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BEHIND THE IRAN CURTAIN

Following a recent flowering of writing by women in Iran, a government crackdown is proving stifling. Heather Falconer assesses the situation – and uncovers an online ray of hope.

When the Association of American Publishers’ International Freedom to Publish Committee chose an Iranian publisher as the 2007 recipient of the Jeri Laber Award – which recognises fortitude in the face of oppression and censorship – the honour was declined for the first time in its five-year history. Though bestowed in 2003 on a resident of the Islamic Republic – publisher, writer and poet Farkhondeh Hajizadeh – by April of this year the award had become too dangerous to accept. The nominee, who was not named, explained that it would just single the publishing company out as a target for the authorities: ‘I am very sad to say that I no longer have the stamina to bear more pressure or to engage in further confrontations.’

Of course, being an Iranian author has always been a dangerous business: ‘In the splendorous land of Iran, a good writer is a dead writer,’ wrote the novelist Esmail Fassih in 1987. What is new about the current crackdown, triggered by the election of right-wing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, is that women seem to be the primary targets. A report published this June by the women’s committee of the Iranian PEN Centre in Exile (IPCE), said that women writers and publishers in particular are living in constant fear of censorship, of cancellation of permits to print, of arrest, of court procedures, torture – even death.

The current regime, it appears, is hellbent on ending a golden age of women’s writing which flourished in the relatively relaxed era of former pro-reform president Mohammad Khatami. Just before Ahmadinejad came to power, the magazine Zanan (Women) reported that the number of published women novelists in Iran had reached more than 350 – 13 times more than there had been a decade earlier. Moreover, their books were wildly outselling men’s, and regularly enjoying print runs of more than 100,000, as well as many reprints. There were also around 60 publishing houses run by women.

Currently, however, they are being ‘rolled back, punished, silenced,’ says Nahid Mozaffari, editor of Strange Times, My Dear (Arcade, 2005), the 2005 PEN anthology of contemporary Iranian literature. ‘This has had a devastating effect on writing women’s morale and on the business of publishing. Many have gone bankrupt.’

Journalist and author Azadeh Moaveni, writing in Time magazine last October, summed up the new levels of fear and paranoia as restrictions were ratcheted up daily in Tehran: ‘When I was asked to co-write the memoirs of [Nobel Peace Prize Laureate] Shirin Ebadi [Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope (Rider, 2006)], I didn’t think twice. That was before the government banned her [human rights organisation], a clear sign they were not interested in putting up with her anymore. Now when she calls, I babble about my dogs, anxious to hang up. She’s taught me a lot about what to do if I ever end up in prison, but I’d like to avoid putting that knowledge to use.’

Writers must run the gauntlet of the all-powerful Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, through which every manuscript must pass in order to receive a permit to print. Many say officials have returned their manuscripts demanding hundreds of unreasonable changes; rejected them without giving reasons; or have simply sat on them for months, even years.

Bestselling novelist Goli Taraghi, who lives in Paris but returns to Iran to publish her books for an adoring readership, said in a recent interview on the Bookslut.com website: ‘My last book, I’ve been waiting two years. Neither yes nor no – it’s just no answer. I don’t give up, because my publisher always says, “Wait, wait, wait, something will change. Someone else may help. It may come out.” But it’s not easy now.’

Even well-established works are not immune. In recent months, for example, the Ministry has banned If Love Was True Love, an anthology by the poetess Forugh Farrokhzad first published in the 1960s; I Turn Off the Lights by Zoya Pirzad, after 23 editions; and Goli Emami’s translation of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, after four editions.

A ‘bloodless revolution’

It may come as a surprise that female voices should have become so dominant in the first place in a society generally defined in the west by images of veiled passivity or even captivity (though, recently, writers such as Marjane Satrapi, with her defiant and often wickedly funny graphic novels – Persepolis, Embroideries, Chicken with Plums – have helped redress that balance).

In fact, females have figured in Iran’s sophisticated and ancient literary culture for the past 150 years, explains Farzaneh Milani, Iranian poet and author of Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse University Press, 1992). ‘But we did not have a tradition of women writers,’ she explains. ‘It was more sporadic. Now, there is a heritage, an ancestry. After the [1979 Islamic] revolution we have seen this tradition coming to its full blossoming. It is truly amazing.’

While the Iranian women’s movement is a century old (see Timeline, left), a dynamic grassroots feminism gained real momentum during the 1980s and 90s, boosted by the economic participation of a wide cross-section of the female population during the eight-year war with Iraq. New feminist journals such as Zanan, established in 1992, courageously challenged the clerics’ take on gender equality; their concern was not so much the veil – the compulsory hejab imposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, while controversial, actually helped many working-class and rural women to escape the home and get an education – but access to the public domain. They demanded a presence and a voice.

