My Bird

by Fariba Vafi

  “The person whose bird has already flown away has difficulty staying put. He’ll become a stranger in his own house.”

  Do I have a bird too? My bird? But is it possible for anybody not to have a bird? Even the neighborhood gigolo, with his dark glasses and curly hair, who is always lingering in the streets, has his own bird. Whistling under his lips, he is perhaps calling out for his bird.

  Afterword

  Fariba Vafi and Her Bird: On Pens and Feathers

  FARZANEH MILANI

  Pen and Feather are varieties of the same word, the root being the Sanskrit pat, to fly.

  —Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1894

  In the cage of my breast / the birds of my words / have lost their feathers.

  —Simin Behbahani, “In My Necessary Silence”

  An unprecedented flourishing of women’s literature—a literary renaissance, really—is one of the collateral, unexpected benefits of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Finally, the pantheon of Persian literature is integrated in terms of the gender of its producers, consumers, and objects of representation. Women are publishing a record number of books and best sellers—fiction, nonfiction, poetry (exceptionally few of which are available in the English language)—and winning some of the most prestigious literary awards. For the first time in Iranian history, a woman—Simin Behbahani—is Iran’s national poet. Whereas there were a handful of women novelists before the 1960s, there are 370 of them now—thirteen times as many as ten years earlier and about equal to the number of men novelists.1 Often women’s novels outsell those of their male counterparts. While the average Iranian novel has a print run of about 5,000, several books by women have enjoyed printings of over 100,000 copies. The same phenomenal growth can be seen in the number of women working as literary translators. Whereas in 1997 Iran had 214 women translators, the number soared to 708 six years later. The number of women publishers almost doubled in that six-year period, rising from 66 to 103. Iran has the fastest-growing cyberspace and blogosphere usage in the Middle East, and here, too, women play a most active and defiant role.

  The contribution of women to Iran’s rich written literary tradition is nothing new. It can be traced back more than a thousand years to Rabe’e Qozdari, a tenth-century female poet writing at the very beginning of Persian literature. However, until the mid–nineteenth century, women’s participation in published literature was sporadic and basically confined to poetry, which proved to be more woman-friendly than other public forms of art such as music, painting, sculpture, photography, or cinematography. Ali Akbar Moshir-Salimi, for instance, includes 294 women in his three-volume anthology about Iranian women writers from a thousand years ago published in 1956, and all 294 women are poets.2 Moreover, for a variety of reasons—access to education and leisure and the two essential conditions for creativity that Virginia Woolf insisted on: a room of one’s own and financial independence—writing, or at least publishing, was the prerogative of women of the court and high aristocracy.3 Out of the 107 poets anthologized by Keshavarz Sadr in his book Az Rabe’e ta Parvin, published in 1956, 43 are members of the court and the rest belong almost exclusively to the upper class.4

  Exceptions aside, for centuries the power and privilege of the written word belonged mainly to men. In a society concerned with keeping the worlds of men and women apart, with an ideal of femininity as enclosed, silent, and invisible, women writers could not easily flourish. They had to subvert a powerful system and negotiate rules of modesty that not only minimized physical contact between the sexes, but also forbade free circulation of their bodies and their voices in open spaces. It is only in the mid–nineteenth century that more and more women appeared in public places and demanded expansion of their citizenship rights. Women writers, always at the forefront of sociopolitical movements in Iran, broke the spell of their textual quasi invisibility by entering public and discursive spaces. They were no longer isolated exceptions. There were finally a considerable number of authors and texts and an uninterrupted chain of literary foremothers.

  Today, more than three decades after the Islamic Revolution and in spite of all the problems—social and economic hardships, censorship, the need to conform to Islamic morality, the eight-year war with Iraq, incarceration, cancellation of permits to print—or perhaps because of them, a larger and more diverse group of women has appeared on the literary scene, enjoying the kind of fame and popularity reserved hitherto for male writers. Religious and secular, westernized and traditional, highly educated and holders of high school diplomas, upper-, middle-, and lower-class women write from a variety of perspectives and enrich the literary discourse. Women’s issues are no longer considered solely the concerns of elite women, personal, private, or unavoidable. They are presented as gendered inequities, endemic to an entire social structure that can and ought to be changed.

