Biography

Shahrnush Parsipur was born in Tehran in February 17, 1946. She started her literary career when she was sixteen, writing short stories and articles.

She graduated from the University of Tehran in Sociology. When she was twenty-eight, she wrote her first novel, Sag va Zememstaneh Boland ( The Dog and the Long Winter - translated into Russian).

In the same year, while serving as the producer of the Rural Women, a socially inclined weekly program for the National Iranian TV, she resigned from working for that organization, to protest against the meaninglessly cruel torture and execution of two journalist-poet activists by SAVAK, the National Intelligence and Security Organization, active 1957-1979. She was imprisoned for a few months, but later, she moved to France to study Chinese Philosophy and Language.There, she wrote her second novel, Majerahayeh Sadeh va Kuchake Ruheh Derakht (Plain and Small Adventures of the Spirit of the Tree) in 1977.

As soon as she was released from jail, she published her novel Touba va Maanayeh Shab (Touba and the Meaning of Night) which has brought her a lot of fame amongst the book readers in Iran.This book has been translated into German and Italian, and English.

As a result of openly referring to the issue of virginity in her novella Women without Men, she ended up in jail again on two different occasions.This book has been translated into English, Swedish, Spanish, Malayalam, Italian, Dutch and French.

In 1992, she was invited to go on a tour around the US, Canada, and several European countries.She spent two months in Iowa and participated in Iowa Writers Workshop Center.

She returned to Iran, but all of her books was banned so she came back to the US. Here she received the Hilman-Hammet award, in two occasions. She has received also the honorary tablet of Syrus the Great from Encyclopedia Iranica.

She later published a book titled Prison Memoir recalling and discussing her memories of jail. Aqle Abi (The Blue Reason) which is a philosophical novel, is another book of hers. She wrote this book in 1989, but it was impossible to publish it in Iran. So she published it in the US and Sweden.

She has written other novels and short stories including Shiva, a science fiction novel [perhaps the first –and only- one of its kind in the Iranian literature]; Bar Baaleh Badd Neshestan (On the Wings of Wind), a novel; Adabeh Sarfeh Chai Dar Hozooreh Gorg (Tea Ceremony in Presence of a Wolf), and Avizeh-hayeh Bolour (Crystalline Pendants),and Men from Various Civilizations , each a collection of short stories.

One of her novellas, Tadjrobe-hayeh Azad (Trial Offers), has been published in the Chicago Anthology of Iranian Stories.She has written a lot of articles and has contributed as a critic and essayist in Persian Book Review, and Negin magazines (Los Angeles) as well as " Shahrvand Journal" (Toronto, Canada).She currently lives in the United States of America as a political refugee.

Shirin Neshat, the prominent photographer and film maker is working on her book, Women Without Men. Two parts of this film have made in Morocco.Because it was impossible to bring the actors and actress from Iran, Shahrnush played in the second part of the film. Since August 2006, she has been making a 14 minute Literary program for Radio Zamaneh in Amsterdam.

http://www.shahrnushparsipur.com/author.htm

Interview with Shahrnush Parsipur, Author by Sepideh Saremi January 1980

Shahrnush Parsipur is arguably one of the most important Iranian writers working today. First published when she was just sixteen years old, much of her writing casts a spotlight on the lives of women in a style that combines frank language with magical realism. Parsipur has been jailed under both the Shah’s regime and that of the Islamic Republic for her work which is currently banned in Iran. Most recently, Parsipur was the first-ever fellow of the International Writers Project at Brown University, and her e-book was published in late 2007.

In our interview, Parsipur discusses the impact of manic depression on her work, and explains how writing fiction is like playing God.

Pars Arts: Your new e-book, The Continuing Stories of Men from Various Civilizations, is a series of stories, all of which were written in the United States at different times. Can you describe the process of writing this book?

Shahrnush Parsipur: In 1992 I was invited to go around the world to speak - I wanted to go to Sweden and Germany, but I was jailed in Iran. So after I got out of prison, I came to Los Angeles and traveled to different cities to speak. In every city, I wrote a story. My first impressions of America were in these stories.

The America of Americans exists in many other stories already; this book deals with the America of a foreigner. When we first come here, what we see and notice are billboards of Coca Cola ads or big bags of popcorn in the cinema. Or massive portions of food. Or the big Chinese, Jewish, and Indian influence here, seeing the number of restaurants. This is what a foreigner sees. Most foreigners don’t go to the Midwest, so they don’t see traditional American life. Mostly we go to the east and west coasts, the hubs of foreigners, and that is what I wrote about.

PA: Why did you decide to publish this as an e-book, rather than as a traditional print book? Have many people downloaded the book?

SP: Nur Karlica Iverson, who created my website [and illustrated the e-book], asked why I didn’t sell my books online. So in October or November of 2007 we published these stories in an e-book. There haven’t been many downloads because I’m not sure how to market them. And some people have trouble with downloading it because they don’t have the right software.

PA: This book, like Women Without Men, has strong elements of magical realism. Why do you prefer this style?

SP: Old Iranian stories use this style a lot, like in One Thousand and One Nights. All of these elements are in this book. And I use this old style now because there are a lot of things that you can’t say plainly. When you write about a country like America, when you pass through it and see a bird’s-eye view, you can see a lot, and I used magical realism to capture this.

PA: You have noted Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and Sadegh Hedayat as influences. In fact, this new book reminds me a lot of Hedayat’s Boof-e Koor (The Blind Owl), which relies on repetition with a difference as one of its main devices, as does your book. Why did you use this device in your e-book?

SP: When I was writing these stories, I was mindful of the differences that Iranians in Iran had with each other. Some people insisted on having beards, a symbol of tradition. Some people insisted that they were creative types and wanted to listen to music and drink; they’re the “tar player” of my stories. And others would shave their beards and just be ordinary. So I took these three types and decided to have fun with them and these stories came to existence from me playing with these three types of characters.

PA: You’ve spoken before about your struggle with manic depression. Many of the most successful writers in history have suffered from depression, including Hedayat. What role does this illness play in your work and in the way that you write?

SP: I didn’t have manic depression until I was 44 years old. I’ve now had it for 16 or 17 years. I think part of it is the influence of technology in my life; maybe it has to do with some electrical imbalance because of too much exposure to computers. Also, the times I spent in prison in Iran were a strain on me, emotionally. The way that I’ve coped with this illness is that I’ve put magical realism aside. Before this, my mind would fly from place to place. Now that I’m manic, I try very much to keep my spirit calm and balanced. I stand in the way of my imagination, because I have to take care of myself. There’s no one else to take care of me. In this sense, men who write are lucky and have an advantage. When they become writers, someone else usually cares for them - a woman. They go out and drink a lot and come home to collapse, and the women take care of them. But when a woman falls apart, there’s no one to take care of her. So because of my disease and because I have to take care of myself, my art, instead of moving forward, has perhaps suffered. When my mind wants to play, I don’t allow it to do so. This illness started when I wrote Aghl-e Abi [Blue Reason, published in 1990 and not yet translated to English], and those around me didn’t think I was sick - they thought I was just very deep. So I lived with this for some time before I got myself treatment.

PA: Part of the reason, and maybe the main reason, your work is banned in Iran is its sexual content. Why do write about sex and why do you think sexuality is such a problem in Iran?

SP: Middle Eastern people have always been under attack and in wars and conflict, and this has made them take on a role of guardians of sex and sexuality of women; the attackers have always killed the men and sexually assaulted the women. So in a way the Middle Eastern society sees itself as guardians of women. But they’ve become such guardians that they’ve become oppressors. Lately I write about my own sexual experiences for Radio Zamaneh. I see it as necessary, because as an older woman, I want to write about things that young women do and often feel guilty or bad about. Because I did those things, and maybe that helps them. But still I think sex will always remain a taboo for Iranians, because Iran is a central place that was always under attack. America is relatively far from its enemies, so there’s not that constant, unconscious fear or threat of rape.