The result, says Milani, was ‘a third, bloodless revolution in Iran’ that has completely changed the cultural landscape. In 2005 well over half of those entering university were female. While women are still heavily discriminated against under Sharia law, they can work, vote from the age of 16, hold professional positions, run companies and stand for Parliament. The impact on literature has been equally dramatic. As UK-based Iranian writer Nasrin Alavi says: ‘If women writers have become the avant garde of Persian literature it is due to this upcoming, young, educated generation of Iranian women. The world of publishing is consumer – and thus substance – driven, and it has proved a relatively level playing field.’

Showcasing a culture

Shahrnush Parsipur, sometimes described as the chief proponent of Iranian magic realism, has spoken of how, after the revolution, her writing became ‘a historic imperative’ as she sought to explore different forms of social oppression. Her treatment of taboo subjects like virginity, rape and violence against women saw her imprisoned before she eventually sought asylum in the US. Like Parsipur, most post-revolutionary women writers ‘are motivated to explore what has happened in their own recent history,’ says Mozaffari, ‘to dig into the national psyche to find answers to the questions that are plaguing us, like, “Why have we gotten here?”’

But these are questions for everybody, she believes, not just Iranians: literature from the so-called ‘axis of evil’ can play a crucial role in showing everyone the wider nuances of a society and people stereotyped by the stifled flow of information. ‘We felt it was important to show that Iran is a complex culture with a very long history, with people with different and diverse opinions and histories.’

While her anthology showcases poetry and prose as well as many genres and styles ranging from social realism to stream-of-consciousness, there are some common threads. ‘Contemporary Iranian stories and poems tend to be sad, often allegorical and allusive, with different dimensions of meaning and interpretation,’ she explains. She attributes this partly to the Persian tradition, partly to the complex emotional and psychological themes being addressed, and partly to the ‘treacherous alleys of censorship’ that writers instinctively navigate.

Mozaffari admits that there are numerous omissions from the anthology – which is why she is planning another – including the work of the bestselling novelists Zoya Pirzad and Fariba Vafi. These writers attract a younger and more geographically and socially diverse readership with their intimate portrayals of the struggle to reconcile tradition and modernity through stories of love, marriage, divorce and working motherhood. Pirzad’s hugely successful 2004 novel We Get Used To It, for example, tells the tale of a divorcee and mother working in an estate agency – traditionally seen as a man’s job – whose efforts to make a fulfilling new life for herself are severely compromised by family duties, disapproval from her mother and daughter and her own traditional upbringing. Reviewing the novel on the arts website TehranAvenue.com, Masoumeh Aliakbari remarked how, unlike classical Iranian prose, Pirzad’s Persian ‘has no uptown or downtown. It has no female or male. Ayeh, the daughter of the head of a real estate agency, speaks in the same way as Mohsen, the agency’s worker.’

Young Iranians – two thirds of the population is under 30 – relate to this conflict between the traditional roles and codes of behaviour imposed on them by the government (and, often, their own families), and their private hankering after more ‘modern’ ideals of individuality and self-fulfillment, gleaned from years imbibing western culture on their (illegal) satellite TVs. ‘Modern concepts of individuality have taken their place in women’s literature and are pushing to make their mark on Iranian fiction as a whole,’ Aliakbari said. ‘This is why women’s literature in particular has the ability to generate the most drastic changes along the largest spectrum of people in our society.’ It is hardly surprising, then, that in recent months Pirzad’s novels have attracted the unwelcome attention of the regime.

Virtual freedom

With their every public move and utterance scrutinised, it is in virtual communities that Iranian women have really found their voices. Nasrin Alavi, whose book We Are Iran (Soft Skull Press, 2005), charts the astonishing rise of the Persian weblog, tells how anonymous blogging has allowed women to express themselves freely for the first time in modern history. She estimates that there are around 500,000 active blogs – Farsi is the fourth most frequently used language in the world for keeping online journals – and the best bloggers have gained huge followings and offer a glimpse into daily life. The recent blog, Nooshi and Her Chicks, for example, features the sometimes unbearably poignant stories of a woman separated from her husband and engaged in a desperate battle to keep her children. (A divorcee in Iran usually loses custody of boys over the age of two and girls over seven).

Lady Sun, meanwhile, one of the original Iranian female bloggers, who now lives in the US, railed against the attacks on women and children by Basij vigilantes during International Women’s Day in 2004: ‘You get there...They are beating a boy at your feet...they strike with batons...The old men at the park are struggling to free the boy from their hands. “With what right are you beating this kid? This boy was on his way home!” They turn to us: “Go away before we give you a thrashing, too!’’’

