The Bathhouse by Farnoosh Moshiri
As we continue to shelter in place, I decided it was time to revisit some of my favorite books of the past. The Bathhouse was high on my list. The slim volume is set in Tehran during the fundamentalist revolution in the 80s, and hauntingly follows the wrongful arrest and forgotten imprisonment of a seventeen-year-old girl who is tortured by militant members of the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Moshiri constructed the fictional account based on interviews with actual victims of Khomeini’s repressive regime. Moshiri herself was one of the sect of intellectuals targeted by Khomeini and narrowly escaped with her two year old son to Houston, Texas. The Bathhouse is an important voice in the canon of prison narratives, and helps bear witness to the atrocities suffered at the hands of fundamentalist political regimes.
Even as a reread, I could not put this book down. I had to finish it. The raw brutality of this narrative wrenched me, and the quick pacing kept me on edge. I enjoy Iranian literature, and am always looking for something that speaks to the troubles that riddle that area of the world — especially gender prejudice. This book not only gave voice to that, but also to the zeal of religious fundamentalism in a very honest, straightforward narrative. We see the loss of innocence personally of the unnamed narrator, but also the collective loss of innocence of a people.
When I finished the book, the first thing that struck me was the opening and closing. Not the first chapter, but the opening of the survival story. The narrator is gushing blood and frantic to stop the flow and “clean” herself. As she is being initiated into the reality of the oppressive regime in control of the torture sessions, the blood flows like a river from her. Right before she is given pads to stop the flow, she passes out in the midst of cleaning her own blood off the floor. She describes the blood river as a “…baby slipping out of [her] on the floor of the female guards’ room…it was sliding out of [her]with an endless stream of blood. Then [she]thought [she] would lie down here and get some sleep close to [her] bloody child” (19).
The analogy to the blood as a child brings to mind the idea of the blood as representative of the narrator’s innocence or childhood. This idea formed more for me when in the closing scene the narrator lies down in her own blood again. I felt like this was cyclical. The first blood was her initiation, and the second was symbolic of her adulthood and sacrifice. She is bathed in it both times. I thought it was also powerful that there is the reference to the children laughing while the narrator is sitting in her blood. For me, this was a foreshadowing of the children’s eventual loss of innocence when the narrator gives voice to her experiences. She wonders what she will tell her sister about the bathhouse where they held her, tortured her, and then forgot about her promised release amidst all the new prisoners. She was marked a temporary prisoner, but held so long that the damage will forever be permanent on her body and mind.
The other thing that struck me was the narrator’s lack of name. This is significant if you look at the narrator as a collective mirror for all of the women that suffer under oppressive, patriarchal regimes. In this way the narrator may be representative of Moshiri who collected all of the stories of the survivors when writing this novel. This helps qualify the novel as literature of witness. The narrator bears witness to the atrocities everyone experienced, including Nahid, a tortured and murdered journalist the narrator befriends one night, who voiced the wish to be the witness. As a reader, the end leaves you wondering whether the narrator will tell the story but her looking up at the moon and the stars seems to indicate that path.
This novel is unapologetic in its prose. It is an intimate view of the oppression the Iranian people have been subjected to for decades. It is not an easy read emotionally. It will leave you in moments of agony and frustration at the evil humans are capable of inflicting on each other. In this moment where we are striving to recognize and acknowledge the legacy of systemic racism, The Bathhouse is an important read in our journey to be culturally literate, and cognizant of the collateral damage of historical amnesia.
The Bathhouse
by Farnoosh Moshiri
2003. 152 pages
About Carrie Honaker
Carrie Honaker is a writer currently based in Panama City Beach, Florida. She is a voracious reader and kitchen sorcery addict who found her inner writer at the Blue Ridge Writing Project in 2010. Most days you can find her plowing through a book, writing or dabbling with a new recipe. Currently, she is working on a memoir encompassing themes of motherhood, food, and loss interspersed with family recipes. You can find her on Twitter: @writeonhonaker, Instagram: @corkdorkva, and on her blog Strawbabies and Chocolate Beer.