PA: In the last few years, much of the most popular literature written in English by Iranian women has been memoir. Now we are seeing more fiction. Have you read any of this work and do you have any thoughts about it?

SP: Though I read many female authors, it’s mostly Persian work. I am aware that many women write memoirs, and I think this is because writing fiction is very scary. Writing fiction is like being a god. Getting to this point is a little difficult. Women are tiptoeing to this creativity by putting down their memories first. They write their memoirs, and when the fears go away, they can write stories. Fiction was hard for me, too. When I finished Sag va Zemestan-e Boland [The Dog and the Long Winter, published in 1976], I felt like my entire being was empty. When I finished Touba, I felt like my being was shaking. And when I wrote Aghl-e Abi, I couldn’t believe it was me that wrote it. Now, in America, I’m away from my homeland and no one understands my language, and I don’t understand theirs. When I publish a book now, ten people here read it and tell me it’s interesting, but it’s not a fortifying experience. If I were in Iran, the feedback would be more inspiring because it would come from a big community. For there to be a fire, there must be some fuel. When you live in exile, you burn yourself out.

PA: What are you working on now?

SP: I’m writing a book now that’s been about Iran and now I want to add a section about America, which I’m still debating about. Asiyeh Dar Miyan-e Doh Donya [Asiyeh Between Two Worlds] follows the life of an Iranian woman who goes from a village to the city and becomes a servant.

PA: How do you see your place in Iranian literature?

SP: I am a writer, age 61, and have a place among my peers. I don’t see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature.

http://www.shahrnushparsipur.com/article11.htm

Simply a stunner

by Goldbarg Bashi, July 9, 2006, iranian.com

The English translation of the novel Touba and the Meaning of Night (FeministPress.org) by the pre-eminent Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur was recently released by a major US publishing house in New York. One no longer needs to have an Iranian passport or an Iranian visa to get onboard Parsipur’s imaginative boat. To make it even easier, her boat sails at all hours from most bookshops and the entire Cyber Space near you... Her 1989 Women without Men (FeministPress.org) has also been available in English (since 2004).

A decade into the Twenty-First Century and years after small publishing houses in Europe translated her epic novels into German, Swedish, French etc -- America and the Big Apple woke up to her salient lexis. In the evening of May 3rd 2006, I met Shahrnush Parsipur for the first time at a Feminist Press reception in New York, where the English translation of Touba and the Meaning of Night was being launched.

Shahrnush Parsipur, the giant of Iranian women’s literature, was radiant, relaxed and seemed excited. Shaking her hand nervously, I introduced myself with my full name and wittingly she responded: “nice to meet you Golbarg Bashi” and immediately put me at ease. I was in the presence of greatness -- I cannot remember a time in my life when I did not know the name of Shahrnush Parsipur -- from my childhood in Iran when my parents and my book-worm of an aunt Mahru “Mimmi” read and admired her work, to my adolescence in Sweden where the Persian originals of her work adorned my family’s library, to my student years in Britain where I wrote academic papers on her fiction. As she gracefully exchanged greetings with everyone who had come to attend the launch of her book in English -- it felt more like the celebration of a national icon’s lifetime achievements than yet another book launch in New York City.

Shahrnush Parsipur’s Touba and the Meaning of Night is considered one of the unsurpassed masterpieces of modern Persian literature. The protagonist of the novel, Touba, a young girl turning into a determined woman, goes through major personal upheavals throughout a turbulent 80-year long Iranian history. Touba’s life-story is connected to the historical predicaments of her country and thus makes the novel one of the best works of literature to provide a fictive narrative of contemporary Iran.

When we read Parsipur’s Touba and the Meaning of Night, we feel that we are reading modern Iranian history but through the perspective of a distorted vision. But we soon realise that the distortion is less in the story that we are reading and more in the history that we have learned. Now this history is turned upside down, and written from the hitherto silenced voice of a woman. It is the interwoven tale of two fictional readings of two straightforward histories -- Iranian history of the twentieth century and the ordinary life of a woman who happens to have been named after a legendary tree. Touba is married to a Qajar prince, she is eccentric but her ordinary life passes by historical and metaphysical domains. Touba is the fate of Iranian contemporary history but it is narrated from the hidden side of a woman’s perspective, which to the narrator (Touba herself) seems to have always been evident but rarely visible in the public.

Touba’s life-story comprises both her own wonderful and magically realistic language and her ahistorical presence in a country’s historical events. One can argue that in one fictional account Shahrnush Parsipur counters the entire masculinist historiography (tarikh-e mozakkar) and the result is a her-story at once empowering and magical.

Yet, non-Iranians have had little chance to get to know Touba or her country’s history. In the United States and Europe familiarity with Iran’s literary, historical and political scene (outside the academy) and thus public opinion in “Western” countries about Iran have been more dis/informed by the media and an avalanche of autobiographies, by journalists, ex-diplomats or expatriate Iranians telling their life stories as a plot, factual or manufactured or a combination of both -- most of the time self-serving, at best an act of narrative therapy, at worst exacerbating “the East/West divide” and more recently squarely at the service of global neo-imperialism (1).

The English translation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s Touba and the Meaning of Night appears at a time (post 9/11) when the US and European market has been flooded by a new genre of English memoirs written by Iranian women and with publishing houses head over heels signing lucrative contracts with “victimised” Iranian (or Muslim) women -- ranging from Hirsi Ali to Irshad Manji to Azar Nafisi. As Laila Lalami writes in her review of such works, “Christian and Jewish women living in similarly constricting fundamentalist settings never seem to attract the same concern”. These types of memoirs seem to have gained their momentum in the course of the propaganda preparation for the “war of/on terror” (2), so that, as the distinguished post-colonial feminist Gayatri Spivak says, “White men [can] save brown women from brown men” (3) .

In the meantime superb Persian novels by authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Moniru Ravanipour, Goli Taraqqi and/or prison memories by committed activists have had no snow ball chance in hell of getting translated into English, published or promoted (4). One can only hope that with the publication of the English translation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s much-anticipated novel, more high-quality works of contemporary Iranian literature will become available in languages other than Persian.

The first thing that one notices about this translation is the idiomatic ease and fluent diction with which the novel reads in English. The translation of Touba and the Meaning of Night is quite beautiful. Kamran Talattoff, a scholar of Persian literature, and Havva Houshmand have done a wonderful job translating one of Iran’s greatest works of literature.

All translations are thankless jobs. The better a translation the more the translator/s disappear into the prose and diction of the writer they are transforming into another language. It is, however, exceedingly important to keep in mind the labour of love and dedicated scholarship that usually goes into translating a literary masterpiece. In this respect, Shahrnush Parsipur has been blessed by exceedingly competent admirers of her work. This particular translation, however, is overburdened by too many explanatory accoutrements that in fact slow down and overtax the literary grace of the text. The novel does not need a foreword, an afterword and then a biography to introduce it to an English-speaking readership.

