We are often guilty in the West of judging other societies by our own sense of
cultural superiority. We believe that national wealth and democracy eradicate poverty,
despite high levels of social deprivation; our cultural and moral codes are the solution to conflicts around the world, despite a track record of making matters worse; with freedom comes happiness, despite mass depression. However, there is an element of western life that, although far from ideal, is of cultural value. Gender equality in Afsaneh is not so much a cultural value, as a muted taboo gasping for breath. Indeed, none of the writers in this collection perceives this inequality in quite the same way.
In ‘Midnight Drum’, Fereshteh Molavi explores the hypocrisies of marriage in a patriarchal society. Locked in a loveless marriage, a
woman is subjected to loveless sex, ‘the nights smeared with deceit and hypocrisy or fear and submission.’ To the West this is a disturbing but familiar perception of oppressive marriage. However, like many
stories in Afsaneh, it offers a rare insight into the active thoughts of a silenced woman, through a stream of consciousness that ironises the
silence, revealing an intelligent person engaging with her social environment.
Other stories are less concerned with the physical and psychological horrors of
male dominance, but instead focus on the void left by the absence of men. In ‘Garden of Sorrow’, Mihan Bahrami portrays a young girl in the initial stages of growing up. Bahrami deftly blends the creative observation of childhood with cultural roots. When the girl’s grandmother smokes her hookah, with its water container decorated with two wooden dolls and scented with rose petals, ‘the dolls swirled in the water bubbles, as if they were running after the petals, and I died of laughter watching them turn somersaults.’ But when the girl discovers she has not been told the truth about her father’s departure, a series of incidents distance her from relatives and childhood memories, and so a process of emotional independence begins.
Some writers in Afsaneh have had to find creative ways with which to bypass the state censorship of women’s speech. Moniru Ravanipour was part of the generation of women writers in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. With women, even more so than before, at the forefront of religious and moral codes, any female dissent was strictly dealt with. ‘The Blue Ones’ - a surreal tale in which the women of a fishing community offer amulets to the ‘blue ones’ in order to ensure the safe return of the fishermen - seemingly escapes censorship by portraying female characters as naïve yet religiously faithful. Read subversively, however, it mocks and criticises the flaws of extreme pedantic faith, and men’s hypocritical dependence on women.
In many of these stories, however, the role of dependence is reversed, a duty often unfulfilled by men. Goli Taraqqi gives voice to a woman’s silent emotions in ‘A House in Heaven’, a moving wartime account of an elderly mother’s frustrated attempts to find a home amongst her unaccommodating offspring. Household objects, those symbols of women’s confinement to the domestic sphere, hold an intense sense of family heritage and identity for Mahin Banoo. When her son, Massoud D., flees from the Iran-Iraq war, he sells his mother’s house and belongings, oblivious to its emotional impact. ‘She had seen her belongings go on sale and hadn’t said a thing. She had seen strangers wandering in her house and she hadn’t uttered a word.’
Mahin’s passive silence towards this domestic upheaval follows her to Europe. Passed around between Manijeh, her daughter living in London, and Massoud in Paris, passed her usefulness to her grown-up children, with no home of her own, Mahin continues to suffer in silence. In Europe she remains a victim of patriarchy, believing herself to be the source of Massoud’s angry outbursts, and urged by Manijeh’s English husband to sell her jewelleery.. Patriarrchy seemingly transcends cultural boundaries. But despite the unjust treatment of Mahin, and women more generally, Taraqqi portrays a bigger picture, occasionally shedding male characters in a sympathetic light, themselves ironic products of male dominance.
This refreshing, thought-provoking collection of stories eradicates any simplified, western notion of an ethnic group of women suffering in a single castigated silence. These Iranian women are clearly engaged in their political environment, but they are by no means collectively minded towards the issue of male dominance. This superb book gives voice to an eclectic blend of silences, which is in its own ironic way as outspoken and subjective as any western equivalent.
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