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\u2019s golden rays disappeared, they would signal the coming of night.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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 \u2013 but inside the cell, within the confines of my shackled mind, it felt as though years had passed. When I woke up, I didn\u2019t know if it was still today, if I had slipped back into yesterday, or if I had already arrived at tomorrow.<\/p>\n
A cell is also heavy. I don\u2019t think anything in this world compares to the density of a cell, and inside that density, time feels compressed and wrinkled. When you stare at the tiny holes in the metal sheet, hoping to catch the slightest change to remind you that time is passing, nothing shifts. There is no sign of movement. It\u2019s as if time itself is standing still, staring back at you. You sit, stand, walk, sit, stand, walk \u2013 again and again \u2013 but time doesn\u2019t move at all.<\/p>\n
double quotation markI couldn\u2019t breathe. Not even curiosity pushed me to move my hands or feet or turn my neck. On that interrogation chair, in front of those men, I sat frozen like a block of ice<\/p>\n
When night falls, it feels as if you\u2019ve lived a whole year \u2013 as if this stretch of time you\u2019ve endured cannot possibly belong to a single day; it must surely be the sum of many. In a cell, time itself can drive a person to madness.<\/p>\n
Occasionally, the ringing of a bell shattered the cell\u2019s abrasive silence and broke through the long, echoing loneliness of the solitary confinement corridor. When the interrogators come for their victim \u2013 their accused, their prisoner \u2013 they do not enter the women\u2019s corridor; they are men. Instead, they ring the bell, and a female warden retrieves the prisoner and escorts her towards the interrogation rooms in another part of the prison.<\/p>\n
When the doorbell echoed, thus my heart raced. The shuffle of the female warden\u2019s plastic slippers drilled into my brain. She walked to the door, paused for a few minutes to speak with the interrogator, then returned with the same shuffling sound. She passed the first cell, then the second, and continued down the row until she stopped in front of mine. My heartbeat quickened even more. All right \u2013 the interrogator had come for me this time. I was ready.<\/p>\n
\u2018The interrogators do not enter the women\u2019s corridor. Instead, they ring the bell, and a female warden retrieves the prisoner.\u2019 A female prison guard in Tehran\u2019s Evin prison. Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl\/Reuters<\/p>\n
A voice rang out: \u201cGet up. Get ready.\u201d<\/p>\n
A blindfold and a chador were thrown into the cell. The warden then waited, watched, and gave orders: \u201cPut on your coat and pants.\u201d<\/p>\n
I put on the loose dark-blue clothes made of a plastic-like material. I hated it; my skin always reacted to them, but I had no choice. The prison had also given me a pair of short, worn-out, torn, thin socks, and I reluctantly put those on too. Then I put on a dark blue maghnae, a fitted Islamic covering for hair, neck and shoulders, picked up the chador and the blindfold from the floor, and prepared to step out of the cell. \u201cNo!\u201d the warden said. \u201cYou have to put on your chador and blindfold before you come out.\u201d<\/p>\n
I did as I was told, put on the chador \u2013 white and patterned with flowers \u2013 tied the blindfold, slipped on the old, torn plastic slippers, and followed the female warden. At the end of the corridor hung a dirty, foul-smelling tarpaulin curtain \u2013 because we were women and the men shouldn\u2019t see into our ward. Every time I passed it, I felt nauseated.<\/p>\n
At the door, I heard a man\u2019s voice say to the female warden, \u201cThank you very much, sister.\u201d From that point on, he took custody of me.<\/p>\n
We began walking through the main corridor of the prison complex. On one side were rows of solitary confinement cells, on the other, the interrogation rooms. Through these walks to interrogation, I realised that more than 10 corridors branched off from the main one. Each held about five cells: two very small ones at the beginning and end, and three or four medium-sized ones in the middle.<\/p>\n
double quotation markSolitary confinement systematically breaks a person down psychologically through isolation, fear, and sensory deprivation<\/p>\n
I entered the interrogation room, still blindfolded, suspended in the centre of the space, until a man\u2019s voice brought me back to my senses.<\/p>\n
\u201cGo forward. Take the seat and sit.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was a plastic chair in front of me. I sat down slowly. Everything felt vague, strange, painfully foreign. The stench of hatred filled the room. I couldn\u2019t breathe. Not even curiosity pushed me to move my hands or feet or turn my neck. On that interrogation chair, in front of those men, I sat frozen like a block of ice.<\/p>\n
Then the interrogation session began.<\/p>\n
