Iranian prisoner resists, persists with stirring courage

In 1946, Holocaust survivor and famed psychologist Viktor Frankl struck a deep chord of dissonance by associating human experience — and meaning — with human suffering.

In Man’s Search for Meaning Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, argued that “human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death.”

Pretty heavy stuff, but a sentiment paralleled by Iranian-Canadian writer Sirous Houshand, whose memoir, The Darkest Night Brings Longer Days: Surviving War and Iran’s Evin Prison, asks deep questions about human suffering, our search for meaning and the very nature of our being. It’s all contemplated through the backdrop of the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war and then three years in one of the most infamous prisons, Evin.

Waiting for imminent execution in Evin, the author, former political prisoner and engineer dives deep into wells of angst, hope, absurdity and stoicism: “when faced with existential threat, our attention refocuses on its dazzling allure. Death gives meaning to life.”

Death giving meaning to life is a central theme of Houshmand’s, whose foundation and dependence on philosophical tomes and on a critique of consumerism, autocracies, collective willful blindness and sticking to one’s principles provides a provocation for how we might all approach this thing called life.

Now living in Toronto, Houshand was born in Iran before his family moved to southern California. A son of a doctor, his parents would drift back to Iran for various stints, leaving him to live with American families and an opportunity to fully understand the post-Second World War development of consumerism and the reaction to the Cold War by the American government and the populace.

After earning his engineering and philosophy degrees, Houshand returned to Iran in the late 1970s to reunite with his family — a return that would launch him directly into the Iranian revolution of 1978, the fall of the shah and the rise of the ayatollahs via a power vacuum.

Despite a small pocket of time following the fall of the shah — where Iranian society exhaled, exchanged ideas and opened its mind to new ideas and a new vision — the revolution ushered in a new republic that would wage cruel war on secularism and opposition parties and witness mass imprisonments, executions and countless human rights atrocities. The lessons taught during the revolution, however, were deep for Houshmand, who had a front row seat in the arena of social movements, courage and conviction. “There comes a point in our lives when we must either follow the painless path, with its status and benefits, or follow the beat of a different drummer for all its consequence,” he writes.

Contrasting societies in the U.S. and Iran during the revolution and after, Houshmand leans on Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Franz Kafka and Frankl to examine and critique our desire to capitulate to greed, shallowness and an unexamined life.

During the revolution and as witness to the shah’s violent response to its own people, Houshmand comes to a significant epiphany: “I pledged to change my lifestyle drastically and never return to a superficial life.” That renouncement stays with him following the revolution, when he finds work as an engineer in a factory, where he and his colleagues serve various field hospitals during the Iran-Iraq war.

The tales of courage and humanity captured by Houshmand underscore our species’ ability, and perhaps desire, to care for strangers and engage in acts of ferocious courage when needed.

It was during the war that the Iranian state became suspicious of everyone on the left. Houshmand found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and was taken on the streets of Tehran.

For three years, Houshmand endured the horrid conditions of Evin prison, much of it in solitary confinement, and certainly under the dark cloud of perpetual physical and psychological violence. It is during this unimaginable time where the author thinks deeply about life’s meaning, our relationship with each other and how human suffering and death awaken us to the beauty and devastation of existence.

In the darkest points of his time of Evin prison, Houshmand still found the energy to resist. “Our resolve is constantly tested, tempting us to give in, in return for which, we are promised a better life. Some succumb and bend the knee. Others stand tall and try to make a difference,” he writes.

He refused to yield to the confessions laid in front of him by Iranian interrogators and jailkeepers. Perhaps it was these principles that kept him alive while so many of his cellmates simply vanished in the night.

The Darkest Night Brings Longer Days is an indictment of the unexamined life and a call for courage and principles in the face of injustice. It is a powerful provocation for those living in times when western democracies normalize troops in the streets, the disappearance of those most vulnerable and a state founded on hate, fear and unfettered nihilism.

Matt Henderson is superintendent of the Winnipeg School Division.