To be sure, each one of these items is quite informative in its own right (especially to students of literature and history). But their collective imposition on the literary grace of this novel adds an unnecessary and even distracting succession of alternating narratives that is damaging to the literary integrity of the work. These additional narratives project an undue nativist anxiety over the novel -- Talattoff thus writes:

“... every turn of the page of the translation called for explanations. Parsipur’s novel is replete with religious, literary, and other cultural references. Some readers may not fully appreciate how central to the narrative is Sufism... fewer are likely to grasp Parsipur’s references to the ethereal girl in Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat... They also might easily overlook the subversion of the symbol of the pomegranate, an image that has symbolized the feminine in classical works such as those of Nezami Ganjavi... Such footnotes would have been indeed necessary every time the text refereed too or portrayed something from the medieval period, or some complex aspect of a society in a state of transformation from a traditional time to a peculiar mode of modernity. In the end, we decided that the narrative would have been interrupted too often if we succumbed to the expedient of footnotes. Instead to the extent that was possible, we incorporated the necessary information into the text”.

All such anxieties may indeed be well-founded, but catering to them is a dubious and damaging urge. When Gabriel Gárcia Márquez’s works were translated into English, his writings spoke for themselves and did not need a group of scholars of Latin American literature putting an explanatory scaffolding around it or contemplating giving it footnotes or incorporating “necessary information” into his text or worrying that the US audience were not going to grasp Latin American concepts and history. Márquez’s words danced freely and spoke volumes to a global audience -- and thus can, I daresay, Shahrnush Parsipur’s. I had read the original Persian of Touba and the Meaning of Night cover to cover when I was a student in Manchester. At the reception of the Feminist Press for Shahrnush Parsipur I obtained a copy of its English translation and had her autograph it for me. Initially, it was a strange feeling to read Shahrnush Parsipur in English. But after a while that sense of oddity began to fade out and the familiar magic of Parsipur’s diction began to work itself out through the unfamiliar habitat of its English rendition. Touba and the Meaning of Night is simply a stunner (in any language)!

At the conclusion of the reception, I arranged to see Parsipur for lunch on the following day so I could interview her, and she gracefully agreed. At about noon time the following day, and over my husband’s outstanding Baqali Polo, we sat down and reminisced about Touba, Mahdokht, Zarrin, Mones, Farrokh-Laqa and most importantly Shahrnush...

Interview (May 4th 2006 -- New York, USA)

Golbarg Bashi: Thank you very much for this opportunity to sit down for a chat.

Shahrnush Parsipur: Of course, with pleasure.

GB: I am interested in your intellectual topography. I would like to begin to ask you when and how you came to the United States, and why did you chose this country as opposed to somewhere in Europe?

SP: When I wrote Touba and the Meaning of Night, it became very successful. I received many invitations from many countries. But the first country that I came to was the United States; of course I had invitations from Germany and Sweden as well. But because of my previous book, Women without Men, I was arrested. And as a result I could not go to Europe and I came straight to the United States. I remained in the United States for about 9 months and I travelled to a lot places -- I delivered many speeches and saw many cities. At the end of my trip, I went from Iowa to Europe. In Europe, when I was in England I suffered a mental breakdown -- because I am diagnosed with Manic Depression. I was hospitalised in England and returned to Iran in a very bad shape. A year later, the Germans invited me because of the German translation of Touba and the Meaning of Night -- in order to give a talk in Hamburg. From Germany I called my contacts in the United States, where my other book Blue Intellect [Aghl-e Abi] was about to come out. Because this book was banned in Iran, my publisher told me why don’t you come to the US to launch the book yourself? I came to the United States in order to help publish my book. I arrived in New York and one day I was walking and thinking to myself that I have no future in Iran and they don’t let me work. Last night when we were watching this film about those kids (5), I thought to myself that all Iranians have to go though this phase, we realise that we don’t have a space in our mother country [jame’ey-e madar] and we have to leave. I had remained in Iran for about a year, and I could not make a living. There was absolutely no way for me to make ends meet. No publisher dared to touch my work. Then I thought about trying to stay and work in the United States so I can make a living. It was with this idea that I came to the United States and thus a trip that was to last only a month, for me to just go to Germany and go back to Iran, turned out to be a journey of some twelve years. And here too, because of my illness, I have had many breakdowns and as a result I have not been able to work as I had wished here in America to make a living. I still have that dream so I can raise some money and go back to Iran.

Due to the problems associated with the revolution in Iran in 1979, she could not complete her education in France, and had to return to Iran. As a result of a misunderstanding, she ended up in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political prison, for four years and seven months.

GB: In Iran, you are best known for your books The Dog and the Long Winter [Sag va Zemestan-e Boland], Touba [Touba va Ma’nay-e Shab] and Women without Men [Zanan bedun-e Mardan]. How would you divide the various phases of your writing career?

SP: The first phase of my writing is up to The Dog and the Long Winter, at this period I am a young writer who is either working or studying and writing. This period begins with the time when I was fourteen or fifteen years old until about when I was twenty-eight. In this period, I am writing short stories and I publish them in various periodicals. But I cannot finish my first novel, The Dog and the Long Winter, the first section which I had written in fact when I was eighteen years old. Imagine, at one and the same time I am a university student, I work for a living and then I married quite abruptly -- I have a husband and a child, I have a lot of customary entertaining that I am obliged to attend to. In short it’s quite a crowded situation.

When I was twenty-eight, I received my bachelors degree. Mind you, I went to university quite late and attended evening classes which was a six-year programme. It was two years longer than for those who attended day school. So then what I did was I summarily divorced my husband [yeh bar-e shoharam ro talaq gereftam], I completed my degree at university -- so two of my problems were solved. My child and I rented an apartment along with my maternal cousins. It was there that I began working on The Dog and the Long Winter. I used to write at night and sleep during the day. This is the period of my writing during my early youth. Then, I went to France -- during a time of my life when I was in high spirits. In which period I wrote my book Small and Simple Tales of the Spirit of the Tree [Majeraha-ye Sad-e va Kochak roh-e Derakht] which I like a lot. It was after that that the Iranian Revolution happened. The rest of my work is written during this revolutionary period and after that when I was in prison and upon my release which is a really terrible period.

So I can consider the period after I turned twenty-eight until the end of my time in prison and when I left the country, as the second phase of my writing career. Then I came to the United States and I wrote my Prison Memoir [Khaterat-e Zendan], and after that I wrote Shiva and after that I wrote The Proper Etiquette of Drinking Tea in the Presence of Wolf [Adab-e Sarf-e Chai dar Huzur-e Gorg] which I had put together earlier. After that I wrote Sitting on the Wing of Wind [Bar Bal-e Baad Neshastan]. At any rate, I wrote all these books in the United States. So this would be the third phase of my writing career.

GB: Which still continues?

SP: Yes, still continues.

GB: In your writings I have noted that you are particularly interested in mythical and ancient cultures and you have extensive knowledge about them, especially in China, India and Iran. I wanted to know how and when you become interested in these sorts of subjects and what has been the influence of this knowledge on your fiction.

