My Bird
Page 10
If during her childhood the narrator was characterized above all by her silence, which was neither willed nor voluntary, if her silence had a “history” and was imposed on her through a complex system of reward and punishment, if she was like “a chest full of secrets with a tight lid” (20), she pledges to begin expressing the deepest emotions, naming forbidden feelings, uttering suppressed voices.16 If she was scared to go deep into the utmost reaches of her memory and her past—what she calls euphemistically “the basement”—she now wants to find the “courage to walk” there, “carefully look at its walls,” and find out about all its “corners and passages,” feeling “no fear” (129). She wants to turn her observing eye into a shining light and look through its darkness. In short, she wants to be able “to return to the basement” anytime she wants, “like a traveler who returns to her homeland” (129).
Although the narrator’s change of consciousness happens in increments, the moment she deliberately travels to the basement and discards her mantle of silence and secrecy, which had bothered her “like a tight woolen dress in hot weather” (22), is such a turning point in her life that she recalls it with precision and lucidity. “It was after Father’s death that I broke my silence by screaming,” she declares. “I wanted the whole world and everybody to know everything” (20). It is no accident that when the narrator of My Bird begins to write, and composes the critical letters to her sister, Mahin (chapter 25 and 45, both beginning with “I write”), she describes her repressed and painful recollection of Father’s death. So, too, Fariba Vafi’s first letter to the world—her first published short story, “You’re at Peace Now, Father,”—revolves around and discloses the details of a painful memory, the death of the father in the basement.
Flying out of confinement and silence, the narrator breaks out of the cage of her former self. Celebrating her ability to speak her mind, she announces with great pride that “I write about me and the world around me” (110). Intoxicated from her sense of power and agency, believing in the transformative power of the pen, she thus moves from muteness to communication, from immobility to flight. Watching her creative energy kindled in front of her bedazzled eyes, she weaves words into a magic carpet, travels to forbidden territories, and beholds her imagination, which glides around “like a butterfly, showing off its wings that change color every second” (96). She converts her secrets and sorrows, the unwritten tale of her muted and concealed identity, the alienation written on her body, and the frustration scripted through her assigned roles into a novel. Her portable text cannot be chained, put behind bars, caged. Like a flying bird, it roams at will and goes to faraway places. It has just transmigrated, thanks to Mahnaz Kousha and Nasrin Jewell, to North America. The birth of the text, then, is a rebirth of the narrator. It frees her from the finiteness of her circumstances; it allows her to define for herself a new life as a woman: daughter, sister, wife, mother, and—no less important—as a writer as well. The nameless narrator grows wings, turns feathers into pens, allows her caged voice to soar, and becomes the highly acclaimed Fariba Vafi.
I wish to express my gratitude to Kaveh Safa, who not only shares my great enthusiasm for Fariba Vafi’s work but also contributed with boundless generosity of spirit and profound clarity of thought to this piece. I also want to thank my good friend and colleague Rae Blumberg, who offered helpful and astute comments, and my bright research assistant, Elizabeth Walsh.
1. These statistics are mainly taken from Hassan Mirabedini, “Dastan nevisiy-e zanan: gam hay-e larzan-e avaliy-e” [Women’s Fiction Writing: First Wobbly Steps], Zanan, Mar. 2007, and Nazila Fathi, “Women Writing Novels Emerge as Stars in Iran,” New York Times, June 29, 2005.
2. Ali Akbar Moshir-Salimi, Zanan-e sokhanvar az yek hezar sal-e pish ta emruz [Persian Women Writers from a Thousand Years Ago until Today] (Tehran: Elmi: 1956–58).
3. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; reprint, New York: Harcourt, 1957).
4. Keshavarz-e Sadr, Az Rabe’e ta Parvin [From Rabe’e to Parvin] (Tehran: Kavian, 1956).
5. My Bird is also being translated into Italian.
6. Personal communication, May 23, 2009.
7. As Nazila Fathi observes, in Tarlan, Vafi “describes women from poor families, who enter the harsh environment of the police school. The book arouses readers’ sympathy for policewomen who must enforce the strict social code of Islam and who are widely resented in Iran for harassing women who deviate from Muslim dress rules,” New York Times, June 29, 2005.
8. Nazila Fathi, New York Times, June 29, 2005.
9. For a biographical sketch of Jamal Mir-Sadeqi and a translation of one of his short stories, “Through the Veil of Fog,” see Stories From Iran: A Chicago Anthology 1921–1991, ed. Heshmat Moayyed (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 1991), 202–19. Mir-Sadeqi is the author of Narrative Literature, the Tale, the Short Story, the Novel: A Look at Contemporary Fiction Writing in Iran, among several other books.
10. “Rahat shodi pedar” [You’re at Peace Now, Father] also appears in Dar Omq-e-sahneh [In the Depth of the Stage] (Tehran: Cheshmeh, 1996), 14–19.
11. Vafi’s short stories, which are often between four and seven pages long in the original Persian, have been called “sudden fiction” or “flash fiction.” Perhaps the increasingly hurried impatience of life compels the skilled short-story writer to offer her tales in finite, quick bursts.
