Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has expressed her longing for her home country of Iran after returning to the UK having spent six years in the country’s notorious Evin prison.
The 47-year-old writer and journalist was detained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 2016, as she tried to return to the UK with her 22-month-old child after visiting family for Nowruz (Iranian New Year).
The circumstances surrounding her arrest were unclear at the time, but she was later sentenced for attempts to overthrow the Iranian government.
After lengthy diplomatic negotiations and a sustained campaign for her freedom, Zaghari-Ratcliffe returned to the UK in 2022.
In a rare interview, she revealed what helped her through long nights in Iranian jail cells.
“I’ve got a ten-year-old girl called Gabriella, her middle name is Gisou,” she told Harper’s Bazaar during a series on art that has inspired her.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe highlighted the startling work of Iranian photographer Hoda Afshar. In particular, one of three women plaiting each other’s hair with their faces turned away from the camera, labelled Untitled #14 from her In Turn series.
“Gisou in Farsi means plaited hair, in a poetic way. She [her daughter] always had long hair and one of the things I really, really missed when I was in prison was that image in my head that I would one day be free and I would plait her hair.”
She added: “Seeing all these women in these series of pictures with their hair plaited, it kind of threw me back to those nights that I was dying and longing to be back and free to plait my child’s hair.”
Despite her difficult relationship with her homeland, Zaghari-Ratcliffe expressed a deep connection to Iran.
“I was forced to live in exile after I left prison and came back to the UK, but the thing I really, really miss is my country,” she said. “Even though I live far from Iran now, my heart beats every single day for what happens in my country.”
Iran attracted international criticism and protests following the death of Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022. Amini, 22, had been arrested by the country’s morality police for failing to wear the hijab. Her death sparked the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which calls for an end to mandatory hijab laws.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe said “the initiation [for the movement] was women’s hair” and discussed the ongoing practice of plaiting as a form of resistance in Kurdistan.
“It’s something Kurdish women have been doing for decades as a form of resistance. This notion gradually came into the Iranian women-led movement.”
