Parallels

A few days ago, I serendipitously noticed a book in "Huron State"'s return cart, and picked it up: The Stoning of Soraya M.. It's a horrifying and gruesomely detailed documentary account of an incident in which a 35-year-old woman in a rural village in Iran was stoned to death in 1986. What's particularly horrible about it, beyond the sheer brutality of such a punishment for "adultery", is the fact that she was very clearly innocent. Her husband (a petty crook) and the village's fraudulent "imam" (an educated embezzler on the run from the law) consciously and deliberately concocted a false accusation and manipulated village opinion so that her husband could free himself from the obligation of supporting her and afford to acquire a newer and younger wife in the city.

This is, as the author points out, only one of over a thousand such cases.

While I was reading it, certain aspects of the story began to sound extremely familiar. The references to the young girl accidentally losing a kite, the husband's preference for flashy cars and prostitutes over his wife and children, the reference to a stone representing the "pillar of Shayton" [i.e., Satan}, all sounded strangely familiar. Eventually, I realized why. One of Susan's poems bears a very close resemblance to this story. Close enough that she must have read it, or heard or read another source about the same case, even though she assigned a different name to the main character. It was an odd feeling to realize this -- that I was reading something she had read years ago, something that had impressed itself upon her mind strongly enough to become part of her own writing. It would have been fascinating to ask her about this and see what she had to say. But that's impossible.