The Iranian political prisoner Sepideh Gholian’s account of life on the women’s wards in Bushehr and Evin prisons is a blindsiding blend of horrifying concrete detail, dizzying surrealism and wild optimism. In every line and in every moment it attempts to recreate, it is entirely and unconditionally defiant. For the reader, discombobulation comes from (at least) two directions. At one moment, you are presented with, for example, the story of a woman attempting to abort her foetus under permanent camera and human surveillance, because the consequences for her unborn child, herself and other family members if the pregnancy continues are unimaginably violent. At another you are instructed how to make elephant ears pastries, designed for large gatherings of visitors, in the cheery tones of the encouraging expert (“It’s not at all messy and impossible to get wrong. You don’t even need an oven. The sweetness is up to you.”)
Gholian was detained and tortured in 2018 after helping to organise a strike by sugarcane workers. Released on bail at the beginning of 2019, she was quickly rearrested after Iranian state television broadcasted her “confession”, evidently obtained under duress, and returned to prison. On her release four years later, she recorded a video message in which she removed her hijab, denounced the regime and called for the downfall of supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Unsurprisingly, the video went viral, and even less surprisingly she was immediately returned to Evin prison, where she remains (the introduction by journalist Maziar Bahari tells us that, for “security reasons”, he can’t tell us exactly how her writing has been smuggled out).
These are the facts, and there are many more of them in this book, detailing the supposed crimes, punishment and sometimes eventual fate of her fellow detainees: Sakineh Sagoori, a 34-year-old woman who gave birth in prison and was made to swear that her newborn child was a member of Islamic State; Elaheh Darvishi, jailed not for her own actions but because her husband was accused of taking part in a terrorist attack; political detainee Fatima Muthanna, now in her 50s but jailed for the first time when she was just three, because of her mother’s membership of an opposition group.
But lives are not constituted only of facts, and it is impossible to imprison an imagination. The scientist Maryam Haji-Hosseini, accused of espionage and held in solitary confinement for 412 days before being handed a 10-year sentence, renders a recipe for a dish of meatballs thus: “Noodles plus meat. Onions. Potatoes. Raisins. The kitchen sink. Gasoline. Nuts, bolts, other toppings.” She is described as adhering to a strict daily routine of “twenty-one and a half hours of reading books, one hour of sleep, fifty-five minutes of asking to be executed, half an hour of calisthenics and five minutes of cooking and baking”.
Going by the recipes in this book, each one dedicated to an inmate and tailored to their specific tastes and preferences, Gholian is clearly happy to spend more than five minutes lovingly creating a cream puff, a lemon meringue pie, a kachi pudding. It is unclear how many of these dishes are materially realised within the confines of the prison, and how many are acts of fantasy, a dream of what life might be like in the future. And yet, the women are phenomenally resourceful: alongside baking and cooking, we read of a powerful production of Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, its scenery constructed by tying together metal shelving units from the prison library, still providing inmates with hope 12 years after its staging.
There are other kinds of theatre, too: perhaps the book’s most profoundly affecting section comes in the form of a shadow play, in which the unnamed young woman who has induced an abortion is visited on successive nights by the silhouettes of other women, some imprisoned, some dead, a dancer here, a woman expressing milk there. One of them is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is portrayed being tossed around in a stormy ocean, throwing out her long hair so that her daughter can catch it and braid with her own. Her imprisonment, as we know, eventually came to an end; others have not, and probably won’t.
But Gholian is here to insist on their voices, their bodies, and their appetites. Cakes, biscuits, puddings might seem trivial, but they are potent signifiers of pleasure, creativity, the body demanding sweetness and comfort. Many of her recipes ask us to cook them in our own kitchens, and to eat them with joy. It’s hard not to agree, with respect and with gratitude.
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes by Sepideh Gholian is published by Oneworld (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply