SOUND MUSEUM by Poupeh Missaghi

Some books beg to be read in a single sitting. I put down Poupeh Missaghi’s dive into the philosophical depths of torture about halfway through and, when I picked it back up, found I’d lost pace with its breathless momentum. So I started again, allowing myself to be swept along by the narrator’s enthusiastic-to-the-point-of-obsessive voice and… wow.

The curator of a new museum dedicated to Iran’s history of torture is addressing a press delegation that has been invited by the regime for a preview before it opens to the public. Deeply proud of what she has put together, she does not shy away from her own involvement in the techniques it is dedicated to preserving. Moreover, she hopes to inspire other regimes, including those in the west who don’t admit to the torture they commit. We are all accomplices.

What sets the museum apart is that the exhibits are aural. Records of torture sessions. Interviews with victims and perpetrators. After all, to borrow from Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, when everything else has been destroyed, “only sound remains.”

Part history and theory of torture, part political screed and part feminist polemic, Sound Museum is an unsettling, powerful gem of a book.

Sound Museum by Poupeh Missaghi
Coffee House Press, 2024
113 pages