The Image of Woman in Contemporary Persian Prose1
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Even before plunging into my books
in search of the image of woman in contemporary Persian prose, I had a nasty
suspicion that my task would not be an easy one. The reason: hard as I tried, I
could not remember off-hand many women characters in our literature, which have
remained with me in one way or another, out of the multitude of books written
by various authors.
This I found very odd, because I
flatter myself by thinking that I am an attentive reader. Could this lack of
recollection only be due to a sudden selective failure of my memory, or could
it be also the result of the attenuated role of women in our novels and short
stories? To prove one assumption or the other, offered no joyous perspective.
Call it masochistic if you like, but I had to know; hence, I rushed to my books
and started thumbing feverishly through them.
As for the first supposition, I
concluded that there is not a dark fathomless well in my memory, which only
sucks women into oblivion — its failure is quite general! As for the second, I
observed that it is not so much the absence of women in many stories that
leaves a vacuum in the mind of the reader, but the repetition of a single brand
of women that renders them almost insignificant. Most of our contemporary
writers have created a stereotype-woman to whom they have clung for dear life.
I will give a few examples to illustrate this point.
To do so, I will go back to the
pioneer writers of this century and start with Dashti, Hejazi and Mostaan2.
Their idea of a woman is best
expressed in this old song:
"Follow
a shadow, it still flies you
Seem
to fly it, it will pursue.
So
court a mistress, she denies you;
Let
her alone, she will court you.
Say,
are not women truly then,
Styled
but the shadows of us men?"
Having said "Amen", these
three have gone to work. However, they put their men so directly in the
limelight that the "shadows" they cast are almost reduced to
negligible spots.
In short, women, as far as these men
are concerned, are nothing but perfumed, elegant, attractive ladies only too
ready to get undressed and fall into somebody's bed. Their virtue: beauty;
their passion: vanity or love.
All these three authors have
produced at least one novel, which has the name of a woman as its title (Dashti
has written "Fetneh";
Hejazi, "Ziba" and Mostaan,
"Rabeeh"). These heroines,
however, never come to life in a three-dimensional way. They remain throughout
the book only what their creators had intended them to be i.e. pin-up pictures
of dolled-up women, with a soul so small / that some believe they have none at
all!
This style of writing, once the
height of fashion, did not stand the test of time, however, and after a
relatively short period died away completely. My generation totally snubbed it,
and the ones that followed mine, remained practically unaware of it. Only a few
writers of certain periodicals kept on producing the-ever-in-love or ever loved,
at any rate ever-flat, portraits of women cherished by Dashti, Hejazi, Mostaan;
writers such as Kasmai and Fazel3.
Although I started with three of our
earliest writers of fiction, I do not intend to stick to the chronological
order to demonstrate further my point of view. I shall talk of some other
authors of monotype woman, more or less at random and as they come to my mind.
In the works of Sadegh Choubak
(1916-1998) and Gholam-Hossein Saedi (1935-1985), you will find the diagonally
opposite cliché of woman to that of the aforementioned trio. Choubak's and
Saedi's women are smelly, filthy, beaten up creatures who are dressed in rags,
if at all dressed, because both these authors are particularly fond of
depicting women as prostitutes. Other occupations, which they have seen fit for
women, are begging, washing dirty linen or dead corpses, getting pregnant out
of wedlock and then somehow getting rid of their bastards. However, whatever
they do, whoredom is never too far away. If ever any other sort of woman puts
in an appearance in one of their stories, she is either so sketchy that she
cannot be considered as a character, or else so insipid that she hardly
attracts any attention. (The women in "Wooden
Horse" by Choubak and "Being
Calm in the Presence of Others" by Saedi are of the sketchy-insipid
type.)
First, let us have a quick look at
their prototypes:
Two sisters in "Zanbourak-Khaneh" by Saedi, who
live in squalor with their other sister, mother, father and a brother-in-law in
a single shabby room, are simply two foul-mouthed, dirty-minded harlots. Two
women in two stories by Choubak, "The
Gravediggers" and "Why the
Sea was Stormy", are trampled-upon, roughly-handled women who kill
their newly-born children — one by burying it alive and the other by throwing
it in to the sea — in order to continue their adversity-stricken lives.
"Under the Red Light" by Choubak is the description of a paltry
brothel, so is "Shadow to Shadow"
by Saedi – with one noticeable difference: Choubak's brothel is populated with
whores, where as Saedi's can boast of only one, Delbar Khanom, whose advanced age has forced her to retire from
that oldest profession to provide the addicts with opium and narcotics.
Khanom Bozorg
of "Beggar" by Saedi is a
vagabond woman who earns her living by asking people for alms; Saltanat and Kolsoum of "A Purple
Dress" by Choubak live thanks to the corpses they rub and wash.
