Camelia -- Save Yourself By Telling the Truth is a personal memoir of Camelia Entekhabifard, an Iranian journalist who suffered persecution and imprisonment in her homeland in 1999. As a Bahá’í, I am accustomed to hearing heroic and self-sacrificing accounts of persection and martyrdom in Iran, true martyrdom in which souls stand up for what they believe and face the consequences joyfully and without fear. But the author is by her own admission a spoiled little rich girl whose family had enjoyed privilege in the time of the Shah and were habituated to European vacations. Whatever historical background she gives are relevant only as the orbit to her own unexemplary life. Typically, when the family heard of the announcement of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, her mother became hysterical and beat her for no reason she could fathom, and she freely admits: “To me, the first important thing that happened to me was that the schools were closed for a week and the final exams were postponed.”
Yes, she endured the wrath of the new regime in the form of fundamentalist vigilantes in school and on the streets as a child and as an adult and a journalist was imprisoned and interrogated for 70 days without justification, as a “spy for Israel.” Her account of her interrogator is not within the context of justice, but in the absurd context of her falling in love with her abuser, though neither sees each other’s face. And when she is given a list of sixty-seven men she has allegedly had relations with, which include several close relatives, she begins to lie and lie and lie, with the view of saving her own skin, since that is what everyone is Iran does, according to her. A typical reply was, “I wasn’t educated properly, I wasn’t a good Muslim, I was addicted to sex. I’m so full of sin you should punish me however you decide.” She also recounts her tawdry love affair with the nation’s most famous soccer player which, after the initial flush of not love but notoriety, fizzles unceremoniously out since neither of their expectations works out – she wants life in the fast lane, the jet set, while he wants a wife who will cook him several meals a day. How banal!
The subtitle of the book is misleading, inasmuch as it suggests clinging to the truth as one’s weapon against corruption, injustice, and tyranny, and with that weapon one would prevail, either in this world or the next. We find, however, that these words were addressed to her by her interrogator, and “the truth” was far from the intention of either of them. His was extracting from her the confessions his superiors wanted to hear, and hers was to secure her freedom with as little pain and as soon as possible, by any means necessary. She attempts to impress us with her clever prevarication in her quest for her own freedom, her ability to survive and thrive, which is her prerogative as a memoirist, but if we’re looking for a bona fide heroine here, we are bound to be disappointed by this self-absorption.
She achieves national attention as a young poet – even this under false pretences, as she reads a love poem which she misrepresents as being inspired by and directed towards the Ayatollah. In her book, she resorts to a non-chronological narrative, juxtaposing her halcyon youth with her barbaric treatment at the hands of her jailers. This writer hopes he is not being unfair, and though himself having escaped a totalitarian regime under dramatic circumstances, has never been subjected to intense personal persecution. Still, this book compares quite unfavourably with Azar Nafizi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, which was told in the context of a love of beauty in literature, or certainly with the heroic episodes of such accounts as The Dawn-Breakers, which are still unfortunately little-known outside of Bahá’í readership, but which nevertheless I believe will before long sweep the world.
The book is not without virtues, even if incidentally. To North Americans, and even to Bahá’ís at large, Iran is seen as a monolithic, backward culture of Islamic fundamentalists, and their leaders are demonized as such in the media. Accounts such as this give us at least a glimpse of the complexity and diversity of Iranian society, its class clashes, its struggles between tradition and modernity, its shifting patchwork of religion and politics, and its pride in its glorious heritage. For this little girl, perhaps the greatest shock outside her sometimes petty personal concerns is the aggressive replacement of the Persian culture of her family and ancestry by the foreign values of the Ayatollah’s theocracy.
Another element is her relationship with her interrogator, with whom she says she falls in love, but manipulates to fall in love with her in order to win her freedom, and their love/fear/power struggle relationship continues after her release in an ugly and indecent affair. This seems like a microcosm of the relationship Middle Easterners tend to have with their leaders, bizarre as it may jangle in Western ears.
She mentions the Bahá’ís twice, briefly. On page 154, her mother’s words: “. . . this Nava is a Bahá’í and unclean . . .” On page 179, while she was incarcerated: “I was given religious books from the prison library to read. One of the books was about the candle stuffing of the Bahá’ís by Amir Kabir. The book told how he persecuted them and would stuff all the orifices of their bodies with lit candles and parade them around the city in a ghastly spectacle. My stomach churned, and I shut the book in disgust. It was horrifying.” This disgust doesn’t seem to have translated into any subsequent journalistic search after truth on her part. Her most scandalous piece, never published, was on the prostitutes (wives for a day) in the clerical city of Qom. I submit that to write of the plight of the Iranian Bahá’ís who sacrifice themselves with no personal thought but rather for the spiritual regeneration of the entire human civilization would be a more worthy enterprise. This link would be a good place to begin: www.kdkfactory.com/quench/
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