made for us without our participation, from the form and content of our writings to the number of writers we have the right to gather with and the things we have the right to demand.

Rules that don't let you express yourself are only there to be broken.

All of us have read something banned, after which we were never the same, maybe a movie or a theater or a rap song had this effect on us, but they were written by someone too, weren't they? A person who wanted to take back some space for the culture of resistance.

Resistance is being committed to writing these banned books that teach us we ourselves must determine our own destiny. And, of course, resistance is being committed to making the banned accessible to everyone, being committed to reach a world where one can live by writing and books and writing belong to everyone.

Resistance in the time of repression is writing for authors of banned books and not leaving them alone. So that in prison or exile they can see the greatness of the collective they belong to, and that it was worth it.

In this last sentence, I want to ask you all to write something for the banned authors in exile and prison on your hands right now.

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This text was written from prison and read at the Dawit Isaak Library's program evening on banned Persian literature.