Both Choubak and Saedi have a lot of
stories in which no woman figures at all; and their other women characters, as
I mentioned before, are merely fleeting figurants who just happen to be in the
story.
Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (1923-1969) is
another writer with just one model for women; and this model, in all
probability, has been taken from his family surroundings. She could be his
illiterate mother (as in "Cooking
Porridge") busy in sorcery and witchcraft to get rid of a rival wife. She
might also be his chador-clad sister (as in "The Unwanted Woman") willing to remain the slave of the man
who has married her, rather than face being sent back as a bad coin.
The only thing for which I feel
grateful to Al-e-Ahmad is that he is not a prolific author. He has, of-course,
amply compensated for the meagreness of his literary efforts by the enormity of
his pompousness, which today does not concern us.
He has only a few short stories with
woman characters in them. Apart from the two I have already mentioned, the
others are "The Pink Nail Varnish",
"Someone Else’s Child",
"The Auspicious Festival"
and "Nezhat-doleh". In all
these stories, with the exception of "Nezhat-doleh",
the reader is again faced with the eternal mother and sister, in that eternal
kitchen sweating and toiling away, ready to satisfy every wish or whim of the
man of the house. They no doubt satisfy the superiority complex of their
creator as well, who makes them as miserable as possible just to appear
magnanimous by showing some pity.
Nezhat-doleh,
the only odd woman out, is such a flop as a story that one wishes that
Al-e-Ahmad had stuck to his uneducated veiled housewives, drab as they are, for
at least he could not have committed the same stupid mistakes in describing them
as he has committed in trying to portray Nezhat-doleh.
The reasons why this story is a
complete failure are manifold:
a) Al-e-Ahmad does not know the most
elementary details about the character he is creating,
b) He does not possess the necessary
sense of humour to write a satirical story,
c) His obvious hatred for his
character, (a well-to-do woman who cares for her face and figure), has rendered
the writer enervating rather than the personage etc. etc.
Nezhat-doleh
serves one purpose however: she shows that Al-e-Ahmad has not only chosen the
female members of his family as models of women to write about, but that he
simply considers them as model women to be emulated in life. This idea,
of-course, comes through very clearly in "The Auspicious Festival" as well. There, he glorifies his
father, a foul-mouthed mullah, who refuses to take his wife to a party given in
honour of the emancipation of women.
Al-e-Ahmad's arrogance has made him
believe that he is a man of sense; and as a man of sense, according to the
formula coined by the Earl of Chesterfield, does not ever consult women about,
or trust them with serious matters. The Earl of Chesterfield lived in the 17
Century — so should have Al-e-Ahmad, I believe.
Paradoxically, the further we move
from the writers of the turn of the century and the nearer we get to the
present time, the image of woman in fiction gets paler and paler. Even the
women writers who have taken up pen, have not produced any memorable female
character, some one who is more than a mere name or sex, who is a person
indispensable to the story, whose qualities – good or bad – whose attitudes – right
or wrong – whose actions – calculated or naïve – make her stand out in the
memory of the reader.
One of these women writers — Taraghi
(1939- ) often talks in the first person singular as a man — in one story on
his nuptial night if you please! In addition, when she happens to talk about a
woman, her knowledge of a woman's anatomy seems to be even scantier than that
of her male counterparts. She has made a woman, for example, deliver long
ideological lectures between two labour pains! Now those of us who have borne
children know that such a performance and such an effort is not humanly
possible. That is why, I for one, was not in the least surprised to see her
character die in the middle of one of her elaborate speeches.
Another woman writer — Simin
Daneshvar (1921- ) seems to believe that only men must act and women should
watch. Kingsley sums up her work nicely in these couple of lines written in mid
l9 Century:
"For men must work and women
must weep
And the sooner it's over, the sooner
to sleep."
In Daneshvar's case, I have often
wondered how much Al-e-Ahmad, who was her husband, is responsible for her
creation of those snivelling nonentities as women.
Back to the pale image of woman in
other writers: In the works of Bahram Sadeghi (1936-1986) and Jamal Mir-Sadeghi
(1933- ), no woman is described in full detail to have a distinct face or
shape. Some other writers of the same generation go even further in that
direction — their women don't even have a name, and are referred to simply as
"the girl" or "the woman". Their indolence is justified:
why bother, after all, to give a name to a bag of bones!
Ahmad Mahmoud (1930- ) has also
economised well on his energy, for out of his 22 short stories, only two are
burdened with a woman character, and out of his three novels, two could boast
of being womanless.
As a sort of an apology to those of
you who have come here to-day to discover the Persian versions of Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary, or Lady
Chatterley, or Cousine Bette, or Scarlet O'Hara, I have saved a few
colourful pictures of women for the end. However, before getting to them I
would like to say a few words about the works of Mahmoud Dolat-Abadi (1940- ).