  Fariba Vafi, whose most highly acclaimed book is translated here for the first time, is one of the leading voices in this vibrant scene.5 She was born in the city of Tabriz, 335 miles northwest of Tehran, on January 21, 1962. Unlike the majority of women writers who are from the capital city and belong to well-educated and elite families, she grew up in a provincial capital where Azari Turkish is the spoken language, attended public school there, and underwent a traditional upbringing in a family she characterizes as not highly educated. Soon after graduation from high school, she began working in a plant that manufactured women’s clothing, and later worked in a nursery school in order to be economically independent and able to buy books.6 Leaving both jobs, she spent a year in a police training school in Tehran, which became the inspiration for her second novel, a book titled after its main protagonist, Tarlan.7 Upon her return to Tabriz, she served as a warden in the Women’s Prison, where she lasted only three months.

  When she was twenty-six, Vafi married Majid Rahbar-e Azadi. Her first child, a son named Elshan, was born a year later in 1990, followed four years later by a girl, Elyar. Although “[m]arriage and children delayed her plan to become a novelist,” as she told Nazila Fathi of the New York Times,8 Vafi never relinquished the dream of becoming a writer. Unlike several influential women writers—Parvin E’tessami, Goli Taraqi, Simin Daneshvar, Simin Behbahani, Forugh Farrokhzad—she was neither related to nor connected with prominent writers. To seek comments by a professional writer, she found the home address of Jamal Mir-Sadeqi (1933–), a prolific writer and teacher of fiction.9 One day after the publication of her first collection of short stories, she knocked on his door with samples of her writing. With tenacity and resolve, she traveled by bus to Tehran every other month, accompanied by her children, to show him her work.

  Vafi entered the literary scene in 1988 with a short story, “You’re at Peace Now, Father,” published in the journal Adineh.10 Although she continued to publish her short stories in literary journals such as Doniya-ye Sokhan and Chista, it took her eight years to publish her first book, a collection of short stories titled Dar Omq-e-sahneh (In the Depth of the Stage, 1996).11 In an outburst of creativity since then, she has published two other short-story collections—Hatta vaqti mikhandim (Even When We Laugh, 1999) and Dar rah-e villa (On the Way to the Villa, 2008)—plus four novels: Parandehye man (My Bird, 2003); Tarlan (2004); Rowyay-e-tabbat (Dream of Tibet, 2005); and Razi dar kucheha (A Secret in the Alleys, 2008).12 Currently, she lives with her family in Tehran and is working on a new novel and a book for children and young adults, titled Stories from Parvin E’tessami. The latter is a prose rendition of forty poems by E’tessami, a pioneering woman poet celebrated for her versified stories.13

  Vafi’s first novel, My Bird, took the Iranian literary scene by surprise. It won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the Yalda Literary Prize, the Esfahan Prize, and the Golshiri Prize, and was chosen as Iran’s best novel of the year in 2003. Containing fifty-three short, relatively self-contained chapters, the novel reads like poetry. The author, a master of verbal economy, weaves magic with words and creates her own signature style—
minimalist, dazzling in its candor and courage, attentive to the smallest details, textured, empathetic, simple and revelatory, elegant and profound. She offers competing visions of truth, avoids judgment and absolutist pronouncements, and shows that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin.

  Set in postrevolutionary Tehran, and all the more poignant for its condensed brevity (141 pages in Persian), My Bird is the lightly plotted coming-of-age story of a writer. It is the first-person narrative of a nameless thirty-five-year-old woman who lives with her husband and two children and shares certain biographical details with the author. Although originally the narrator resents being the sole caretaker of her two children, eventually she comes to view motherhood neither as stifling nor as her sole mission in life. She neither begrudges her maternal responsibilities nor does she romanticize motherhood.

