“If freedom could sing a song small as the throat of a bird, nowhere would a wall remain crumbled. It would not take many years to comprehend that ruins are a sign of human absence, that human presence creates life” Ahmad Shamlu, contemporary Persian poet In this paper, I engage with different forms of atrocities committed against imprisoned dissidents in post-revolutionary Iran. Through a case study, I demonstrate how madness/disability/injury can be both a product of, and a response to, state violence, namely imprisonment and torture. I interviewed more than 30 former political prisoners who survived torture and imprisonment in the 1980s in Iran, and now, live in exile as part of the Iranian diaspora. I investigate the disabling processes and social relations involved in how some prisoners went “mad” and some remained “sane.” Using the transnational disability model (kazemi, 2017, 2018), I defetishize their disability by demonstrating how madness and sanity can be deliberately created (i.e., socially organized and imposed) in extremely brutal institutions and inhumane treatment of dissidents. As well, I ponder the ways in which madness could be the bodymind’s ‘response’ to violence or ‘survival strategy’ in the context of asymmetrical power relations. As an heir to the 1979 revolution, and as a raclialized activists-scholars from the global south, I struggle in this chapter to re-articulate the disabled subject against the ongoing re-constitution of him/her as a white subject in the Empire of rights, namely the global north.