Two nights ago, amid the heavy wind and rain, I arrived at Queen Elizabeth Hall at Southbank Centre to attend the Orwell Memorial Lecture 2024, given by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Each year, the speaker chosen is allowed total freedom to choose his or her lecture topic, the only requirement being that it should be a topic “in which George Orwell would have been interested”. The title of Nazanin’s lecture was “The Feeling of Freedom”.
Now, I’m no politics buff, nor am I well-versed in British-Iranian relations. I have merely heard of the extraordinary story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, British-Iranian citizen who on her way back to the UK from a trip back home was captured at the airport and held as a political hostage by the Iranian government for six years and banned from returning home. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the lecture; would it be some rousing speech highlighting the injustice done to her, calling us to activism; would it be in-depth insight into the complacency of the British government in the shaping of the modern Middle East?
In fact, the speech she gave was rather plain and simple. Nothing political was really mentioned; she recounted the story of how she was captured, what life was like in Evin Prison, where Iran holds its political prisoners, and how she the concept of freedom turned from something abstract into something concrete for her. Looking at the well-dressed woman speaking calmly on stage, one could have believed her to be a Parliamentary MP, or a professional journalist, or a CEO, but most certainly not a woman who had suffered nine months (!) in solitary confinement, a mother who left a child when she was two years old and returned to an eight-year-old daughter, and a prisoner who had to reckon with the fact that despite not having done any wrong she must yet face a sentence with no defined duration and completely dependent on political circumstances beyond her control.
The way she talked about the camaraderie within the prison ward, the book clubs she had with other political prisoners, it was almost as if prison was a positive thing for her. It was only when they opened the floor to public questions that, through others’ questions, I began to get the sense that she had downplayed a lot of what she had to go through. One week of solitary confinement, if I really think about it, is more than enough time to break me, not to mention nine months for her. In 2019, then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson made a grave mistake of implying she was visiting Iran with journalistic intentions, which very likely led to extending her prison sentence another two years. When asked by a member of the public whether she resented him (and most of us would probably bear a lifetime grudge toward someone whose oversight led to a prison sentence) she merely replied that she had moved on and no longer wanted to live in hate. The amount of soul-searching that must have involved, I cannot begin to imagine.
This woman sitting in front of me, looking like any other ordinary woman, bore such an extraordinary story. It was only afterwards, when I thought about the event, that I realized this was what true courage looked like. Having weathered years of struggle, rather than becoming more hard-edged, she had become more stoic and calm. That’s not to say she lived a life in resignation; rather, she saw it as a duty for her to tell her story, and she continues to do so even two years after her release. Her message isn’t overtly politicized, and it seems to me she tries her best not to make it so. In that way, it was more human and more subtly moving. When one woman asked her what they–the people who cared for her and campaigned for her– could have done more, given that the situation was completely out of their control, she replied that the most important thing for prisoners was the knowledge that they had not been forgotten, and the best way to do that is to tell their stories, and to keep telling them.
In her answers she casually mentioned fellow political inmates who had it much worse than her, who were not mentioned in the headlines of newspapers every day as she was and yet who were serving sentences of 10 years or more. For them, existence must be such a different thing, so much more raw and essential. I think back to the political prisoners in Hong Kong, jailed for seven years or more for participating in an unapproved election against an inherently undemocratic system. If I connect Nazanin and her experiences with her fellow inmates with the jailed activists of Hong Kong, I begin to understand how these people see the power in what they do, how they have crossed a threshold in the understanding of freedom, and why for them this is what they must do. Of course, I am generalizing and using my own imagination, but stories work by connecting people via their imagination.
For Nazanin, her existence became political the moment she was detained by the guards at the Imam Khomeini Airport. She did not have a choice; her life was no longer just her own. But perhaps she was forced to reckon with something many of us (me included) can willingly ignore and choose to do so: that our lives are not just our own, that it is deeply connected to the society around us, whether that be a democratic one or an authoritarian one. She mentioned that in prison she read a lot and thought a lot about the Holocaust, how humans could commit such an unbelievably inhuman act. She recalled how guards at the Evin prison would cry with the prisoners when the cameras weren’t “looking”. Even if they didn’t want to, they were effectually serving the system. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it’s a steep slope towards the abyss of humanity; we could easily reach that cesspit without us realizing.
Perhaps that’s a little bleak, but what if, by not really understanding, by wilfully ignoring the stories of others because we can, we are actually complicit in an unjust system?
Near the beginning of her lecture, Nazanin mentioned that once she stepped into prison, freedom became for her not a necessity to be taken for granted, but a choice. One must decide to live in freedom and struggle for it. For the rest of us who are privileged enough to take freedom for granted, stories like hers remind us why we should never forget that freedom is essential, and what living in freedom really means, before we let that slip away from us.
Article photo courtesy of Southbank Centre.
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