women's day

Iran: revolution and literatures, driven by the same drive for freedom

Censorship is the central theme of Iranian writer Nasim Vahabi's new novel, ironically titled "I am not a novel" (Tropismes editions, 2022).

© Tropismes editions

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

13 mins

In Iran, women's literature is abundant, inventive and committed.

Echoing the increasingly radical demands of women calling for the end of the mullahs' regime which deprives them of voice and social visibility, novelists and poets recount at length this irrepressible desire for change and freedom.

Writers, revolutionaries, same fight! 

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Since September 15, Iran has been rocked by a wave of demonstrations following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman accused of breaking the country's particularly strict dress code for women.

These demonstrations, which massively mobilized young people across Iran, denounced the restrictions on freedom, especially for women, before turning into a real movement of protest against the theocratic regime in power in Tehran for 44 years.

Nearly six months after the start of the protest, the demonstrations now seem to have diminished in intensity.

Observers even speak of running out of breath, but the fact remains that this movement made an impression, with images that have gone around the world, of young girls burning their veils or cutting their hair in the middle of the street and trampling photos of the regime's founder, Khomeini and his successor Khamenei.

International media have called events in Iran over the past six months a "genuine feminist revolution".

Historians, for their part, point to the similarities between the activism of Iranian women and the march of the fishmongers of Paris in 1789 storming the Palace of Versailles to prevent the king from jeopardizing the revolutionary process begun with the storming of the Bastille. .

A demonstrator in Tehran on October 1, 2022, protesting the death in custody of Mahsa Amini.

PA

For Anne O'Donnell, specialist in the Russian revolution quoted by the magazine

, the Iranian women demonstrating in the streets today would be the distant heirs of the matrons of Petrograd at the head of the food riots which played an essential role in the fall of the tsarist regime.

However, according to the historian, what is happening in Iran is unique, because Iranian women are both actors and stakes in the social movement underway in their country, "they are fighting to wrest their right to be free

".

The revolt of Tâhereh Qurratul-Ayn

The struggle of Iranian women does not date from the advent in 1979 of the Islamic Republic, which made the obligation for women to wear the veil an essential element of its political doctrine.

But before becoming compulsory, the wearing of the veil was part of the immutable social traditions of the country.

Relegated inside the house, women's bodies had to remain invisible in the public space.

She was a poetess who was the first woman to defy the tradition of wearing the veil, in the 19th century, more precisely in 1848. Tâhereh Qurratul-Ayn entered history for having removed her veil during a literary encounter, whose Attendance was predominantly male.

The participants cried foul because removing the veil was a blasphemous act.

Most of the men present in the room closed their eyes so as not to have to look at the woman's hair, considered at the time to be the source of all temptations!

Legend has it that one of the gentlemen in attendance even brandished his sword threatening to attack the miscreant, before turning the weapon against himself for fear, no doubt, of not being able to look at himself in the ice cream after witnessing such ignominy against God.

Accused of being a sexual debauchee, the young woman was thrown into prison, then put to death.

She was only 36 years old.  

That she was a poet was perhaps not unrelated to Tâhereh's revolt against the rules of propriety governing her patriarchal society.

Writing had taught him to reveal himself and to say the forbidden while deconstructing the authorized words.

" 

," she had prophesied.

Demonstration in Paris, France, on October 2, 2022, in support of Iranian protesters.

© Aurelien Morissard / AP

This question of the liberation of women will become the leitmotif of the works of Iranian women writers who will take over from the intrepid Tâhereh in the 20th century.

Paradoxically, this feminist current in literature even flourished after the mullahs came to power in Tehran and the establishment of what the anthropologist Chowra Makaremi calls "gender apartheid

, which in no way stifled the voice women.

On the contrary, born in the first half of the 20th century, Iranian feminist literature really took off after the Islamic revolution, asserting itself as a mirror of the irrepressible aspiration of Iranian women for freedom.