  The novel focuses on the search for and the emergence of an individual female self and on the liberating potential of storytelling. Its narrator vows to explore her life, her feelings, and her surroundings more carefully, and to describe them as accurately as she can. Reconstructing and reinscribing her subjectivity, she inches her way out of alienation and isolation and moves from an existential crisis to self-awareness and self-revelation. All the silence and secrecy and fear, all the scenes repressed but not forgotten, all the feelings buried but not dead that she carried around like the “hump” (10) of a hunchback, come unglued over the course of the novel. Like a freed bird, they fly out of the cage of their captivity.

  The narrator of My Bird, like Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s Awakening, a canonical American text, is a woman who examines her place in society and escapes her gendered confinement. Although a devoted and compassionate wife and mother, she awakens gradually to the truth that she does not want to be restricted by traditional definitions of femininity. “I was sick and tired of my assigned role” (20), she writes. “I am not a mother, not a daughter, and not a wife. . . . I cannot perform any of the roles that have been assigned to me” (70), she laments. She feels bored, “bored of constantly having to take care of the kids, of the peeling walls, the broken water heater, the cockroaches that do not die with any kind of bug killer. She is tired of the long days turning to night, and of long nights that are filled with tears” (70). Married to a man, Amir, who often is away on business, and when home feels “chained” (40), or like “a migrant bird,” who “is trapped in a cage,” yearns “to fly” (68), she realizes she has “no place to go” (86). Even when she contemplates cheating on her quasi-absent husband, her imaginary betrayal is related to space and the suspension of her restrained physical mobility. “He doesn’t know that I cheat on him a hundred times a day,” she concedes. “I leave this life a hundred times a day. Like a terrified woman who has never left home. Gently, slowly, and quietly, even though scared to death, I secretly go to places that Amir cannot even imagine” (35). And so it is that she develops fantasies of flight and promises herself to define herself on her own terms and to “never again be dependent” (87), never again to be captive of an image or a role foisted upon her.

  The promise the narrator of My Bird makes to herself is similar to Edna’s. The strategies and tactics the two women adopt to establish their subjective identities, however, vastly differ. While Edna takes refuge in the welcoming sea and has to rely on the pen of Kate Chopin to memorialize her despair and defiance, the narrator of My Bird seeks and finds salvation in the act of writing. She takes up the pen, confronts the truth of her life head on, and throws away “such nonsense like a shared life, the warm family unit, and other rubbish” (106). She begins to make up her own definitions and to reimagine and rebuild her relationships. She undergoes two major and interrelated transformations. She breaks out of the physical confinement that impedes her freedom of movement and abandons the silence that constrains her freedom of expression.

  Although Vafi, a voracious reader, does not recall ever reading The Awakening, the main character of one of her earliest short stories, titled suggestively “A Woman on the Shore,” from her first published book, In the Depth of the Stage, eerily resembles Edna. When readers first meet the nameless protagonist of “A Woman on the Shore,” she is taking care of her child, while her husband is joyfully swimming. Beckoned by the sea, mesmerized by its whispering voice, its magic and mystery, its majestic vastness, “the woman gets up with agility, rolls up her pants, and puts her feet on the warm, wet sand. A little wave embraces her feet and darts away quickly. Her naked feet follow the retreating wave.”14 The euphoric plunge, however, is short lived, at least for now. The sight of her child approaching the water makes the mother in her return to the shore. But “the desire to swim to the heart of the sea does not leave her alone.” At long last, upon her husband’s return, the woman hands him the child and “slides like a fish in the bosom of the waves.” She does stop at one point to look at her family, but caressed by the seductive waves, she quickly decides to turn her back to the beach. “A feeling of joy forced her to run and to surrender her whole body all at once to the sea.”15

  Whether the woman’s sensuous embrace of the sea is a triumphant liberation on dancing waves, an act of rebellion, a defiant refusal to be sucked in by motherhood, or a self-authorized death we will never know. A multiplicity of persuasive interpretations and closures is both valid and viable. Within the context of Vafi’s whole body of work, however, it is safe to propose that the drowning protagonist serves as a warning to the author. The woman on the shore disappears in the roaring waves without redefining or articulating herself. Her voice is thus trapped, silenced, swept away. Literally and literarily, it is buried alive. Forewarned, the narrator of My Bird starts out where the woman on the shore ends up. She rejects her earlier silent expressions of captivity and rebellion, refuses the fate of numerous other defiant but drowning literary antecedents (Ophelia, Maggie Tulliver, Edna, and the woman on the shore, among many others), and stubbornly claims her right to live an independent life and express herself freely. Like a flying bird, she bursts into open space and begins to sing.

