Recommended Link: Day of the Imprisoned Writer – Mahvash Sabet

Mahvash Sabet

Yesterday’s Guardian contained a moving letter from one writer in freedom to another in prison, part of an international campaign of protest. Below is a short extract: for the full text see link.

Alberto Manguel writes an open letter to the poet, imprisoned in Iran for her defence of the Bahá’i Faith
News: Leading authors mount international protest to defend persecuted colleagues

Dear Mahvash Sabet,

It’s almost an impertinence, I feel, to write to a poet who is being kept behind bars for her words and beliefs. King Lear, imprisoned at the end of the play with his daughter Cordelia, tells her that they will become “God’s spies”. That is what you as well have become, bearing witness to society’s injustices, prejudices and inability to understand that no matter what society might do to a poet, the poet’s words will still be free in the minds of the readers, and continue to conjure up ideas, engage the mind in conversation. Perhaps there’s consolation in this.

You end one of your poems saying that “You can’t see the sorrow after lights out,” and that you therefore “long for the dark, total black-out.” I hope, for your dear sake, that the end of your sorrow is near but not as that “total black-out” you speak of: instead, as a resolution of freedom, as the free sunlight that is every person’s natural right, a right no one is entitled to take away. . . . . . .

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