As flames engulfed the prison that day three years ago—and again this past summer, under Israeli bombardment—this truth confronted me: I am undeniably tethered to this place. Evin is not just a distant cluster of buildings where I happened to be born; it is the axis of my geography. The prison stamped its coordinates on my body. In the key of its fearful and tyrannical map, my destiny was fixed. This map seeks to contain not only me and my family but the very idea of us and our people. Denying the enduring evidence of resistance, it aims to trap us within a familiar script, rendering us unruly people in need of discipline or helpless victims awaiting salvation.

And yet, because Evin is, for me, where everything began, my compass points out from this narrow place toward a wider world. My origin directs me to return, always, to what the regime, along with its imperial co-conspirators, disclaims: those stubborn histories of revolt it has never been able to fully crush—the archives it has endeavored to destroy, the voices it has tried to silence, the lives it thought it had extinguished. When I look out from Evin, the view widens beyond Tehran’s walls: toward other uprisings, other unfinished liberation struggles, every place where people refuse the borders drawn to contain them.

Evin Prison’s role as an antagonist of popular struggle precedes the Islamic Republic. Opened in 1971 in the beautiful village of Evin in northern Tehran under the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the prison was originally a high-security detention center run by SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded secret police. The complex comprised two large communal blocks designed to hold 300 people, 20 cells for solitary confinement, a court room, and an execution yard. In 1953, after the US and UK, hoping to protect Western oil interests, orchestrated a coup ousting the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the CIA assisted in establishing SAVAK, and the prison became a key site for the secret police to incarcerate, torture, and kill opponents of the Shah. (In the 1960s, as relations between the US and Iran became increasingly strained, Israel’s Mossad helped to train SAVAK agents, with whom they also carried out several joint operations.) By the 1979 revolution, Evin held more than 1,500 people, including 100 political prisoners in solitary confinement.

In February 1979, a month after the Shah fled Iran, as Ruhollah Khomeini rose to power, the doors of Evin opened to the public for the first and only time. Crowds stormed the prison to bear witness to the torture chambers and solitary cells that had come to symbolize the Shah’s brutal rule. Hours later, the gates shut again. The revolution had prevailed; the Shah was gone for good. But what awaited the population was not the end to state violence that the newly formed Islamic Republic had promised, but a new wave of it, even deadlier than before. Inside Evin, the regime established the notorious Ward 209, where political prisoners—including dual nationals and foreign citizens—are held in particularly brutal conditions, and which has since become synonymous with fear in the Iranian imagination. People incarcerated here are kept in prolonged solitary confinement, denied legal access and medical care, and subjected to torturous interrogations designed to coerce confessions.

When the Iran–Iraq War began in 1980, the regime used the fighting as a pretext to further crush internal opposition. Among those arrested and sent to Evin were my aunts and uncles, my father, and my mother, who was pregnant when she was taken. After my birth, I stayed with her in her cell for just over a month, and then was handed to my grandparents, who raised me along with my cousin and my brother until my parents were released in the mid-1980s.