  That is why bird symbolism is so central to the unfolding plot of Vafi’s novel. For over one thousand years, free-roaming birds have epitomized for Iranian writers the liberty to wander at will, while their language, not tied to man-made rules, eloquent and universal, has stood for the song of a soul in its eternal search for identity, for voice and wing. My Bird begins and ends with references to birds. The story opens with a verbal map of the narrator’s new neighborhood. In the cacophony of sounds and smells, in the landscape of smoky rooftops, small balconies, latticed iron doors, and cramped sidewalks where roses and jasmines are so “dusty” they cannot inspire poets and passersby—in this claustrophobic cosmos crowded with people, birds are a continuing inspiration and presence. “The third-floor neighbor keeps parrots,” remarks the narrator in the first few lines of the book. “We also have a bird store down the street,” she adds promptly. Birds appear and reappear throughout the novel and show up five times in as many lines in the last paragraph of the last chapter, bringing the book to a close. “Do I have a bird, too? My bird? But is it possible for anybody not to have a bird?” (131) asks the narrator rhetorically.

  Harangued by a nagging sense of entrapment, the narrator goes looking for her bird. And this is quite an accomplishment for a woman who is associated throughout the novel not with birds, but with a zoo populated by heavy animals—polar bears, camels, crocodiles, buffalos, boars. At times, Amir calls her a “polar bear” (30; 52) because she does not participate in his restless and utopian fantasies of escape to Canada, because she fully understands the difference between forced mobility and the freedom of movement, because in his view she likes “to stay put,” because she is “afraid of change . . . afraid of moving” (30). At other times, when he has had enough of her, her legs remind him of a camel (52). Sometimes, he sees her transformed “into a crocodile” (52), or “really fat, like a buffalo” (101). When the narrator’s daughter ge
ts mad at her, she draws her “with two big horns” on her head “and big teeth like a boar” (39). To reject all these unwanted analogies, the narrator gently strokes her own arm. “It’s silky and smooth,” she says with a sense of relief. “My hand should remain on my arm to feel its softness,” she advises herself. “If I remove my hand, I might think I have the skin of a rhinoceros, the thick skin of a rhinoceros that would mistake hitting for caressing” (101).

  Homebound rather than roaming freely, compared to nonflying creatures, the narrator looks for her bird. Refusing to be trapped by old and familiar cages, declining to whisper in the dark or to keep silent, she portrays the flying bird as a symbol of her sense of entrapment as well as her desire to take full flight and sing. Looking for her bird thus becomes synonymous with looking for her identity. Immobility of body and voice will no longer mark her thereafter.

  The narrator is admired frequently for her silence. “I have been praised for it time and again,” she confides. “I was seven or eight years old when I realized not all children have this virtue. My silence was considered my best asset” (19). Once when she refuses to answer her father’s probing question regarding Aunt Mahboub, “not out of wisdom but out of fear,” she realizes that her “simple and cowardly act of going mute” is turned into “a meaningful and wise silence” (20). The positive reinforcement continues. “In later years, I was repeatedly admired by the women in the family for being reserved, for being secretive” (20). On rare occasions, when she abandons fleetingly her distinctive and celebrated quality, she earns the censure of her family and the epithet “tattletale.” “I don’t like tattletales,” says a furious Aunt Mahboub. “She pressed her hand on my bony chest: ‘A woman should learn to keep everything here. Do you understand?’ I understood” (28). Although the narrator comes to the realization that just as “There are a hundred types of kindness” (17), there are also different varieties of silence, even though she knows all too well that full transparency is an illusion that refuses to be called what it is, she nonetheless vows to express the previously unarticulated.