►

An iconoclastic imagination

Historians of Iranian literature like to recall that before being the slogan of the September 2022 protesters, “Woman, life, freedom” was the internalized motto of Iranian literature.

Indeed, the great Forrough Farrokzhad, spiritual heiress of Tahirih in the 20th century and considered the major voice of modern Persian poetry could have made it her own.

Born in Tehran in 1932, she published her first poems in the 1950s, but died young, at the age of 33, in a tragic car accident.

In just 15 years of literary career, Farrokzhad transformed the age-old poetic practice of his country by breaking with rhyme and old metrics.

She also openly discusses taboo subjects such as sexuality, love,

The revolt of the poet resounds from the titles of her collections of poems:

(1955),

(1957),

(1959),

(1963),

(1967) .

Comparing the women of her generation to mechanical dolls, she wrote:

“

Look at the world with glass eyes.

One can in a box lined with felt

The body stuffed with straw

Sleep for years in sequins and lace

We can with each caress

Screaming for no reason and saying: Ah how happy I am!

»

It is undoubtedly this concern that Forrokzhad had to embody through his poetry the dreams, aspirations and disappointed hopes of Iranian women for centuries, which makes the youth of the country continue to recite it regularly, as it does. did again during the recent protests.

Here is an honor that neither Simine Daneshvar nor Sharnush Parsipur have certainly known, but these novelists nonetheless also remain key figures in the modern literary corpus of Iran.

Born in 1921, Daneshvar is Iran's first female novelist and short story writer.

She made a name for herself in the 1940s by publishing short stories, but it was the publication of her novel

(The Mourning of Siavosh) in 1969 that consecrated her fame.

Having become a best-seller in Iran, Daneshvar's pioneering novel tells with great concern for realism and particular attention to the inner life of its characters, the worries and aspirations of its heroine in the face of her husband's political activity.

The story is set against the backdrop of World War II and the British occupation of southern Iran.

Torn between home and the world, Zari does not know how to free herself from the shackles of the traditions to which she feels trapped.

Daneshvar's short stories, which draw their inspiration from the feminine universe in Iran, are also marked by a certain feminist consciousness.

►

As for Sharnush Parsipur, she is the other great lady of contemporary Iranian letters.

She made a name for herself in 1976 by publishing her first great novel with a deceptively playful title: The Dog and the Long Winter.

Parsipur is also the author of short stories characterized by "

", as the great French specialist in Persian letters, the late

(1) wrote.

Christophe Balaÿ in the RFI studios, in November 2019. © RFI/Redaction persane

Born in 1947, the author of

(Parsipur's second novel) spans two historical eras, that of the Pahlavi dynasty (1921-1979) and that of the Islamic revolution and beyond.

Her writings having displeased the monarchist administration as later on the Islamic governments, she had to spend several years in prison.

The last time was after the publication of her third opus

, a feminist and sassy book published in 1990.

The book stages through an inventive narration and all in metaphors, the sexual oppression of women in a patriarchal Iranian society where men have the right of life and death over their female compatriots, as in the stories of the Thousand

.

Like Scheherazade, the heroines of Parsipur must constantly negotiate with their executioners to save their heads.

A young girl turns into a tree to avoid having sex.

Shot down by her brother, a woman is condemned to be reborn only to end up murdered by a stranger.

Women Without Men is made up of thirteen connected stories where realism and fantasy mingle to show a disturbing and brutal Iran.

Women write without taboo

Contemporary Persian literature still tells of a disturbing and brutal Iran.

Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, the literary situation has changed profoundly, with the massive irruption of women in the literary field today.

By promoting the massive entry of girls into school and university (65% of students are women in higher education), the Islamic Republic has created the conditions conducive to the female literary explosion experienced by the Iran for thirty years.

