“It’s kind of like they kill you, but you’re still alive,” Sarah Shourd told Keene State College’s Mabel Brown Room on Sept. 23., four years after her release from solitary confinement in Iran. The University of California, Berkeley graduate found herself in solitary confinement in an Iranian prison for 410 days, following what was thought to be an innocent hiking trip in Iraqi Kurdistan [northern Iraq].
Shourd was welcomed to KSC by Professor Angela Barlow and Program Manager for Diversity and Multiculturalism Initiatives Kim Schmidl-Gagne, as part of the Sidore Lecture Series. The Series aim to, “Enhance faculty efforts to challenge students and the wider community to participate in dialogue around original, provocative and sometimes controversial issues facing society,” according to the KSC website. Shourd spoke to an audience of roughly 100 students, including several of Professor Barlow’s criminology classes.
Shourd explained that before she was detained, she was already an anti-war activist.
“About fifteen years ago I was at U.C. Berkeley and that was when 9/11 happened and I became a very adamant, fervent anti-war activist. I organized walk-outs for my classes and sit-ins and locked myself to various corporations who were giving money to the war funding,” Shourd said.
After her detainment though, her focus shifted from solely anti-war activism to prison reform, especially in relation to solitary confinement.
Shourd highlighted how many prisoners in solitary confinement are there unjustly, just as she and her partners Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were in Iran. The group was on vacation, hiking in the Green Mountains of Kurdistan—a safe place for tourists. According to Shourd, “No American had been kidnapped or killed there in recent decades. Even during the Iraq war, no American was killed in northern Iraq-Iraqi Kurdistan.”
During their hike, they saw a soldier on a ridge who called them to him.
“My heart started beating a little faster, I was definitely a little on-edge by this soldier. We were too far from the tourist site, but there was no choice but to go and so we went to the soldier and he pointed to the ground and said ‘Iran,’” she explained, “ … It was in that moment that we realized we had somehow crossed into Irani territory over an unmarked border and in that moment, my life was changed forever.”
From that moment on Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were political prisoners of Iran. From the border they were transported to Evin Prison, which according to Shourd is, “A notorious prison; it’s where all the political dissidents are taken in Iran—tortured, many people have been killed there.”
Shourd was allowed short meetings with her partners in prison. She explained that the fourth time she met with Bauer and Fattal in the prison, they told her they were to be celled together until the end of their detainment, but that she would remain in solitary.
“I felt like time froze and I stood there in my cell realizing that I could be in there for years, I could be in there for the rest of my life, for all I knew,” Shourd said.
She made her emotions clear to the audience as she continued to describe her experience in Evin, “In that moment I heard something; I heard like a screaming … It was a terrible, horrifying experience because you can’t do anything for them … I couldn’t stand to hear it so I crouched down in all fours; covered my ears and closed my eyes and prayed.”
“But suddenly the cells doors burst in and a couple of guards came in and they started to shake me and they were like ‘Sarah, Sarah’ and when I came to and I looked at them, I could see in her [their] eyes. I could see myself and I realized I had been screaming and that I had been actually beating at the walls of my cell,” Shourd explained. She went on to label that moment as, “the closest I ever came to becoming completely unhinged.” The three American hikers were released from the prison unscathed, Shourd in 2010, Bauer and Fattal in 2011.
After Shourd’s release in 2010, she had thought she would transition smoothly back into “normal” life and that it would all be over. Since then however, she said she has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and unexpected detachment issues.
Shourd described, “When someone would come up to hug me, I would cringe. When someone touched me on the shoulder, I would jump. Eye contact was physically painful and I wanted to spend all of my time, if I could, alone.” Shourd articulately described her mental anguish. “It’s one of the most insidious things to carry around a pain inside of you that no one can see and that no one understands,” Shourd stated.
Shourd expressed how horrified she was to be released before her now-husband, Shane Bauer and friend, Josh Fattal, but that even while she could hardly stand to be around other people, she knew she would be instrumental in their release.
“Of course I didn’t have a choice, because I had to go on Oprah, I had to meet President Ahmadinejad and President Obama and President Clinton and I had to free my [now] husband and friend. But I never enjoyed the company of other human beings,” Shourd explained, “I always felt uncomfortable, threatened and frankly on a certain—just on a very physiological level—just afraid of other people, and I had to suppress that so that I could do the job that I needed to do, and that was the only thing that was important to me was freeing them.” During the question-and-answer session towards the end of the lecture, Shourd was asked what others should do when they suffer a tragedy that shakes them to the core and takes away who they are. She explained that one should use their traumatic experience as a springboard for their activism, just as she did.
Hersch Rothmel, a KSC senior in attendance, expressed positive and negative opinions regarding Shourd’s speech. “I thought it was really good; I like how she linked her experience back to international and national politics and issues of social justice,” Rothmel stated, “There was one thing I would like her to have touched upon—how her experience shouldn’t speak for how the culture is there; she didn’t talk about how Iranian culture is different than Iranian government.”
KSC student Bev Cole, also in attendance, said, “I’d say the biggest thing I kind of learned was just the whole conflict or issue with solitary confinement because I’ve never really thought about it.”
She continued to describe her thoughts on the lecture and said, “I’ve always just assumed it would be only people that had done horrible crimes, so I didn’t realize it’s kind of arbitrary how long people are in there and there is no sort of regulation for that. So that’s really shocking to me and makes me want to take action.”
Although Shourd now does activist work for others in solitary confinement, it has not been an easy road to get where she is today. For nearly a year after her detainment Shourd didn’t tell her loved ones about her experience, since she was entirely focused on freeing her partners. While in Oman with her now father-in-law waiting for Bauer and Fattal to be released, he asked her about her experience in solitary confinement.
“It’s kind of like they kill you, but you’re still alive and you’ve lost everything and you have no idea if or when you’ll ever get it back, but you still want to live,” Shourd replied, “Your desire to live just gets stronger and stronger, but you have no way to express it and you’re in this sort of state-of-animation, this state of slow-motion torture that is like being buried alive.”
Emily Bouffard can be contacted at ebouffard@keene-equinox.com
Alexa Ondreicka can be contacted at aondreicka@keene-equinox.com