He could also be considered as a
writer who has encountered only one class of female. For his women, without
exception, are all hard working, needy peasants living in near-starvation
villages around the Khorasan province. Nevertheless, his women somehow manage
to exist in each case as individuals. They are all credible convincing
characters, who cannot be taken away from the text without leaving a
considerable gap; something that certainly could not be said about very many
authors I have mentioned so far.
In Dolat-Abadi's case, the image of
the woman he portrays — repetitious as it may appear — should not come under
scrutiny, but rather his concept of goodness and evilness of woman. Chastity is
cherished by him to the point that whenever a woman of his, deviates from its
path, the reader can be certain that catastrophe shall follow catastrophe. The
life of no playful woman could possibly come to a happy end as far as
Dolat-Abadi is concerned. This idea obsesses him to such a degree that it
either constitutes the leitmotif of his story, or else it forms an important
part of it, in almost all his books. "Journey",
"Departure of Suleiman" and
"The Man" are among the
first category; "With Shabairou",
"The Fable of Baba Sobhan",
"Around the Curve" and "Kolidar" belong to the second.
The image of woman I reckon as
memorable can be found in the works of Mohamad-Ali Jamal-Zadeh (1892-1997) and
Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951).
Both these writers are the authors
of their time. By that I mean, they have depicted their era with such a
fidelity and accuracy, that their books, apart from the literary merit, have a
sociological value as well; and what is more, their dialogues are so very
representative of the language spoken at the time, that they could be
considered as good sources for linguistic studies. In short, one can see and
hear
What distinguishes the two authors
from one another is that Jamal-Zadeh is happy just to mirror his society, whereas
Hedayat goes further than only reflecting the different aspects of life. He has
a sharply critical eye that leaves (usually) an unwritten moral between the
lines.
The three women characters I have
chosen from the works of Jamal-Zadeh are as different from one another as any
three women are in real life. Two of them appear in his "Book of Water- ducts" and the third
in "The Judgement Day".
Ezat-Molouk,
a widow five-times over, doesn't mind (to put it mildly), becoming a bride yet
another time; but waiting for that happy moment, she doesn't deprive herself
from having some good times. At any rate, remarrying is not her major
preoccupation, because she is first and foremost a businesswoman whose main
task is to collect every penny of interest her capital accumulates for her. To
achieve this end, she does not hesitate a fraction of a second to use her
feminine charm, and if that happens to fail, to start her threats and menaces,
and finally, as a last resource, to kick up a scandal, which has proved to be
an infallible method. She, needless to say, uses exactly the same tactics to
avoid paying her debts.
Ezat-Molouk
is described in only a few pages of the book and we hear only two of her
conversations in full. Nevertheless, in those pages and through her vocabulary,
the reader knows all there is to know about her: the way she puts on her
make-up every morning; how she starts her round of daily visits; her manner of
talking and walking; the reason for her faking humbleness or blowing her top
off. She is an authentic woman, and without her, the district Jamal-Zadeh
paints for us would not be the same.
Robab Soltan,
the wife of the baker living in that same district, is a modest housewife who
passes her time cursing and cajoling, alternately, the half a dozen unruly offsprings
she has given birth to in seven years of marriage. Her curses are just as
colourful as her sweet lullabies and both ring as true as the character of Robab Soltan herself.
Robabeh occupies
a much smaller place in "The Book of
Water-ducts" than Ezat. She
is not seen in the alley, but is heard all over it, particularly when there is
a good hot meal at home which softens her sulky husband, or while he is away
and Robabeh starts her routine of
coaxing and swearing to calm her children down. Through her voice, one is
acquainted with her, and that voice cannot be mistaken for any body else's.
Finally, Masoumeh Shirazi: She first appeared as a part of Jamal-Zadeh's
book: "The Judgement Day".
The chapter devoted to her is entitled "The Ecclesiastic and the Courtesan". Being by far the most
moving part of the "Judgement Day",
Jamal-Zadeh later turned this chapter into a separate book called "Masoumeh Shirazi".
The angel Esrafeel has blown his trumpet, it is the day of resurrection, and
all the dead are out of their graves standing in front of the Divine Court of
Justice. Masoumeh is just one of
these sinners. She addresses God in a simple sincere tone, telling Him all her
life story. Her monologue is interrupted only a few times by His voice to
encourage her to go on, and is frequently punctuated with remarks such as
"O God! Strike me deaf-mute if I sound blasphemous, but you are not a
woman and cannot possibly understand what it means to have a miscarriage!"
When Masoumeh finishes her story, she appears as pure and untouched as
the first snowflakes, the very personification of innocence. What can
Jamal-Zadeh's God do, but canonise her? Now let Khomeini's God sizzle in His
holy juice!
Now to Hedayat.
