Marina Nemat
Marina Nemat was born in 1965 in Tehran, Iran, and came to Canada in 1991. Her first memoir, Prisoner of Tehran, has been published in twenty-nine countries and her second book, After Tehran, in four. In 2007, Marina received the inaugural Human Dignity Award from the European Parliament, in 2008 the Grinzane Literary Prize in Italy, and in 2014 the Morris Abram Human Rights Award from UN Watch in Geneva. She is the co-chair of the Board of Directors at the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture (CCVT), the chair of the Writers in Exile Committee at PEN Canada, a member of the Board of Directors at Vigdis, a Norwegian NGO that aids female prisoners of conscience, and a member of the International Council at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Marina regularly speaks at high schools, universities, and conferences around the world and teaches memoir writing at the School of Continuing Studies at University of Toronto.
Bio last updated November 28th, 2018.
Articles by Marina Nemat
The Conversation: Solitary Talks with God
By Marina Nemat with Stephanie Schoenhoff
August 1, 2016
As a political prisoner in Iran, where she was kept in solitary confinement and narrowly escaped execution, Marina Nemat says she discovered the reason God is a great storyteller. "He let's us," she says in conversation with Convivium's Stephanie Schoenhoff, "tell our own stories."
If I'm not asked, I would never, ever go up to people and talk about Jesus and God, even though they are the most dear things to me, because I believe one of the most important things in my life is that I know I'm not a prophet How can you be everything and never have been tortured? It just doesn't add up For God to say, "You know what? I created this world, and it has turned out to be a rather difficult place C: I think many people struggle to understand why there is suffering in the world, it is very difficult to grasp why God would allow such pain When people ask me, "How did you survive?" I always give them the birthday cake story, or when someone was sick, how you would stay up with someone all night MN: After having to betray Jesus, isn't that true? To me, God is a great storyteller One side tips, and the other side tips; but if everything is even, if everybody has to do good and has no other choice, there's no scale C: One of the most compelling parts of your new book, After Tehran, is where you talk about one of the things that helped you cope in prison, which was to imagine that Jesus went through something similar MN: I really do not have the ability to think of God as somebody who sits on a throne in Heaven I would say to that, "Well, people would not do terrible things to other people, so that other people cannot beat me to a pulp, and they cannot rape me, and they cannot do whatever they want to me Each one of these places has their own specific characteristics, but the fact is that prison, like Auschwitz, was and is a place of no accountability, where a man can do to a man or to a woman whatever he desires First of all, when I was in a state of shock, when I was in Evin prison, the only thing that I could really trust, when it came to my mind and the way it was analyzing everything that was happening, was One of the things that really plagued me, and made things difficult for me in prison, is that I felt responsible for everything I just don't have it He looked at me and said, "Oh, Christ, what the hell was that?" I said, "It was a fish