SP: I cannot pinpoint a date in which I can tell you when I became interested in mythologies. The reason for my interest in mythology was a Chinese book called I-Ching ... and this book is a fortune-telling book. But it’s a strange book as one of my American friends put it -- this is a book of strategy and tactic. This is a book that consists of sixty-four tables, each consisting of six lines. Inside this six-line sixty-four tables, the Chinese do fortune telling, the same thing we do with Hafez by way of fortune-telling. The Chinese do the same however ordinary Chinese do not use this book. This book is at the disposal of only the experts. At one point I noted that these tables resembled a chessboard and chessboard also has sixty-four squares on which the pieces move with the same logic of probability. Exactly as in the book I-Ching. This became very interesting to me, the similarities between these two cultures. I wondered what kind of relationship could have existed between these two cultures. Meanwhile I looked at an instrument in Iran called Raml. Raml consists of two cylinders on which four cubical squares rotate and as far as I could tell that too consists of sixty-four squares. Because two cylinders times four cubical squares becomes eight cubical squares, and eight times eight becomes sixty-four, when these cubical squares rotate. So I discovered something that was very interesting, one was this book I-Ching, the other thing was chessboard and the third thing was Raml, which is a small instrument. I had no doubt that there must be some sort of relationship [khishavandi] among the three objects and there must be a common ancestor, or parentage for these three objects. And since the parents are quite close to this phenomenon, we need to find out their more distant ancestry. It was with these vague ideas that I began to try to understand Raml. Mind you, in Iran Raml is a very secretive phenomenon and not everyone knows about it. Nor do they teach everyone about it. I managed to find a teacher and brought him home, initially he was playing hard to get and was reluctant to share his knowledge. In short I was quite baffled as to what this Raml business is all about. Soon after that I went to France in 1976. In France I went to a university, in the company of a friend. At that university, there was a gentleman -- a distinguished professor, specialising in Occult Science [uloum-e makhfi]. I told that professor that I have noted these similarities and I really don’t know what to do. He told me to go and study Chinese. So I started studying Chinese. He told me to study the Chinese Civilisation first, and then proceed to study Indian Civilisation and then try to connect all of these things together and see what happens. So I went to the Department of Chinese Languages and Civilisation and began my course of studies, which in about two years coincided with the Iranian Revolution. My circumstances in France became rather perilous. In 1980, I returned to Iran. What was your question again?

GB: My question was the influences of...

SP: It was through my studies of these three instruments that I was attracted to mythology. I had purchased a book to translate -- it was called Histoire de Croissance a Des Idea Religieux [The History of Religious Belief and Ideas], unfortunately I cannot remember its author. In that book, I read a number of Sumerian myths. One of which was the myth of Gilgamesh and other one was the Sumerian myth of creation. I was deeply influenced by them. From that point forward, I was deeply enmeshed in mythology and related matters.

GB: What has been the influence of these mythologies on your work? How does it manifest itself?

SP: These myths show themselves in part in my Women without Men, in part in Touba and Meaning of Night and in a considerable part in my Blue Intellect. Mostly in these three books.

GB: To move to a different subject, I know that you have written extensively about your prison incarceration. But I wonder if you could tell me now about the reasons and conditions of your time in prison?

SP: I have been to prison four times and I have extensively discussed them in my Prison Memoir [Khaterat-e Zendan]. It is very difficult for me to explain them again. But I will tell you...

The first time was because I publicly protested the execution of Khosrow Golsorkhi and Keramatollah Daneshiyan -- they were both poets, on which occasion I resigned from the Iranian National Television. Because I believed the reasons of the state for the trial and execution of these poets were not sufficient and it was wrong. In the letter of resignation that I wrote, I indicated that I was not opposed to the government [hukumat] or monarchy [maqam-e saltanat], I still am not opposed to it. But that execution was unjust. At any rate, because of the circumstances surrounding this resignation, I was arrested and put behind bars for 54 days. I was incarcerated.

The second time it was in 1981. I had returned to Iran in 1980. I tried to find a job to earn a living. My sister-in-law had a number of publications which she used to go and purchase. Both to read and to share with us. This particular publication was of a leftist leaning. Right now I cannot remember to which political group it belonged. The name of that publication was Rahaee [Emancipation]. I used to borrow it from my sister-in-law and read it. At any rate, a number of this particular publication had accumulated at my brother’s house. When a number of the leading cadre including Ayatollah Beheshti and his comrades were assassinated. All of these publications were immediately banned. I went to my brother’s to return my niece. My brother had asked my mother who had at the time was in the kitchen to get rid of these publications. But my mother had forgotten and these were left in his car and he had driven to the village of Evin a few days later and these publications were discovered by the police and the Hezbollah militia. At this point they arrested all of us. None of us were political activists, neither my mother, nor my two brothers, nor I. Each one of us was sent to prison for different reasons and periods. Mine become longer than all of them. It lasted for four years, seven months and seven day -- but I was never officially charged.

On two other occasions, I was arrested after the publication of my Women without Men, when a Hezbollah affiliated periodical attacked me, claiming that this story is anti-Islamic, unethical and contrary to this, that, or other things [zede behman]. I was arrested -- I believe in the month of July of 1990. I was in jail for about two months and my family put my maternal aunt’s house as collateral and bailed me out. After that I reported back to the prison in order to release my aunt’s house from any collateral obligation. These are the four times I went to jail.

GB: Again you have written in considerable detail about your experiences in prison. Could you just tell me briefly how you reflect back on your prison experiences?

SP: During my second term in prison, many executions took place. Large groups of people were executed. Maybe six, seven thousand people were killed, which later in addition to the executions that took place in 1988, the number exceeded to ten thousand deaths. These were exceedingly frightful years. The atmosphere of prison was terrorising...

GB: Among the books you have written since you came to the United States is The Proper Etiquette of Drinking Tea in the Presence of Wolf [Adab-e Sarf-e Chai dar Huzur-e Gorg]. Has your living in the United States had an impact on your writing? Do you consider yourself a writer in exile?

SP: I left Iran because I did not have a source of income. In the United States, I became a political refugee. Not initially, because I did not consider it proper to seek political asylum. But eventually I was forced to do it -- because I had no other way of staying in the United States legally. Right now, I live in the United States. I tell you in absolute honesty that my returning to Iran is an entirely personal question concerning my family. My son is in Iran and I wish to live with my son. But I cannot tolerate the atmosphere in Iran -- I have become too old to walk in the streets and have a, say, fifteen year-old girl to come and tell me “Hey Sister, fix your veil” (khahar hejabat-o dorost kon). You know my connections to certain aspects of Iran have been cut. Iran is a place where people get on each other’s nerves. It is as if they are striking each other’s nervous cords violently. They create a condition in which one has no choice but sit down and just cry out loud. The reason for that is simply the fact that the class differences are quite pronounced. The villagers have invaded the cities. They are consistently curious to find out how you as an urban dweller live. Thus on every occasion they grab hold of you and interrogate you. And I for one have no patience left in me to answer these questions. It is very difficult for me. On the other hand, I don’t really feel at home here in the United States either. I would have very much liked to have become completely American. But that is also impossible, because I live in an Iranian domain and about ninety nine percent of the time, I associate with Iranians. So the expression, choob-e doa sar tala (damned if I do, damned if I don’t), is perfectly applicable to me.

GB: Would you say that your presence in the United States has had an affect on your work?

SP: Yes, right now there is a historicity to my writing. Because I no longer am in touch with the daily realties of people in Iran. So I am in effect attending to a history. But I must say that I really wish I could go to Iran to meet the younger generation. I mean the young people who are now writing and working. It would be priceless for me to see them working.

GB: I see your point that there is now a certain element of historicity in your writing but do you also write about the exilic condition?

SP: No, so far I have not written anything about the United States because if I were to do so I would have to talk about characters that I have met here in the United States -- bringing them on to the stage. And I don’t think they would want to be dragged to that scene.

GB: Well, I think they would be honoured... My next question concerns the visual adaptation of your work. Recently Shirin Neshat has adapted certain parts of your Women Without Men for a video instillation -- in one of which you play a part and I understand that she is also working on a feature length adaptation of the entire book. I wonder what are your own thoughts on these visual adaptations of your literary work?

SP: Well, you see, you write in a certain way and the filmmaker imagines and portrays your work in a different way. I categorically like and endorse Shirin’s work because she is an artist par excellence and extremely talented and as a result I believe in this particular work -- she is also very successful. Of course she has made some serious changes in my work but this is the prerogative of any filmmaker to change the subject in a way that she can turn it into a film. As for my acting in all honesty, I am not an actress (chuckles). Bringing actors and actresses from Iran is very difficult. First of all, Women without Men is banned and the book itself is quite problematic. The other thing is that the Islamic Republic does not allow women to appear in movies without a veil so there are these kinds of problems as well. So the actors and actresses had to be selected in Europe and the United States. Well, Shirin was quite limited because of these restrictions and asked me to come and play the role of the Mother. So I said fine, I’ll do it. And I started acting.