‘Weblogestan’ has become the last refuge for authors unable to get their manuscripts past the Ministry. ‘It is as if there is an invisible conveyor belt taking anything that has been rejected by the Minister of Culture and releasing it into cyberspace,’ Alavi says. When the censors asked the writer Abbas Maroufi to make more than 200 changes to his last novel, he refused and posted the entire manuscript of Fereydoon had Three Sons on the Internet. ‘When human conduct, law and honour has crumbled,’ he blogged, ‘...other wheels are put in motion.’

The authorities are making inroads, however. In 2003, Iran’s government became the first in the world to imprison a blogger (journalist Sina Motallebi) and it has since arrested many more. ‘Numerous’ women bloggers have been dragged through the courts in the past year, according to the IPCE report mentioned earlier.

But Alavi believes the young, educated idealists of cyberspace remain the greatest challenge there is to the current regime. She is not alone in believing that the empowerment of Iran’s women writers through education and technology is a genie that can never be forced back into the bottle. ‘We have paid a high price [for the freedom to publish] – there has been depression, incarcerations, executions,’ says Farzaneh Milani. ‘Short of war, I don’t think anything will be able to stop this tree which has been nurtured with the blood and sweat of many women.’

HEATHER FALCONER is a freelance journalist with a background in women’s and employment issues. She has written extensively for the Equal Opportunities Commission, and her work has been published in The Guardian, Daily Mail and various women’s magazines.

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From Issue 35 ◊ Oct/Nov/Dec 2007

Ladies of Iranian Lit

Zoya Pirzad
Born: 1952, Abadan. Famously reclusive winner of numerous literary prizes in Iran.
Major works: I Turn Off the Lights (2001), We Get Used To It (2002); winner of Novel of the Year at the Hooshang Golshiri awards for ‘superb characterisation, ingenious representation of the conflicting emotions of a woman...creating a language in perfect harmony with the theme and characters of the novel.’
Look out for: planned English translation of We Get Used To It (already available in German).

Simin Daneshvar
Born: 1921, Tehran. Iran’s first woman novelist; co-founder in 1968 of Iran Writers’ Association.
Major works: Savushun (1969), hailed as masterpiece of modern Persian prose, covering Allied occupation of Iran in World War II. Short story collection Whom Should I Greet? (1980); Island of Bewilderment (1992) and The Dazed Camel Driver (2002), two of a planned trilogy about the 1979 revolution’s effects on various social groups.
Look out for: A Persian Requiem, translation of Savushun by Roxanne Zand (Halban, 2002).

Simin Behbahani
Born: 1927, Tehran. A cultural icon in Iran.
Major works: numerous collections of poetry adapting the traditional lyrical Persian ghazal, incorporating parts of everyday speech and subverting gender roles. She says her work is inseparable from her homeland. ‘I’m so lucky to be one person among many others. It’s why I am able to feel people’s pain and unhappiness as if it is my own.’
Look out for: A Cup of Sin: Selected
Poems, edited and translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa (Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Shahrnush Parsipur
Born: 1946, Tehran. Imprisoned pre- and post-revolution; resident in US since 1994.
Major works: The Dog and the Long Winter (1974), Touba and the Meaning of Night (1989), Women Without Men (1990), Prison Memoirs (1995), Sitting on the Wing of the Wind (2002).
‘Right now, I have no idea who is reading me...and this is quite an agonising issue....because you need to have an active, agile and provocative relationship with your audience so that you can continue to write.’
Look out for: new translation of Touba and the Meaning of Night (Marion Boyars, 2007).

Moniru Ravanipur
Born: 1954, southern village of Jofreh. This year’s International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University; arrested post-2000 Berlin conference (see Timeline p. 12).
Major works: Kanizu (1988), The Drowned (1989), Heart of Steel (1990), Nazlie (2003), Satan’s Stones (1991). Distinctive style melding traditional myths and superstitions of village childhood with modern urban influences.
‘I am still in touch with people who are secretly water worshippers but the last time they spoke to me they said something had gone wrong with the water – maybe it was the nuclear material that had got in there.’
Look out for: ‘Satan’s Stones,’ short story in Strange Times, My Dear (ed. Nahid Mozaffari, Arcade Publishing, 2005).