In the interrogation room, when I lifted my blindfold, I saw a man seated behind a small wooden desk in the corner. My chair stood opposite his. While my mouth was dry, he began speaking harshly, aggressively, his voice soaked in threats.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, Ms Mohammadi, you\u2019ll be staying with us for a while,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor how long?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t ask. No one knows. It depends on you. If you cooperate, you\u2019ll go back to your children.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCooperate?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes. The Defenders of Human Rights Center<\/a> is an American espionage project,\u201d he started.<\/p>\n After each interrogation, the interrogator would hand me the end of his prayer beads. Sometimes they smelled of rosewater, sometimes of sweat, and I would now follow behind him, holding them, back toward my cell.<\/p>\n \u2018Through these walks to interrogation, I realised that more than 10 corridors branched off from the main one. Each held about five cells.\u2019 Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl\/Reuters<\/p>\n In most Iranian households, prayer beads were objects of devotion \u2013 used to remember God. The prayer beads of my grandparents, resting on their clean, fragrant prayer rugs, were part of my sweetest childhood memories.<\/p>\n Now, every time I held the end of those beads, all I felt was repulsiveness.<\/p>\n Solitary confinement is one of the great unknowns \u2013 and once it envelopes you, it fills you with terror and dread. Before my arrest, one of our activities had been protesting the use of solitary confinement against our family members.<\/p>\n Among our group of activists was the wife of a detainee. She was a well-known psychiatrist with detailed knowledge of what was to be known as \u201cwhite torture\u201d. She shared precise information about her husband\u2019s condition and, drawing on her professional expertise, explained how solitary confinement systematically breaks a person down psychologically through isolation, fear, and sensory deprivation. It attacks the mind rather than the body, leaving deep and long-lasting trauma.<\/p>\n Now it was my turn.<\/p>\n Earlier, I had heard one detainee\u2019s wife describe the solitary cell as a grave, and another prisoner had said that solitary confinement felt like being submerged in freezing water: he could see his hand turning numb and icy, yet was unable to pull it out. For me, it felt like being a child trapped in the arms of a monster. Every time I imagined its face, anxiety flooded my entire being.<\/p>\n For the first few days, I was not allowed any fresh air. I was stuck in the cell the whole time. When a man opened the cell and ordered me to put my blindfold on and start walking for interrogation, I felt like a stranger stepping on to an unknown planet. It was as if gravity itself had shifted and intensified, forcing me to exert enormous effort just to move. I walked slowly and cautiously. I could not see what lay ahead.<\/p>\n Not seeing breeds fear. And fear, in an environment of terror and repression, easily multiplies. To fight tyranny and oppression is always hard. But when you are bereft of all choice, when your agency approaches zero, and you are placed in front of power at its most potent and non-negotiable \u2013 the struggle becomes something else entirely. It becomes deadly.<\/p>\n Such a condition is like a world of unknowns. Over time, you no longer even recognise yourself. The blindfold and orders are dreadful, and the heavy, clanging metal door \u2013 which opens only from the other side, by the will and hand of the jailer \u2013 is not truly a door. A door implies possibility: it could be opened, or closed, entered, or exited, by your choosing. In solitary confinement, the door becomes something else. It hardens and becomes more merciless than the concrete walls, because it is what holds you back.<\/p>\n An incarcerated Iranian woman in the female section of Evin prison. Photograph: Atta Kenare\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Even a simple medical checkup became an ordeal, requiring clearance from multiple security and judicial agencies. [As I suffered multiple medical emergencies], prison officials would sometimes admit secretly that they didn\u2019t understand the level of extreme control being imposed on me, claiming they were under pressure from higher authorities.<\/p>\n Due to years of imprisonment, I had come to understand that the medical neglect was not an accident, but a deliberate strategy to silently eliminate opposition. Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner\u2019s rope. Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail \u2013 and then make sure no help arrives, or they create conditions in which death can come easily, helping it along by standing in the way of life-saving care.<\/p>\n Note from the editor<\/p>\n These writings by Narges Mohammadi were smuggled out \u2013 often by fellow prisoners and visitors, at extraordinary risk to their own lives \u2013 during her time as a prisoner in Iran\u2019s notorious Evin, Qarchak and Zanjan prisons. They form part of her autobiography, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, due to be published later this year. Mohammadi has been arrested 14 times for her activism in Iran, which has focused on women\u2019s rights and ending the regime\u2019s use of the death penalty. She has already been sentenced to more than 40 years in prison<\/a> and 154 lashes across several convictions, and faces a further 18 years in prison. The campaigner was awarded the Nobel peace prize while still in prison in 2023, during the \u201cWoman, life, freedom\u201d protests.<\/p>\n In December 2024, Mohammadi was released on a temporary sentence suspension after suffering a series of health crises in prison, but was violently rearrested a year later during another regime crackdown on dissent, and sentenced to years more prison time in February this year. Mohammadi\u2019s health deteriorated severely over the course of 2026, with her weight dropping more than 20kg. She was found unconscious in her cell after suffering an apparent heart attack in March.<\/p>\n For weeks, requests by her family and doctors for her to receive proper medical treatment from her team of surgeons in were denied. On Sunday, she was released on bail to receive treatment from her medical team in Tehran. She remains in a critical condition<\/a>.<\/p>\n