GB: So your consider this a positive development -- I mean this transformation of your literary work into a visual work of art.

SP: Oh definitely.

GB: In your work, both in your fiction and in your memoir, you talk quite freely and frankly about moments of eroticism and sexual intimacy, i.e. you bring rather private and taboo subjects into the public domain. These I believe are liberating for your readers. Perhaps preventing women in particular from experiencing false guilt over these feelings. Where did you find the courage to write so publicly about these taboo issues?

SP: You see, Golbarg jan, from the time I was a young woman I discovered some secrets. And that was that unless you have sexual experiences you cannot enter the domain of public work and social activities. Those in power know this fact and thus transform women to sexual objects. I mean they first and foremost repress and denigrate women -- then they direct them to put a wedding gown on and go to their husband’s home and come out wearing the shroud. I mean to say that they train women in certain limited roles. So the most important barrier in front of a woman who has ambitions in creative work and wants to do something important is to overcome her fear of sexual taboos and matters. It is very funny that in our society you come across women who are more than seventy years old and still don’t know what an orgasm is. You come across young girls who go to a public bath and are afraid to sit down for fear of getting pregnant by some semen that might be floating around. There are some strange fears around which must be overcome. The way to do so is to talk about sexual matters as much as possible openly and honestly. In order to make it possible for women to get to know their own bodies. So she knows who she is and where she stands. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in sexual anarchy, not at all. But I completely endorse sexual freedom. This must come to pass so that women can become somebody. Having said all of this I hereby declare in this particular historical juncture that in my judgement the best thing a woman can do is having a husband, live with her children and carry on a quiet and dignified life!

GB: ... Are you concerned that since you left Iran, you may have lost some of your readership? And would you say that this potential loss may have an influence on the way you write?

SP: Well, my books keep selling rather well in Iran. Unfortunately there is no honest publisher in Iran to tell me exactly how many copies of my books are actually sold. Do you see what I mean? For example there is a publisher who publishes my Touba and the Meaning of Night or Dog and the Long Winter. I call him once a year and I ask him, how much have my books sold and when would he give me my royalties. To which he responds, “I beg your pardon Madame, I still have more than a thousand copies of your book sitting in my storage”. I call him a year later and he says “Would you please Madame, I still have two thousand one hundred copies of your book collecting dust on my shelves”. You see what I mean? My books instead of getting reduced in number they keep increasing in this man’s inventory. Something fishy is going on. Right now, I have no idea who is reading me. I have no factual information and this is quite an agonising issue for me. Because you need to have an active, agile and provocative relationship with your audience so that you can continue to write. But unfortunately I do not have this relationship.

GB: So it has had an impact on the way you write now?

SP: That is true.

GB:... because you have no idea how you are read and understood inside Iran.

SP: That is true.

GB: Right now two of your books have been translated into English...

SP: Three of my works.

GB:Women without Men...

SP:... I have a novella called ‘Tajrubeha-ye Azad’ that appears under the title of Trial Offers in the book that Professor Heshmat Moayyad has edited and is called Chicago Anthology of Modern Persian Literature published by MAGE in Washington D.C.

GB: That is right, so those two plus Touba and the Meaning of Night makes three of your works that have been translated into English.

SP: That is right.

GB: So, are you now conscious of your English-speaking readership and do you think this possible attention may have an impact on your writing in the future?

SP: I really don’t know my dear -- I am sixty years-old. When I write, still, Iran remains my main frame of reference. Do you see what I mean? Because I have not experienced the American society intimately. I do live in the United States but I live amongst the Iranians. But this is a time for me to discover what Americans say about my work and how they connect to it. In other words, I will discover what Americans think of my work. Time will tell.

GB: In er words, you are still not conscious of what your English-speaking readership thinks or does not think of your work?

SP: That is true.

GB: But if you were to become conscious of that audience -- it will have an impact on your work, right?

SP: Perhaps. I don’t know.

GB: And that would lead you to write about issues in this country?

SP: Perhaps. So far I have not written anything about the place where I live.

GB: I would also like to ask you about the writers that you have read and admired, both in the past and right now, and been your inspiration?

SP: Two writers more than anybody else have had influenced my work. One is Dostoyevsky from Russia and Charles Dickens from Britain. I have read them a lot. I have been extremely influenced by these two writers. Dostoyevsky, I loved so much that when I used to attend an Italian school run by catholic nuns -- on every Sunday there used to be a special programme that they would sit us down and preach to us -- I used to think that if I were to become a Christian and I were asked to wed the Christ, I would wed Dostoyevsky. This is how much I loved Dostoyevsky. As for Charles Dickens, I read one of his works called Great Expectations thirty-three or thirty-four times. The last time I read it was in fact when I was in prison in the Islamic Republic and I noticed that I still loved it -- it is yet to tire me. But the interesting things is that I have not read anything else by Charles Dickens. I have just read this one book over and over again. Among the French, I love Honore de Balzac. Two Latin Americans have heavily influenced me -- I adore Gabriel Gárcia Márquez and I love Jorge Louis Borges and people like them. I am very sad that I don’t know anything about contemporary Chinese or Japanese literatures. I believe that if I were to know these two literatures, I would have been influenced by them.

GB: Have you read all of these authors in their Persian translations?

SP: Yes, I have read them all in Persian.

GB: Who among Iranian authors have influenced you most?

SP: Sadeq Hedayat. His Blind Owl has had a tremendous impact on mIn my Blue Intellect, I have extensively used the Blind Bowl. There seems to have been a constane. I have used Hedayat’s Blind Owl in Touba and Meaning of Night.

GB: I know that you say that you are not a political person -- but do you follow the political news for example the issues concerning the women’s movement inside Iran...

SP: Look, I read this news -- but they don’t touch me. In other words, I am not constantly engaged with them.

GB: But they do interest you, right?

SP: Of course they do.

GB: Thank you Ms Parsipur -- sorry if I tired you.

SP: Well you know after so much grape juice...

NOTES

(1) For a critique and analysis of literature at the service of Empire, see Laila Lalami’s The Missionary Position. The Nation (June 19, 2006 issue), Negar Mottahedeh’s Off the Grid: Reading Iranian Memoirs in Our Time of Total War. Middle East Report Online (September 2004) and Hamid Dabashi’s Native Informers and the Making of the New American Empire. Al-Ahram (June 1st 2006).

(2) The term “war of/on terror” belongs to Zillah Eisenstein, an American anti-racist feminist activist, professor and author. Her seminal book Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and ‘the’ West is one of the most cogent feminist critiques of the US Empire.

(3) See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1988: 271-313.

(4) Committed academics, chiefly among them, Farzaneh Milani, Zohreh Sullivan, Kamran Talattoff and Farzin Yazdanfar have meticulously translated and analysed contemporary Iranian women’s literature but unfortunately their work is limited to academic circles. For a foundational text on Iranian women’s literature in English see Farzaneh Milani’s wonderful book Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women. New York: Syracuse University Press. 1992.