While between 1930 and 1960, the country had barely a dozen female writers, this figure increased phenomenally from the 1990s. A non-exhaustive list of authors who have published literary works in the recent years bears witness to the scale of the phenomenon: Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Monirou Ravanipour, Zoya Pirzad, Fariba Vafi, Parinoush Sanjee, Ehsaneh Sadr, Sepideh Shamalou, Farkhondeh Aghai, Maryam Jahani, Mahsan Mohebali, Nasim Marashi, Fataneh Haj Seyed Javadi, Mojgan Atatollahi, Ava Farmehri…

These authors, essentially novelists, produce best-sellers and win prestigious literary prizes.

Above all, they are in the process of modernizing the style and theme of Iranian letters which, marked by a certain elitism and predominantly poetic and epic for centuries, have long favored lyrical outpouring and intimacy.

With the new generation of post-revolutionary women authors, from different social and economic strata, all life experiences, even the most secret ones, such as polygamy, transsexuality or the most abject ones such as rape, pedophilia, now have the right quoted in the pages of literary works.

Driven by an ambition to unveil, women write without taboos, even if, due to state censorship, political criticism, allusions to sexuality and the body,

Tehran, September 19, 2022. Taking off your veil is above all a political gesture.

© AFP

“

,” Fariba Vafi, arguably one of the most read Iranian novelists in her country today, recently lamented.

Despite her celebrity, this writer who has made a name for herself by recounting the daily life of Iranian women, their confrontation with patriarchy and institutionalized discrimination against the female sex, must content herself with evoking the dramas of her protagonists between the lines, through metaphorical allusions and never directly.

"

," says the novelist Nasim Vahabi, who lives and works in France.

With two of her novels blocked at the censorship office of the Ministry of Culture in Tehran, she had plenty of time to meditate on the functioning of totalitarian powers "which need to control minds, humiliate them,

”.

She cites the example of 1984 by George Orwell, “

”.

“

,” she explains.

»

Censorship, precisely, is the central theme of Vahabi's new novel, ironically titled

(2).

A self-fictional account, it depicts the confrontation of a writer "

" with the leader of a team of censors, who insists that he is not called "

" but "

”.

The author will find it easy to explain to this "

", with supporting examples, that his novel is not as "

" as he accuses it of being... It's hilarious, full of misunderstandings, but also very Kafkaesque, when the narrator finds herself locked up in the archive room where thousands of manuscripts 

” gather dust on shelves that rise to infinity.

When we ask Nasim Vahabi, who passed through the deathbed of literature, this Dante-like Hell, if we still want to write, the answer bursts out: "You know, writing is resisting, a bit like

»

Three questions to… Nassim Vahabi

Can we say that

 is a militant book?

It may be perceived as a militant novel, but my intention was not to write a militant book against censorship, against I don't know what.

I just wanted to write.

Admittedly, I had been very deeply marked by the censorship of my two books.

I was angry with the government of my country which allows itself to confiscate my manuscripts, to block the publication of texts simply because they do not go in the direction of its political line.

But censorship is not the only subject of this novel: it is also about love, life and death.

I hope my readers will appreciate it.

.

I have never seen this archive room.

I would have liked to see it with my own eyes, because it must exist somewhere.

All these manuscripts must be kept somewhere, but where?

So I imagined it… I could have written at the beginning of the novel: “ 

 ”.

This is also the meaning of the title of my book:

.

It is a practice that comes from afar.

At the time of the Shahs, it already existed.

There were many writers, poets and intellectuals imprisoned for their political opinion at the time.

But it's all a matter of dosage.

It is well said that it is the dose that makes the poison.

After the 1979 revolution, the dose of censorship increased considerably.

It is now part of the system.

Censorship has invaded all sectors of life in Iran, even controlling people's freedom of dress, as we have seen in recent times.

You can die for a hair that comes out of your scarf… I dream of a free country, of a free literature.

(1)

by Christophe Balaÿ.

Europe, May 2012.

(2)

, by Nasim Vahabi.

Translated from Persian by the author.

Tropismes editions, 2022.

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