‘Blindfolded, I sat down slowly. Then the interrogation began’: Iranian Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi on the torture of solitary confinement

Sentenced to 44 years in prison for her political activism, she is now critically ill and her family warn she may soon die in custody. In this exclusive excerpt from her writings, smuggled out of prison at immense risk, Mohammadi describes the horror of her incarceration The cell had no ventilation. At the top of the door, at the highest point, there was a window set close to the ceiling, covered with a perforated metal sheet. The tiny holes in the sheet would allow the thinnest strands of sunlight to promise morning, and as the sun’s golden rays disappeared, they would signal the coming of night. The most delusional element of solitary confinement is time itself. The hands of the clock are gone; day and night pass without measure. Time becomes nothing but a narrow beam of light slipping through the small holes in a metal sheet. I didn’t dare take an afternoon nap, because I would lose my grip on time entirely. In the outside world, such a nap might last only minutes – but inside the cell, within the confines of my shackled mind, it felt as though years had passed. When I woke up, I didn’t know if it was still today, if I had slipped back into yesterday, or if I had already arrived at tomorrow. Continue reading...

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