(5) Here Shahrnush Parsipur is referring to a documentary film titled Sound of Silencedirected by Amir Hamz and Mark Lazarz that we saw together on the evening after her book launch in New York. This film was screened in the context of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

About

Golbarg Bashi is a Ph.D. student in Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol, UK and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York, US >>> Visit GolbargBashi.com

http://www.shahrnushparsipur.com/article2.htm

Resource

http://www.parsarts.com

"Iran's literary giantess is defiant in exile... but missing home"

Camden New Journal - MIDDLE EAST EYE by MOHAMMED AL-URDUN

Published: 19 June 2007

Shahrnush Parsipur fled Iran in the 1990s rather than face another spell in jail for her writing. Now her bestselling masterpiece Touba and the Meaning of Night is being published In the UK for the first time

THERE'S something spellbinding about this woman in red. One of Iran's most revered authors, she's been translated into several languages and is feted internationally, spent years in a political prison and now lives in a self-imposed exile. Only the third woman to have been published in modern Iran, it wouldn't be gilding her lily to dub her one of the mothers of Persian literature. In the flesh she radiates charisma but has a reputation for guarding her privacy and confounding all assumptions of Iranian feminism.

It's been almost 20 years since Shahrnush Parsipur published her bestselling masterpiece Touba and the Meaning of Night, sparking a storm in Iran and wooing European critics. Now with the first British edition just out we are at last properly introduced to one of the giants of Iranian literature and to a book that took two decades to arrive.

"This is the first time I've worn red," the 61 year-old says of her new shirt and matching camisole-top. "I bought it in Oxford Street. When I saw it I had to have it! In Iran it's a habit for women to dress in black or grey: we don't want to attract attention to ourselves so red is out of the question. Even in America I dress mostly in black and grey."

But Parsipur shows few signs of ever having been cowed by convention. Neither Islamist nor nationalist, she's expert in Eastern philosophies and describes herself as spiritual and "a woman of the world". She cites Dostoyevsky and Dickens as her main literary influences. Of Dickens she decided to only read Great Expectations but, with typical eccentricity, read it 34 times and the masterpiece with helping her through prison.

Since she started writing in her teens she's had 12 books published. In her teens she married "abruptly" and had a son. She went to university and took evening classes, graduating in her late 20s. It was a "crowded situation" resolved when she divorced on friendly terms, moved out with her son and began working on her first novel, The Dog and the Long Winter. In France she wrote her second, Small and Simple Tales of the Spirit of the Tree. When she returned to Iran in the mid-1970s she protested against the Shah and was imprisoned. A few years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution she was again jailed for political dissent though she still asserts her innocence.

It was a terrifying time in which thousands were executed and she suffered harsh treatment during four-and-a-half years inside. She counts herself lucky however to have spent formative years with other intellectuals and fellow travellers and to have found the inspiration for Touba and the Meaning of Night. It's a masterful curate's egg of a novel mixing mysticism, history, philosophy and personal tragedy. Set against the backdrop of occupation, war, revolution and social transformation in Iran, it depicts the last century with more pathos and insight than any mere history book. It is the story of a girl who begins wanting to marry God, searches for the meaning of life but encounters death, marries a royal but falls on hard times and in her last moments has revealed to her the meaning of womanhood.

Written at a crossroads in Iranian history and in Parsipur's life, the story has special significance for observers of Iran as well as the author. Touba's character is the embodiment of Parsipur's women: a web of contradictions and complexities, socially repressed yet relentlessly pursuing the meaning of life. Touba's life is also linked with two other women who symbolise different stages of women's history from ancient times to modern Iran. It's a book that stirred such strong emotions in Parsipur that when she finished it in jail she tossed the manuscript onto a bonfire only to rewrite it from memory when she was released.

It was an instant hit in Iran and Europe but when in the early 1990s she faced another prison spell for her next novel, Women without Men, she chose self-exile in America. Now she lives hand-to-mouth renting a room from a friend in Berkeley, California. Her books sell in huge numbers in Iran but are confined to the black-market from which she cannot claim royalties and she has a natural reluctance to chase up her European agents for money she's owed.

In America she chose to sign up with a respected independent feminist publisher rather than a corporate book giant - even though her first royalty cheque for Touba was for just $90. Parsipur has a complex relationship with America. It has been a safe haven, she admits, but has never been a home-from-home. In fact she confesses to feeling unsettled - a feeling made worse by the recent war hysteria. A "wanderer by nature", she said the only place she's ever likely to feel at home is back in Iran with her son. She also finds herself instinctively swimming against the political tide. There is a new interest in Iranian women writers, in particular those who condemn Iran, but Parsipur voices ambivalence and unfashionable ideas that have brought howls from the politically correct. Femininity is her central theme but, while exiled Iranian writers like Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) have made a name for themselves as feminist opponents of the Islamic state, Parsipur scornfully declares: "I am not a feminist!"

But neither is she a stick in the mud - far from it. Her views, she said, are shaped by her study of ancient philosophies. Toying with her elegant Ying-Yang ring, she explained there's a bit of femininity and masculinity in all of us. The problem is that we're too often ruled by our masculine side, she said: Technology, war and social upheaval are symptomatic of our masculine urge to rip things up and start again. Whereas we need to get in touch with our feminine side, the creative instinct in tune with our environment. Her views on marriage are also bound to set feminists' teeth on edge: Despite several relationships since her divorce she said marriage is a cornerstone, meeting our sexual needs and "making a nest for children. For this you need a man and a woman ... The woman needs a man to help elevate the children."

To further confound the mainstream, she refuses to toss brickbats at Iran. That may appear counter-intuitive considering she has been suffering bouts of serious depression since prison and sees her son only every few years when he can leave Iran to meet her. That is until you realise she still has a complex love-affair with the country she left 17 years ago, which is home to her family and ex-husband - a film-maker she is close to, and which continues to tug on her heart strings.

So when she discusses Iran she naturally reaches for a philosophical and historical view. The 1979 Islamic Revolution was, she stated, a "manifestation of an ancient matriarchy". When I raised a quizzical eyebrow she replied that the roots of Iranian Shia Islam lie in the ancient Sumerian religion that worshipped feminine icons, while examples of female iconography appear throughout Shia history. Though the Ayatollahs may not have realised, "the basis of [their] religion is matriarchal. The roots are very old, thousands of years old and are pregnant with matriarchal ideas that have remained alive under the earth as it were, among the lowest levels of society". The clerics may have tried to set women back centuries but, "inevitably Iranian women have arisen".

Iran is undergoing tremendous social change with women a rising proportion of university students - already about two-thirds, and despite restrictions unprecedented numbers are occupying top jobs in law, science, medicine and arts. But Parsipur has no truck with suggestions she's been a political beacon for Iranian women. "I'm just an observer not an activist," she said. Now in middle-age she said she has pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will: She gloomily predicts more wars in the Middle East but pins her hopes on the birth of socialism with a dash of Islam; she despairs of ecological destruction but hopes we find a green solution in our feminine side.

Yet she still has the air of a woman searching for her own private place in the world. She admits she's in a "more masculine" stage of life - unsettled and in search of a missing piece. It's not hard to imagine peace of mind might lie in a permanent reunion with her son. In the meantime she is working on her next novel in the German countryside where she is living as guest writer-in-residence of the prestigious Heinrich Boll Institute and looking forward to her next meeting with her son.

"When I was in prison," she said, "I was fascinated by some of the women there. They could have been freed, or led different lives, married and been with their families but instead they died for their ideas ... I didn't believe in all their ideas but I believe in their spirit and that their spirit is in the women of Iran." With an optimistic laugh she added: "Iranian women have a tendency to change themselves ... I hope they too will be wearing red in the future."

http://www.shahrnushparsipur.com/article10.htm

"A Prelude to Touba and the Meaning of Night"

Seattle Asian Art Museum

October 7, 2006

Translation by James M. Gustafson

Department of History, University of Washington

In 1978, I was living in Paris.I had more or less fled from Iran around that time.Pressure from the shah’s secret police, called SAVAK for short, was very great.In 1978, I had been in Paris for two years.I was going to the university and majoring in Chinese Language and Civilization.The lessons were very hard and no matter how much I tried, I could not master writing Chinese characters easily.At the same time, I was busy writing a novel which I finished that same year, 1978.