12. Few of Vafi’s short stories have been translated into English. For “The Flight of the Sun,” see Franklin Lewis and Farzin Yazdanfar, In a Voice of Their Own (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 1996). For “My Mother Behind the Glass,” see A Feast in the Mirror: Stories by Contemporary Iranian Women, ed. and trans. Mohammad Mehdi Khorami and Shouleh Vatanabadi (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 201–5. “My Mother Behind the Glass” is also translated in Afsaneh: Short Stories by Iranian Women, ed. and trans. Kaveh Basmenji (London: Saqi, 2005), 172–76. For “On the Way to the Villa,” trans. Yassaman Assa, see Iran’s Literature Today: Glimmer in the Mist, www.iransliterature.com/page.asp?16.
13. Stories from Parvin E’tessami is part of a collection entitled The Rereading of Ancient Books for Children, which contains thirty books from thirteen classic Iranian authors and poets. “Author Vafi narrates E’tessami’s poems for children,” Tehran Times, May 20, 2009. V. 10595.
14. Fariba Vafi, “A Woman on the Shore,” Dar Omq-e-sahneh [In the Depth of the Stage], 84–87.
15. In one of the most anthologized poems of modern Persian literature, “O, People,” Nima Yushij depicts the scene of a drowning man. His concern, however, revolves mainly around the complicity of all those uninvolved, carefree, and disengaged people who sit—”cheerful and laughing”—on the shore, witness the death of a struggling man “in the rough and formidable sea,” and refuse to offer a helping hand to save him. The anguished voice of the poet and that of the drowning man mingle with the wind and the enveloping, angry waves and remind the reader of an avoidable and cruel death. In his growing distress, the drowning man “raises above the water / now his head / now his feet / he has his eye on this world / and is shouting for help: / ‘O, people!’” Nima Yushij, Majmou’e-ye Ash’ar-e Nima Yushij [Nima Yushij’s Poetry Collection] (1955; reprint, Tehran: Safi Alishah, 1968), 178.
16. The narrator is horrified by the prospect that her daughter might turn into a windup doll, a vessel filled with silence or prerehearsed responses in delineated spaces. She does not want her daughter to take after her. “She has gone mute. A muffled sound comes out of her mouth. I see the fear in her eyes. I recognize silent crying very well. Silent crying means that she cannot leave” (39). Recognizing silent crying well, not wanting her daughter to be like her, she adopts a new strategy. “I sit Shadi in front of me and give her a little lecture—what Maman should have done with me and never did. If I wanted to say something, I would pace up and down the room seven or eight times. I felt my heart in my throat and could not talk because it seemed like my words were stuck at the bottom of a deep well” (17)
. To teach her daughter a lesson, to extricate her voice from the bottom of that deep well, she grabs her doll, takes its battery out, and squeezes it. “‘See,’” she tells her, “‘if you don’t make a sound, you are as bad as a doll without a battery, without a heart. Then it is possible to hurt you because nobody will even find out’” (18). Forugh Farrokhzad, too, was appalled by the possibility of becoming a windup doll and to “see the world through a pair of glassy eyes.” Repulsed, she lamented: “one can sleep for years and years / in a velvet box / between layers of lace and tinsel / with a body stuffed with straw / With every squeeze of a shameless hand / one can declare / like a windup doll: / ‘O, I am so very happy.’” Forugh Farrokhzad, Tavalodi Digar [Another Birth] (1964; reprint, Tehran: Morvarid, 1972), 71–75.
FARIBA VAFI was born in 1962 in Tabriz, Iran. She started to write short stories at a very young age. As a young girl, she frequently traveled to Tehran from her hometown of Tabriz, 335 miles away, to buy books and show her writing sketches to a literature teacher. Like most women writers throughout history, marriage and children delayed her plan to become a novelist. Starting to write in 1983, her first short story collection, In the Depth of the Stage (Dar Omgh-e-Sahneh), was published in 1986. The next short story collection, Even While We Are Laughing (Hatta Vaqhti Mikhandidim), came out in 1999. She has written four novels: My Bird (Parandehye man), 2002; Tarlan, 2006; Dream of Tibet (Rowyay-e-Tabbat), 2007; and A Secret in the Alleys (Razi dar Kucheha), 2008. She is currently working on the novel On the Way to the Villa (Dar Rah-e-vila). She lives in Tehran with her husband and two children.
NASRIN JEWELL is professor of economics at St. Catherine University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her current research area is redefining and reevaluating work, specifically applied to women in Iran. She has authored and collaborated on a number of articles on the role of women in economic development, the global economy and the New World Order, and women and work. She has been a Fulbright scholar to Caracas, Venezuela, and was a Midwestern Universities Consortium scholar in Madrid, Spain. Professor Jewell is a member of the board of directors of Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies.
MAHNAZ KOUSHA was professor of sociology at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her book Voices from Iran: Changing Lives of Iranian Women (Syracuse University Press, 2002) explores family dynamics in Iran. She also conducted collaborative research on life satisfaction and happiness in Iran. Her areas of interest were race, gender, class, and family relationships in the United States and the Middle East.