Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.
Guardian – Even the gentle references to sexuality in Fereshteh Ahmadi’s short story Harry Is Always Lost meant it was hit by the censors. The female protagonist is late catching a flight. In a frantic taxi journey to the airport, she is with a man, but it is not clear if they are dating or are husband and wife.
On the plane, she sits next to a strange man, who starts a conversation and ends up giving her a lift when they land in Tehran. This stranger drives so fast that the wind blows her scarf away, leaving her struggling to cover her head until they manage to buy a new one.
The story was initially in Ahmadi’s 2013 collection, Heatstroke, but censors at Iran’s ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, who vet all books before publication, asked her to remove it.
“They wanted the man and the woman in the story to be husband and wife or at least be engaged,” says the Tehran-based writer, while visiting the UK for the first time on the invitation of the International Agatha Christie festival in Torquay.
“They also had issues with the woman. They said she went too far with the guy on the plane – why was she travelling so easily independently? Why was she having a relaxed encounter with the second man? Her self-confidence made them uneasy.”
But that was under hardliner president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now the story is in print thanks to a little more leeway in censorship under newly re-elected president Hassan Rouhani.
Ahmadi’s work as a writer is particularly striking because she comes from a country where conservative attitudes towards women are prevalent. It is obligatory for women in Iran to wear the hijab, and in court their testimony is worth only half that of a man. Judges, as a rule, favour men over women in divorce cases.
Despite such discriminatory laws, Iranian women are incredibly active, taking up more places at universities than men and having a strong presence in civil society – although a number of leading women’s rights activist are languishing in jail.
Iran has a number of female vice-presidents and one female ambassador. Rouhani is expected to nominate a number of female ministers.
Ahmadi’s success is testament to female writers thriving in Iran’s literary scene.
Ahmadi, who has been a judge in a number of Iranian literary prizes, was born in the southern city of Kerman in 1972. She studied architecture at Tehran University and worked as an architect for some years before dedicating herself to writing. Her first collection of short stories, Everybody’s Sara, was published in 2004 and she has written two novels: The Forgetful Angel and The Cheese Jungle.
“The eight years under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a real catastrophe,” she says. “A lot of books did not get permission for being printed, a lot of books had permission but they were blocked from being reprinted. In the past four years under Rouhani a lot of books managed to get permission, get printed, for many writers they finally succeeded to publish their work.”
Ahmadi joined other prominent Iranian writers in signing a letter of conditional support for Rouhani, who was re-elected in a landslide victory last month.
The letter called for more freedoms. “We’re in a situation better than [the] past, better than those eight years, but we want it to get better.”
Ahmadi, who also works as an editor with two publishing houses, said she has noticed the political difference in her own job. “I see with my own eyes how many books get permission,” she says. “Now, at least you can go and haggle, you can talk to the censors, you can make changes, you can ask for a review.”
Like all Iranians, she practises a degree of self-censorship. Ahmadi says Iranian writers have mastered how to use metaphors and symbolism to get around restrictions. In a story featured in her collection Domestic Monsters, published last year, a group of men go up the hill to eat and drink, but there’s no mention of alcohol. Until someone throws up, a clue that strong drink was involved.
“We talk about something, but we mean something else. We’ve learned how to do this and our audience also gets it, the audience gets the clues,” she says.
“In the past two decades, women writers are doing something different in contrast with an older generation of female writers who were still following male traditions. A woman wrote stories but the stories are about someone else. The protagonist is a wife of that person, or the daughter of that father, the main focus is on that man and the woman is still in the shadows. That has changed in the new generation of Iranian female writers. Now they’re looking for their own voice, an independent voice.
“In the recent generation, good or bad, women writers are talking about their own issues. They’ve created an issue and they should resolve it themselves. It’s not an issue about their husband or a male character.”
She remembers an Iranian magazine journalist asking her about something she would like to do that she hasn’t done before. “I said I wanted to go for a stroll in Tehran in the middle of the night. For a man that is a strange wish, because he can do this. Not for a woman. I’ve never done it before – I really want to do it. I want to walk in the streets of Tehran at night at 1am, 2am to see who is still awake, how it feels, what’s happening in the city.”
Ahmadi is critical of how the outside world views Iran. “The world focuses on extremes in Iran, but people in Iran want to portray their inner stories, they want to talk about themselves, where I am in all of this,” she says. “When we want to know deeply about other people, we go and read their stories, watch their cinema but all these years, there has only been a focus on bold issues in Iran. That’s why people, their identity, their connections and their private lives that have similarities to lives in other parts of the world [are] forgotten in the middle of this. I think many of our writers are doing just that. They’re writing about themselves, they’re looking into their own identities.”
For Iranian female writers, so much of the outside world, and of their innermost lives, remains something that cannot be explored.
Fereshteh Ahmadi’s work is not yet published in English, but you can see a full list of her books here