In the summer of this year, a frightening event took place.A cinema caught fire in the city of Abadan and all of the people inside burned in the fire.It was being said that SAVAK agents caused this event, but that explanation seemed unusual because it was absolutely of no benefit to the state.Today, it seems that religious agents had done this.The people of Iran were outraged.At the end of August 1978, suddenly a piece of news shook everyone like a tremor.It was being said that in Jhaleh Square, where a crowd had gathered to hear a cleric speak, soldiers had opened fire and three thousand people were killed.Of course, later on it was clear that the number of casualties was much, much less than this figure, but the public had a tendency to exaggerate everything.

Following this, demonstrations and rallies began.Crowds numbering in the millions poured into the streets and held demonstrations against the Shah.A remarkable portion of this crowd was women in chadors.I used to sit in front of the television astonished seeing these women.Why had Iranian women suddenly returned to Islamic dress?What were they seeking?What was their goal in doing this?I was reminded of my grandmother who, in spite of being an enlightened woman, wore Islamic dress like all the traditional women.My grandmother, who was named Touba, had told me that when she was eighteen years old and had divorced her husband, she was grabbling with a fancy to marry God.She had seen God in the form of a cleric at a prayer gathering.She suddenly became convinced that this man himself was God.Starting the next day, she went from one prayer gathering to another to see this man and tell him “Sir, please, take my hand in marriage!”

Of course, this thought is very Christian.Nuns considered themselves promised to Christ, and Christ, in turn, is the offspring of God.My grandmother also wanted to become the wife of Islam ’s God, who as we know is a lonely God with no spouse.So if you consider the idea carefully, marrying God is quite bold.One could consider this the first step of a woman who unwittingly took a step toward freedom.

But in the beginning of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, women had all put on the veil and poured into the streets.Were they just like my grandmother many years ago, pouring into the streets to marry God?I believe it was precisely this.Conservative men who were orchestrating the Islamic Revolution never had any interest in giving women permission to participate in governing, but the participation en masse of women in this revolution was so prevalent that there was no way they could be excluded.

Although this is quite strange, at the heart of a reactionary and traditionalist revolution, women ’s freedom took shape.Traditional and very religious Islamic families sent their daughters to schools and universities.Women, little by little forged themselves a path to enter Parliament.Revolutionaries removed them from judiciary posts, but these judges, like Shirin ‘Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, became lawyers for the judiciary.Women became involved with learning in all fields.They went to classes in painting and music, and succeeded in various scientific fields.Now a situation has arisen where nearly sixty percent of Iranian university students are women.

In the summer of 1981, I was arrested along with my mother and two brothers.None of us were political so this arrest was unusual.I have written a detailed account of these events in my book The Prison Memoirs.But it was in this same prison that I decided to commit to paper an outline for a novel about the conditions for women.My grandmother was the best gateway for me to present this literary world to my readers.I chose her as a model for all the women of Iran.I tried to show how throughout history, women have been captive of a situation of their own inferiority.The prisons at that time had frightening conditions.Throughout just these few years, ten thousand people were lost to execution squads.Those thousands were among the finest children of Iran.In this uproar of blood and tears, I was writing.I struggled to keep my composure.

I told the warden I ’m not a political person, but a writer and asked if he would give me permission to keep to myself and write a book.He agreed, on the condition that I did not show my work to any of the prisoners.I set aside time at night for writing.I slept the greater part of the day and at night when everyone was sleeping I would write.I had compiled ten notebooks one could say that I had written half of the novel, when they changed our cell block.Of course, I was in jail with my mother.One day, they called us both in to transfer us and our belongings to a new prison.They searched all of our possessions and confiscated all my notebooks.This was less the work of the official jailers than of some of the prisoners who collaborated with the prison’s employees.They called these prisoners the “tavab,” a word meaning “extreme repentants.”I imagine they were afraid I was writing about prison life and had exposed them.At this point, I had lost all my notebooks.Tired and upset, I went to a new block.We were under the impression that it had better facilities.But I was much happier at the old corrective block since it housed better prisoners.The new block was full of the “tavab,” or collaborative repentants, and they frustrated everyone.The combination of the repentants with some of the guards made for hellish conditions.Fortunately, I had freed myself from the headache of participating in the various programs that were made obligatory in prison with the excuse that I am not political.But the rest of the inmates had painful lives.I remember one day one of the inmates was speaking non-stop in the prison corridor from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon.This was a tradition where prisoners would address the rest of the inmates through closed-circuit television installed in the corridor and tell them that they had repented.But this prisoner was very clever, and with what he said that day for seven or eight hours altogether he didn’t say even two words that were logical and comprehensible.Regardless, the poor prisoners had to listen.By now, it was nearly dinner time.The inmates were in the middle of dinner when the prison guard announced with annoyance and anger that the television was airing a program about one of the Hezbollah martyrs while the unsympathetic prisoners kept eating.So all of the prisoners went back out to the corridor now to watch this.At the end of this program, it was announced that in the prayer room a supplication prayer is being held.This is a special prayer Shi’i Muslims perform for two hours, full of tears and sighing.At midnight, the prisoners, tired with their heads hanging, were going off to go to sleep when the guard announced that at dawn a prayer of mourning would be held.This is also a Shi’i religious ritual.I imagine it is held on Friday mornings because traditional people have the habit of having their love affairs Friday nights.So by holding this prayer in the morning before a god who does not allow them even one evening of joy, they are asking for forgiveness.

A year passed and the atmosphere of the prison changed.Ayatollah Montazeri, a more liberal ayatollah, was put in charge of the prisons.Some changes took place.They returned my notebooks to me.I read them and noticed they had torn out some of the pages, mostly where I had talked about the killing of a fourteen year old girl.It dawned on me that writing in a prison atmosphere wthas not a good idea, because regardless of how free of a soul you have, there is nonetheless the possibility that you ’ll censor yourself.For this reason, I burnt all of these notebooks.

On the last day of winter 1986, I was released from prison.I had to work to make a living.I started working on some translations and then opened a book store with an acquaintance.This person left and I was alone and penniless.It was at this bookstore that I wrote the book again.At this time, I had to register with the revolutionary court every month.Six months passed.At one of my interrogations, they asked me what I was doing for work.I said I am a bookseller.The court official wrote to solicit my collaboration, asking me to tell them who was coming in to this bookstore.I was infuriated.I suddenly was made aware that if I became successful as a bookseller, I would be forced to cooperate with these people.For ten frightening days, I closed the bookstore and returned all of the books to the distributors.In these ten days, I aged ten years.I wrote the rest of the book Touba at home.But it took three years for the book to be published.In these three years I was under such emotional pressure that in the end, I had developed serious psychological symptoms and problems.

