Reza Baraheni (; 13 December 1935 – 25 March 2022) was an Iranian novelist, poet, critic, and political activist.
Baraheni lived in Toronto, Canada, where he used to teach at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
He was the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory, and criticism, written in Persian and English.
His works have been translated into a dozen of languages. His book, Crowned Cannibals, is accused by a few of containing some fabrications. Moreover, he translated into Persian works by Shakespeare, Kundera, Mandelstam, Andrić, and Fanon.
Winner of the Scholars-at-Risk-Program Award of the University of Toronto and Massey College, Baraheni taught at the University of Tehran, Iran, the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and York University. He was also a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford University, Britain, Fellow of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and Fellow of Winters College, York University. He was president of PEN Canada.
He died on 24 March 2022 in Toronto, Canada, and was buried on 9 April 2022 at Elgin Mills Cemetery, Canada.
Political life
Baraheni, along with his friends and fellow writers, Jalal Al-Ahmad and Gholamhossein Saedi, initiated the first steps in 1966, leading to the founding of the Writers Association of Iran in the following year. Their meeting with the Shah's Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveida in that year led to an open confrontation with Shah's regime, placing the struggle for unhampered transmission of thought as a preliminary step towards genuine democracy on the agenda of Iran's contemporary history. Despite the struggle of some of the most famous writers of the country to turn the Writers Association of Iran into an officially recognized human rights organization, Shah’s government suppressed the association, intimidated many of its members, arresting and torturing some of its members, among them Baraheni, who had returned from the United States after the completion of a year-long teaching position in Texas and Utah. In 1973, he was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran. Baraheni claimed he was tortured and imprisoned for 104 days (See God’s Shadow, Prison Poems, 1976; The Crowned Cannibals, 1977, Introduction by E.L. Doctorow).
Back in the United States a year later, Baraheni joined the American branch of the International PEN, working very closely with Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Howard, and others at PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee, sharing at the same time, with Kay Boyle, the Honorary Chair of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIFI) to release Iranian writers and artists from prison. He published his prose and poetry in the Time Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the American Poetry Review.
In 1976, during his exile in the U.S., human rights organizations were led to believe that the Shah’s SAVAK agents had arrived in the U.S. to assassinate Iranian opposition leaders, among them Baraheni. With the help of the American PEN and the assistance of Ramsey Clark, Baraheni says he was able to expose Shah’s plot.
Baraheni wrote a four-page article in the February 1977 edition of the erotic magazine, Penthouse, claiming how political prisoners in Iran under the Shah were tortured. He alleged how the political prisoners and their family members were raped systematically in Iran under the Shah. His claims, however, have been disputed by many other Iranians who say he either exaggerated or made them up to get his readers' attention in the West. He was influential in turning public opinion in the West against the Shah of Iran, and especially amongst the Democratic Party in the US. See Report by Robert C. de Camara on Shah's record.
Baraheni returned to Iran in the company of more than thirty other intellectuals in 1979, four days after the Shah fled the country. Baraheni tried very hard to win favors with Ayatollah Khomeini. On 30 January 1979, he wrote in the Etell'at newspaper, "Soon [after Khomeini's return] there will be a permanent and deep democracy in Iran, and we will enter an era where poverty, repression, bankruptcy, hopelessness, and capitalist greed will end, and Iran will be saved from economic chaos and bad governmental planning". However, Khomeini ignored Baraheni's flattery; instead, he joined his Leftist friends in the Writer's Association.