Shahla Sherkat
Born: 1956, Isfahan. Sentenced to four months in prison post-Berlin conference.
Major works: founding, publishing and editing Zanan, which covers everything from reform politics to domestic abuse. Has sold everything she owns to continue publishing; has escaped closure by authorities through expert self-censorship.
‘If I am not optimistic about Iran’s government then I am optimistic about its people – especially the women. I believe that women are moving under the skin...in an organised manner...no force can stop this movement.’
Look out for: interview in Asharq Alawsat, an online daily paper at http://aawsat.com

Goli Taraghi
Born: 1939, Tehran. Resident in Paris since 1979, but returns to Tehran regularly.
Major works: novels and short stories dealing with themes of displacement, often written in a stream-of-consciousness narrative. First collection of short stories,
I Am Che Guevara Too (1969). Novels include Winter Sleep (1973, translated into English and French), Scattered Memories (1992), In Another Place (2003), Two Worlds (2004).
‘[In Tehran today] there is cultural hypocrisy....Inside a woman can be absolutely European...but as soon as you go out you live a big lie – you put your scarf on, you brush your teeth so no one will smell the alcohol on your mouth.’
Look out for: translation of novella In Another Place in Strange Times, My Dear.

TIMELINE

1852 Iran’s first woman poet, Tahereh Qorratol‘Ayn, executed for support of Babi religious movement.

1907 ‘Constitutional revolution’ abolishes absolutist rule. Society for Freedom of Women founded.

1910 First Persian woman’s magazine, Danis, published. By the 1930s there are 14 such publications.

1921 Parvin E‘tessami publishes her first poems at age 14 in her father’s literary journal.

1935 E‘tessami publishes first and only collection, Divan. Disappointed by the reception, she forbids reprints, but posthumously her work remains popular.

1936 Reza Shah Pahlavi abolishes the veil and makes mass education available to women.

1946 First Congress of Iranian Writers pledges artists’ duty to fight social injustice: start of the age of ‘committed literature.’

1953 Nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq – elected in 1951 – overthrown in British-US-backed coup; Shah reinstalled.

1962 Women get the right to vote and be elected.

1967 Groundbreaking poet Forugh Farrokhzad dies in car accident age 32, having survived a nervous breakdown. Her Tehran grave becomes – and remains – a literary shrine.

1968 Simin Daneshvar co-founds Iran Writers’ Association, lobbying for literary freedoms.

1978 Shah’s authoritarian rule angers clergy and left-wing, leading to riots, strikes and demonstrations. Martial law imposed.

1979 Shah deposed; Ayatollah Khomeini takes power, supported by most writers and intellectuals. Quickly alienates many by lowering marriage age for girls to 13, ruling that women cannot be judges and making hejab compulsory.

1980 ‘Reign of Terror’ begins: political parties banned; 6,000 mass executions take place; universities closed. War breaks out with Iraq.

1981 Shahrnush Parsipur imprisoned for possession of banned pamphlet. Detained more than three years without charge.

1989 Ali Khomeini issues Satanic Verses fatwa. He dies later that year. President Khamene’i appointed supreme leader.

1990 Parsipur arrested and imprisoned after publication of novel Women Without Men.

1992 Zanan magazine founded by Shahla Sherkat. Pro-reformist Mohammad Khatami at Ministry of Culture permits hundreds of feminist books and biographies.

1993 Between now and 2000, numerous writers, intellectuals and dissidents killed by vigilante groups directly linked to security apparatus of Islamic regime, causing national and international outcry.

1997 Khatami wins presidential election with 70 per cent of vote. Ushers in new era of hope for democracy, freedom and civil society; women vote for him in huge numbers.

1999 Demonstration at Tehran University following hardline-led closure of reformist newspaper Salam, leads to six days of rioting and arrest of more than 1,000.

2000 19 writers and intellectuals arrested for participating in a Berlin conference on social and political reform in Iran; sentenced after show trials to prison terms of four to 14 years.

2001 Khatami re-elected despite widespread disillusionment over failure to take on the clerics and deliver reform.

2003 Thousands attend student-led protests against clerical establishment. Human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi becomes Iran’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner; this achievement goes unreported by Iranian media.

2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tehran’s ultra-conservative mayor, wins presidential elections on anti-corruption and economic relief platform.

2006 UN Security Council deadline for Iran to halt work on nuclear power not met. Shirin Ebadi’s memoirs published in the west.

2007 Street-level drive by authorities to enforce ‘correct’ hejab; hundreds arrested. Journalist Parnaz Azima and writer-academic Haleh Esfandiari detained while in Tehran to visit relatives (Esfandiari has since been released). By June, seven journalists had been imprisoned, at least four daily newspapers and 20 weekly journals closed, and dozens of writers, publishers and editors arrested and dragged to court.

• PHOTO © PHYLLIS CHRISTOPHER