My Bird

Afterword

133 Afterword Fariba Vafi and Her Bird: On Pens and Feathers F A R Z A N E H M I L A N I 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 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. 134 | Farzaneh Milani 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 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. A F T E R W O R D | 135 confined to poetry, which proved to be more womanfriendly 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 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...