I personally believe that the women
created by Sadegh Hedayat are better portrayed than his men are. He captures
them more accurately, more precisely. One of the reasons for this is, I
suppose, that he sees the shortcomings of the society in which he lives better
reflected in a woman. His anticlerical and anti-Islamic feelings — highly
developed and well known to all the scholars of his works — could find no
better vehicle than women to drive his message home. Women, after all, have
always been the main victims of religious fanaticism and superstition in my country.
In stories such as "In Quest of Absolution", "The Go-between" or "Chador", Hedayat brilliantly
explains the absurd and the morbid aspects of Islam. Who could demonstrate better
these absurdities than women characters? And they do so most successfully.
Sadegh Hedayat understands women. He
is perfectly familiar with their different and often complex feelings. That is
why his women are not simply a handful of passive characters that sit inert and
accept whatever befalls them without showing any reaction — each, needless to
say, in her particular manner and within her individual capacities. They are
women capable of hating, loving, being clever or jealous. In short, they are
made of flesh and blood and come to life most vividly.
Although Sadegh Hedayat is aware of
the ignorance and miseries of the women of his time, he never over dramatises
the situation to show despair; nor does he tear a woman to pieces to convince
the reader that she is under unbearable pressure.
Zarin-Kolah,
the heroine of the story called "The
Woman who had lost Her Man",, in spite of her tender age and lack of
experience, is far from being totally crushed when she finally realises that
her husband has abandoned her for good. Alavieh
Khanoum's life is no better than a dog's, but that does not stop her from
getting the better of all the other people surrounding her in the story. It is
just about her — Alavieh Khanoum —
that I would like to say a few words.
She is a fat, bosomy woman with
fuzzy hair and swollen eyelids, whose only means of defence is a sharp glib
tongue. Her strong sense of survival makes her flexible at times and rigid at
others, a skilful liar, a shrewd plotter and a perfect mistress of her feelings
at all times.
The reader meets her on the way to
Mashad among other rather poor travellers who go there on pilgrimage. However,
for her, this journey is nothing but the means to win her bread and butter. Alavieh Khanoum commands a small and
strange group of people. They have been trained by her to narrate the plights
of the saints in Karbela desert, with the aid of a painted curtain depicting
the bloody scenes of the Holy War, thus swindle the other passengers or the
inhabitants of the villages and towns through which their shabby carriage
passes.
One never knows exactly how she has
recruited her army: she constantly lies about her relationship with the members
of her group. The women in that group are sometimes her sisters sometimes her
daughters; the man, alternately her son and son-in-law; the children, her grand
children or orphans adopted out of charity.
Whatever or whoever they may be,
they are all dependent on her. She uses the people around her and finds no one
indispensable; but the others need her — Alavieh
Khanoum is irreplaceable. Her quackery gets her into some tight spots every
now and again, of-course, but each time her sense of survival shows her a way
to wriggle out of the difficulty.
Alavieh Khanoum is a prominent character thrown into relief, who remains engraved in
the mind of the reader forever.
I may have given you the impression
that I have a very poor opinion of Persian contemporary writers, with the
exception of Hedayat and Jamal-Zadeh. Although this may be true of some of
those mentioned in this lecture, it is certainly not true of all of them. I
must also add that certain stories, to which I have referred today, to
demonstrate the weakness of the women characters, are not necessarily bad
stories. Another point worth mentioning: I have not analysed the works of all
writers in this exposé — some because I do not consider them worthy of
analysis, but others because this modest study could not pretend to be
exhaustive.
There is one absence, however, that
I hope you have noticed and missed. I mean, of-course, the image of woman in my
own books. This negligence has not been due to any sort of modesty on my part,
(I am afraid I cannot boast of any), but because, oddly enough, the
praiseworthy things others "discover" in your works always sound much
more convincing than the "facts" you relate about yourself!
To prove that I did not start this
survey with some preconceived feminist ideas, I would like to conclude my
speech with a quotation from George Eliot:
"I'm not denyin' the women are
foolish, but God Almighty made 'em to match the men."
I had expected only this much and no
more of our contemporary authors, but I am afraid most of our writers seem to
have forgotten the latter part of this saying, because their women do not match
their men. This is regrettable.
I thank you for bearing with me.
1This
lecture was given at the following centres: University of Pennsylvania
(U.S.A.), Columbia University (U.S.A.), U.C.L.A. (U.S.A.), University of
Michigan (U.S.A.),
2All three
popular authors at the turn of the century. However, Ali Dashti will be
remembered for his studies of Persian classics and religious matter — chiefly
for “Twenty-three Years” (a study of the prophetic career of Mohammad). He was
after the 1979 Islamic Revolution imprisoned and tortured at the age of 85 and
died as the result of his injuries in December 1981 or January 1982.