A unique and intriguing concept, The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club by Sepideh Gholian is both a prison memoir and recipe collection; a celebration of baking, as resistance, therapy, and heartfelt tribute to fellow detainees. Gholian, a human rights activist, is to date, still incarcerated in one of Iran’s infamously brutal prisons. Beaten and tortured, she remains unbowed, having smuggled out the contents of this book in order to tell the world about Iranian repression and to raise a beacon of hope.
Gholian entrusted her work to Maziar Bahari, a journalist and documentary maker. In an excellent introduction, he outlines her history of non-violent protest and the regime’s heavy-handed response. Whilst rolling news reports of global atrocities can sometimes desensitise and inure the watching world, he believes that her use of baking recipes feels like an expressive and personalised new way into people’s hearts.
As a political prisoner, Gholian is given the ‘privilege’ of setting up a kitchen and it’s here that her baking plans begin to take shape, each recipe dedicated to a fellow prisoner, some remain anonymous, some are no longer with us. The recipes are linked to personal stories and some of them are hard to read, containing appalling accounts of violence, abuse, and trumped up charges.
The most affecting of these is the experience of a young, unmarried inmate who suspects she may be pregnant. Struck by extreme nausea in a place where ‘the sound of vomiting is forbidden,’ the possibility dawns on her, along with the chilling realisation of what this will mean. Disgrace, ‘a shadow as dark as death’. Her father and brother will threaten to cut the throats of the women in the family (guilty by female association), and her own life will effectively be over.
How this traumatised woman confirms, secretly terminates, and then attempts to recover from her pregnancy is a harrowing read. In this grim jail where there are no therapists on hand for support, it’s the sisterhood that steps in and carries her.
Gholian tells us that one of their kindnesses is to make her a kachi pudding ( a traditional dessert laced with rosewater and saffron). It seems, perhaps, like a relatively inconsequential gesture but for these women, baking is love, solidarity, defiance and joy, resulting in such wonders as tres leches cake, lemon meringue pie and date crumble.
Despite the barren nature of the prison, art also finds a way. The women paint, write, perform plays and share elaborate fantasies. One of these is a visualisation of a shadow-puppet show, where Gholian’s fellow inmates, past and present, are imagined as dancing shadows projected on a wall. A mother and daughter shadow pair dance together in a gathering storm, binding themselves together using their hair like rope.
‘The mother and child are Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her daughter Gabriella, also called ‘Gisou’, which means ‘tresses’ in Persian.’
Gholian’s recipe for Nazanin is scones baked with honey, cinnamon and crushed walnuts.
An inspirational book from a radiant and galvanising woman, whose spirit cannot be quelled. Translated from the Persian by Hessam Ashrafi.
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club by Sepideh Gholian is translated by Hessam Ashrafi and published by OneWorld Publications, 208 pages.
