I confess that as a citizen of Canada I take a great deal of our personal freedoms for granted. I grew up without a fear of dedicating myself to the wrong religion or political party. I was never faced with certain death when it came to any of the personal decisions I made. Marina Nemat's Prisoner of Tehran provides me with the context necessary to remind exactly how fortunate I am to be a Canadian citizen. This memoir details Marina's teenage years where she is subjected to torture and incarceration within one of the most notorious political prisons in Iran. It shares not only her memories but her personal turmoil and viewpoint on Iran under the Islamic Regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. I felt that it was her mission to shed light on the inhumane treatment of women and persons of alternate religious and political views through her writing. She also wished to express the idea that life was precious and worth preserving. This paper will provide a synopsis of the book, look at the main conflicts in the story using the Lens and TRIP methods of conflict and provide a critique of the writing as a whole.
The first half of the back somersaults back and forth in time between the beginning of her incarceration at Evin prison and her earlier memories. In chronological order, Marina recounts her formative years living in Tehran with her parents and grandmother. She is of both Russian and Iranian descent and follows the Russian Orthodox Christian faith. She develops a love for books, adores her grandmother and takes trips to the Caspian Sea with her mother. It is on one of these trips when she meets a young man by the name of Arash. She develops deep feelings for him and they begin spending more and more time together. At this time, Tehran is a place of great political and emotional upheaval as the population of Iran is split into many different factions of differing viewpoints. Many of these groups uphold the Shah as the rightful leader while many more, mostly those who uphold the Muslim faith as law, believe that he is corrupt and swayed by the evils of Western civilization.