The book was published just one week after the passing of Ayatollah Khomeini.Three days earlier, I was in front of Tehran University which is home to various bookstores.I was looking over a newsstand.Not even one periodical was on the stand.Merely a few small books of crossword puzzles were to be seen.The atmosphere of censorship was incredible.But the publication of Touba was huge cultural news that exploded like a bomb and excited everyone.In the first ten days, the first prints sold out and the book was reprinted three times in a span of three and a half months.It sold a great number.I was feeling now there was more room to breathe.it seemed to be that people were rediscovering themselves reflected in this book.In fact, Touba, the character, is the average Iranian.She is somewhere between the aristocracy and the working class.For the past five thousand years, the people of Iran have increasingly spent each day more in bondage than the day before.Sumerian myths, that formed in our region, are rooted in the very remote past, thousands of years ago.In Sumerian myths we can read how people have been sinking deeper every day into slavery and servitude.Sumerian myths cover this ground.I must confess that in this book I have made extensive use of three Sumerian myths.The creation myth in the Sumerian narrative, which is the killings of Apsu and Tiyamat, the pre-existent male- and femaleness, was the basis for the formation of some of the characters of this book.The Epic of Gilgamesh has had such an impact on me that the character Prince Gil took his name from him.Of course, in the Sumerian myth, Gilgamesh does not attain immortality.In my book, he has become eternal, but not because of my attitude towards metempsychosis, which I do not believe in, but rather because this myth is eternal and is as though it was written just yesterday.I have taken Leila from the myth Lalita, which is also a myth from the region.The story of the journey of the Sumerian goddess Inanna into the underground world, which was reflected later in the Babylonian and Assyrian myth of the goddess Ishtar, is another basis for the formation of the characters Leila and Touba.In truth, I love mythology.I think that whatever we write, the myths have said before us, because in the realm of mythology, people have recounted their first experiences in a simple way that is difficult to imitate.We know that the airplane has matured and developed much technically, but it has been said that the pilots who created all the air maneuvers that were later adopted flew those single engine planes.Myths are of the same nature.People have created myths to express all of their sexual, emotional, economic and ecological needs.These myths recount all aspects of their character.Therefore, I as a writer am always concerned that I must use myths.It is also necessary to mention that I have made use of The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, a great writer from Iran.This book is a work of mythology in its own right.This book is available in English translation, and I invite you to read it.Every time one reads this book, they discover something new in it.

I should also add another point about the term “Touba.”In the Iranian mystical tradition, Touba is a tree in heaven whose name also appears in the Qu’ran.According to popular belief, the fruit of all trees and all flowers are on this tree, and all kinds of birds live on its branches.The convention is that this tree has many breasts, and when fetuses and very small children die they go straight to the lower boughs of the tree and feed on the milk of the breasts.

I am of the opinion that, as the author, I have said all I needed to say about the book.So that ’s Touba and the Meaning of Night.

http://www.shahrnushparsipur.com/article9.htm

Touba and the Meaning of Night Review

"A fictional biography of a woman named Touba, and her struggle to survive successively exploitative relation ships in a patriarchal religious culture wracked by cataclysmic political transformations, Touba and the Meaning of Night is a feminist tour de force that stands among the classics of twentieth-century Middle Eastern literature. We can't recommend Touba more highly." - Tikkun

Touba and the Meaning of Night centres largely around Touba and her experiences of the rapid changes Iran underwent in the 20th century. Born at the end of the 19th century, when a woman's role was often still very limited, Touba is confronted with constant change; from early on she wants simply to search for God -- a pursuit of something pure, simple, and complete -- but the world around her, and all it entails, holds her back.

Touba is fortunate in that her father recognises that the world is changing. Haji Adib isn't comfortable with much that is happening, but he recognises that knowledge can't be held at bay. He knows, for example, that it has now been proved that the world is not square or flat but round -- "yet he wanted to continue believing in the squareness of the earth". Admirably, he is willing to question himself:

He needed to understand why he wanted the earth to remain square. And he also understands: Now that the earth was round, everything took on a different meaning. Appropriately enough, one of the gifts he gives his daughter is a globe. More importantly, he teaches her how to read (even as he knows that giving women knowledge and allowing them to think undermines much of what he grew up with).

Her father dies when she is only twelve, but as the only member of the family with any education Touba essentially runs it. At fourteen she makes a great sacrifice, daringly essentially proposing marriage to Haji Mahmud, a relative who supported the household, in order to save her mother from having to marry him. Haji Mahmud is much older than her, and the marriage is no great success; it ends in divorce after only a few years.

Among the items Touba brings to her house after the divorce are her father's books (and the globe), but she barely has time to study them before she is married off again, this time to a relatively poor prince from the reigning Qajar dynasty. It, too, is not an ideal marriage: the prince is often away (and has to spend considerable time in exile). Touba only participates occasionally in court life, but is at least introduced to it -- while elsewhere encountering more revolutionary figures. Irans's significant geo-political role, and the tug-of-war of influence by the English, Russians/Soviets, and Germans, especially during the two World Wars also have ripple effects throughout the country (and her life), as does later the American influence.

There's constant change throughout the novel, with the new all around. Parsipur doesn't overemphasise it, but often slips it in nicely in such observations as when Touba sits down in an easy chair: "She was not used to furniture and felt stiff."

Politics often intrudes -- especially given her connexion to the eventually deposed royal family -- but Touba is, for example, satisfied that her family has been spared by Reza Shah, even though she knows others have been tortured and murdered by the regime: But what did it matter ? The ones who died were important individuals. The shah left ordinary people alone. After the second World War, with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah, and then the rise (and fall) of Mosaddeq, other characters also take a more prominent place in the novel, notably Ismael, who becomes Touba's son-in-law. An excellent student he becomes politically active and is arrested and interrogated by the security forces. Other significant characters portray other typical Iranian roles in those years.

Touba herself remains at some distance from much of this. She is curious about politics, but her view of it is relatively simplistic, seen only in light of her life rather than the larger picture (which is, however, something fleshed out by the other characters). Touba never forgets her personal quest -- and sets out (physically) several times for what she seeks. Rather than the simply traditionally devotional, Touba's experiences (and part of what lures her) is of a decidedly mystical bent, used very effectively by Parsipur.

Some of the novel's strongest episodes are flights of fancy, accounts of what amounts to the supernatural. Strikingly, Touba is eventually burdened with a particularly horrible story, and with it the body of Ismael's sister, Setareh -- to which, eventually, comes a second: She had carried the first body all these years, had cried for it on many occasions in the mosques and during sermons, and had protected the house's perimeters, not allowing an unfit eye to view the hidden grave. She had put aside her dream of searching for God in order to be able to adapt and turn the wheels of her fortune until the proper time arrived. Now they had placed a second corpse on her back and left the house.

Touba and the Meaning of Night does not proceed as one simple life-story. There are large gaps in the story, jumps ahead in time, while other parts are presented in close detail. Familiarity with 20th-century Iranian history no doubt helps in understanding some of the events and characters better, though Touba's own story, in particular, is surprisingly effective even without the historical connexion. (Both the translators' introduction and an afterword do provide considerable helpful supporting material; the book is very well presented.)

The language doesn't always flow smoothly (and the breaks in the action make this even more obvious), and it's not clear to what extent this is true to the original; possibly such an approach works better in Farsi ..... Nevertheless, the overall impression is entirely satisfactory, with many of the scenes vividly realised and quite gripping. Unusual, and perhaps not meeting all western expectations of such a history-covering fiction, Touba and the Meaning of Night is nevertheless certainly worthwhile.

Translated by Kamran Talattof and Havva Houshmand

Afterword by Houra Yavari

Biography by Persis M. Karim http://www.shahrnushparsipur.com/article5.htm

Movie Description from Netflix.com Women Without MenZanan-e bedun-e mardan(2009) NR

Amid the tumult of the American- and British-backed coup that reinstated the Shah in early-1950s Tehran, the heart-wrenching tales of five very different Iranian women converge in a lovely orchard garden, where they find both freedom and friendship. Director and acclaimed visual artist Shirin Neshat brings a striking aesthetic style to this stirring drama, an adaptation of the magical-realist novella by Shahrnoush Parsipour.