Evento

Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran

Berkeley Arts & Letters Presents
with co-sponsors the National Iranian American Council, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and the Persian Center

Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran:
HOUSHANG ASADI
in conversation with JONATHAN CURIEL

Thursday, October 21
7:30 PM

In the tradition of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Houshang Asadi offers a personal and moving account of his six-year political imprisonment in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Asadi was arrested in 1983 during the fierce clampdown on political parties in post-revolution Iran even though he supported the new Islamic Republic. Little did he know at the time that he would spend the next six years of his life in prison where he would be brutally tortured to extract "confessions" that he was a spy for the Russians, a spy for Britain, a spy for anyone or anything.

Asadi's raw account is Letters to My Torturer. Journey with him through this astonishing period of history, as Iran swung from one political extreme to the next. Witness the conditions in Tehran's prisons and courts, today filled with yet another generation of political prisoners. Meet his fellow prisoners - journalists and political activists, friends and strangers - many of whom were also tortured to extract confessions, and are named in the UN Human Rights report on the thousands summarily hanged in the bloodbath of 1988. One of these fellow prisoners was the young Ayatollah Khamenei, now Supreme Leader of Iran, who shared Asadi's tiny cell for nine months and formed a close friendship with him, later saving him from execution.

Asadi's torturer went on to become an ambassador for Iran. Asadi became an exile, unable to escape the searing pain he experienced at the hands of his torturer, "Brother Hamid", whom he confronts one last time through these letters. Profoundly upsetting, immeasurably important, Asadi's story demands to be heard.

"Mr. Asadi has offered the world a powerful testament to what transpires in the prisons of Iran - a nightmare that the country's radical Islamic leadership clearly would be only too happy to export." Saul Rosenberg, Wall Street Journal

"A harrowing memoir of imprisonment and torture under the Islamic Republic of Iran... With moving stories about fellow prisoners, biting commentary on the religious dictates imposed by his jailers and meditations on the soul-destroying effect of false confessions and the special cruelty of his ideological, authoritarian interrogators, Asadi's simple prose attracts even as the facts he reports repel. A horrifying glimpse of the decades-long nightmare still afflicting the people of Iran." -- Kirkus

A journalist, writer, and translator, Houshang Asadi was a member of both the Writers' Association of Iran and the Iranian Journalists' Syndicate, and the co-founder of the Association of Iranian Film Critics and Script Writers. Prior to the Islamic Revolution he served for many years as Deputy Editor at Kayhan, Iran's largest daily newspaper. In 1983, following the new Iranian government's crackdown on all opposition parties, Asadi was arrested and sent again to Moshtarek prison. He received a sentence of death by hanging, but was freed after serving six years. In 2003 he escaped Iran. He now lives in exile in Paris, where he co-founded the Persian-language news site Rooz Online, with his wife, Nooshabeh Amiri.

Jonathan Curiel is a world-traveling journalist in San Francisco and the author of America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots, which details the historic influence of Arab and Muslim culture on America, from the time of Columbus to the modern age.

$12 advance ($6 students with ID, NIAC members, and Hillside Club members), $15 (for all) at the door, online at Brown Paper Tickets or 800-838-3006.

Hillside Club (2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley)

Ubicación

Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street
Berkeley, AR 94709
United States

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Categorías

Otra > Política

Apropiado para niños: No

Se aceptan perros: No

No fumar: No

Accesible a silla de ruedas: No

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