A fierce defender of freedom of speech
Jailed and tortured twice in Iran, writer moved to Canada and continued his activism
Reza Baraheni, indefatigable Iranian dissident and former president of PEN Canada (2001-03), has died, at the age of 86, in Toronto.
He was known as “Iran’s Solzhenitsyn.” “A chronicler of his nation’s torture industry.” “Iran’s finest living poet.”
He had the distinction, and ill fortune, of being jailed and tortured by both the regime of the Shah and, after the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic. He went into exile twice — in the 1970s to the United States for five years, and then in 1997 to Canada where he settled.
He and Canada were made for each other. In no other country would a newcomer, even of his stature, have been so quickly accepted and elevated to the presidency of a leading centre of PEN, the writers’ group with chapters in more than 100 countries.
A human-rights activist and a ferocious defender of freedom of speech, Baraheni was perpetually protesting his homeland’s persecution of writers, intellectuals and ethnic minorities. Knowing him was to know the agony of contemporary Iran.
A prodigious author, in English and Persian, he left behind a trove of more than 60 books of essays, literary criticism, fiction and poetry. His works have been translated into a dozen languages.
When he recited his poems, or Rumi’s or Hafez’s, he left audiences spellbound, including those of us with only a vague familiarity with Farsi. He was a good storyteller. His recounting of the horrors that he had endured remain imprinted on my mind.
Born in an Azerbaijani Turk family in Tabriz, he grew up in grinding poverty. He became the second Iranian to complete a Ph.D. in English — the first became a court poet of the Shah, while Baraheni took the dissident path.
As a lecturer at Tehran University, he spoke up for non-Persian minorities whose linguistic, ethnic and cultural identities were being suppressed. He was arrested by the Shah’s police.
“My long beard was pulled out, bit by bit,” he told me in 2005, recalling Day 1 of his 102 days in captivity. “Then I was dragged to a room of the torturer. ‘Tell me who told you to write that article?’ he asked, pressing me from both sides. ‘I wrote it myself,’ I said. ‘Tell me, tell me,’ he kept squeezing.
“He then started kicking me in the stomach, groin and testicles. I fell down. Others joined in the beating. I was stretched out on a torture bed, my hands and feet tied down. I was given 75 blows to the soles of my feet with a barbed-wire whip. I fainted.
“When I came to, the interrogator lifted me up and put a pistol to my temple and pulled the trigger. I went down … Later, a guard told me that one of the torturers had imitated the sound of shooting.
“I was told if I didn’t confess, my wife and my 13-year-old daughter would be raped in front of me.”
He was released after strong protests by prominent American academics and writers, including novelists Jerzy Kosinski and E.L. Doctorow.
Baraheni defected to the U.S. He testified before Congress and rallied Arthur Miller, Joan Baez, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Berrigan, Pete Seeger, Susan Sontag and others to question Washington’s blind support of the dictatorial Shah.
In December 1978, he and Allen Ginsberg were among the hundreds demonstrating outside the White House against Jimmy Carter hosting the king.
Two months later came the Islamic revolution. Baraheni returned to Iran, trading the tranquility of his tenured professorship at the University of Maryland for the taste of promised freedom in his homeland.
In Tehran, battles were raging in the streets, with the Shah’s palace guards putting up one last stand. Dodging bullets on one such night, Baraheni found himself in front of a mosque where the watchman let him in. He lay down next to others in the courtyard. Pulling the hood of his parka down to his eyes, he dozed off.
Awakened by raindrops, he saw the others still asleep. He shut his eyes. But the drizzle wouldn’t let up. Sitting up, he looked around. No one stirred. “They had all been dead. I rushed out to the dozing guard and asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
“‘You hadn’t asked.’ ”
He resumed teaching at the University of Tehran but was soon condemned as a counter-revolutionary and incarcerated for 84 days, the last 48 at the infamous Evin prison, where nearly a quarter century later Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi would be murdered.
Baraheni was held in solitary confinement and blindfolded often, always during interrogations. Returning disoriented from one such night session, he found himself pushed into a long line of prisoners being marched uphill.
“Where are they taking us?” he asked.
“We’ve all been condemned to death,” piped up the man behind him. “Weren’t you in court?” “No.”
“Don’t you have a mark on your sole?”
“NO.”
“You’d better shout and let them know.”
But the guards ignored Baraheni. “Keep screaming, keep screaming.”
Someone finally flashed a torchlight at his soles, only to yell that Baraheni also be marked up for the death squad.
“I was kept in a room waiting for someone to turn up with the marker. Then, by a miracle, they found the condemned man. I was spared. Minutes later, I heard the shots.”
Following his release, Baraheni was fired from the university.
In 1994, at clandestine meetings of the Writers’ Association, Baraheni and others wrote a charter calling for “freedom of expression, without limits or exceptions.” They called it the Text of 134, echoing Vaclav Havel’s Charter of 77 in Communist Czechoslovakia. He translated it into English and had it smuggled to Arthur Miller, who read it at the 1994 Congress of International PEN in Prague.
Retaliation was swift. Many were jailed, blackmailed or murdered. Baraheni’s name turned up on a hit list in the fall of 1995. He fled to Sweden, from where he came to Canada.
Following the American invasion of Iraq, Baraheni was distraught that the Baghdad Museum and the Iraqi National Library had been looted and destroyed. He wrote: “All it’d have taken was two soldiers and a tank” to safeguard those great treasures, but the Americans had instead prioritized guarding Iraqi oil wells and the oil ministry in Baghdad.
He was a polarizing figure, drawing strong reactions, for and against. That was a function of his passionate advocacy as well as a reflection of the deeply divided Iranian society, in Iran and in the diaspora — pro-Shah royalists and the Islamic revolutionaries, to start; Marxist Mujahideen-e-Khalq and law-abiding secularists; and at present, the many factions within the Islamic regime, broadly divided between supreme leader Ayatollah Syed Khamenei and the hard-liners on the one hand, and liberal-minded clerics on the other.
The latter tried and failed to soften and democratize the polity, including former presidents Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) and Hassan Rouhani (2013-2021). When Khatami, especially, had raised high hopes, Baraheni was emphatic in telling me, “Khatami won’t make much of a difference, even if he’s in power 25 years.” Baraheni knew the lay of his land.
Baraheni died March 24. He is survived by wife Sanaz Sehhati of Toronto; daughter, Aleca, of Fairfax, Va.; sons Oktay, of Tehran and Toronto; and Arsalan Esfandiar, of Toronto. A funeral is scheduled for Saturday, April 9, at 1 p.m. at Elgin Mills Cemetery in Richmond Hill.
He and Canada were made for each other. In no other country would a newcomer, even of his stature, have been so quickly accepted and elevated to the presidency of a leading centre of PEN, the writers’ group with chapters in more than 100 countries