Women Political Prisoners: Memoirs and Resistance

By Binesh Hassanpour

b.hassanpour@utoronto.ca

             On September 26, 2004 at the University of Toronto, a seminar was held in honour of Edward Said by a group of political and humanitarian activists.  Among them was Dr. Shahrzad Mojab, Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and Associate Professor of Adult Education Counseling Psychology (OISE, UT). 

 Along with other academics, Dr. Mojab presented a variety of issues facing women in the Middle East.  The topic at the forefront of the discussion was that of women political prisoners, which was argued to be politically omitted from studies of feminism, diaspora studies and so on.  Dr. Mojab was concerned with this political omission, and spoke of academia’s failure to address the matter of women political prisoners. 

“We need to ask,” Dr. Mojab said, “if the women of the Middle East are only constructed on the basis of their religious identity, if only their resistance to patriarchal religious-feudal state is understood as an act of reform from within, how do we explain the experience of thousands of women who are in prisons, who were in prisons, and who will be dragged into a prison as we are talking about them?”

In order to address academia’s silence in regard to questions such as these, Dr. Mojab argued, “We may take the first step of launching a new area of study – i.e., multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, teaching, and publishing about political prisoners all over the world.  We need activism in art, politics, and every other intellectual sphere in order to eliminate prisons, and especially to put an end to the incarceration of human beings for political reasons.”

As the discourse moved into full swing, Dr. Mojab argued that the “feminist and Marxist retooling of our students” would allow society to rupture the class, gender and ethnic dimensions of community, and thus in turn allowing the expansion of knowledge of many issues – including that of women political prisoners.

Haifa Zangana – a renowned political activist – was also in attendance.  Zangana spoke of the marginalization of women in the Middle East, and the importance of literature as a form of liberation in states of oppression.  Haifa Zangana’s political biography includes her resistance to the Baath party in Iraq (in the early 70s), and her involvement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which she described as a movement wracked with “corruption, nepotism, and hypocrisy.”

 In an evening that left the audience impressed, Dr. Mojab, Haifa Zangana and their colleagues managed to shed some much needed light on some previously ignored issues in society and academia alike.