The Bitter-Sweet Feelings of a Face-to-Face Meeting With Bahman
February 23, 2010
by Jila Baniyaghoob
Bahman, an imprisoned journalist, has been in jail for eight months for his work in the media. Today I had my third twenty-minute face-to-face meeting with him in all these months.
I had been so missing a long talk with Bahman, and I had written down the key points of what I wanted to tell him on a small piece of paper.
It’s an amazing feeling: to be with someone you used to talk to for several hours every day, using a note to tell him what you want to say. And if he’s interested in political and social news, more than half the time will be spent on giving him the headlines.
Another amazing feature of Evin prison is that you, the visitor, don’t have the right to take a present, no matter how small, to your loved one. For instance, it is forbidden to take any type of foodstuff, even a small bar of chocolate or a green apple. But the prisoner can give the visitor something small to eat, or a present, usually made by the prisoners. Of course, this is possible only during face-to-face meetings, not when you have a meeting in a ‘cabin’, seeing the prisoner through a glass window and talking to him on the phone.
You have a mixture of sweet and bitter feelings when you receive a gift from your imprisoned loved one. You know that your loved one who has very limited resources in prison has still tried to get you the best of what there is to eat - foodstuff that he has bought from Evin’s little shop at several times the price. Apparently, at the Evin shop everything is more expensive than outside.
You know that he might have deprived himself of eating or drinking something that he likes, saving it for when you meet him. If you don’t eat, you’ll spoil all his plans to make you happy. And if you do eat, you’ll feel strange.
For instance, Bahman had brought me a small can of pineapple preserve, which he knows that I like. I can buy the same pineapple preserve from any shop outside at a reasonable price. But I must happily eat Bahman’s gift of pineapple preserve in the prison meeting hall to make him happy.
Of course, I ate the pineapple eagerly, to the very last bit. He had also bought me a lot of chocolate, milk-chocolate and Kit Kat bars, which he knows that I like, and insisted that I should take them home.
Of course, I did that. But, you know, it’s a strange feeling. I wish I could take foodstuff for him to prison, rather than bring it home for myself, from prison.
Jila Baniyaghoob won an IWMF Courage in Journalism Award in 2009.
Source: http://zhila.org/spip.php?article258