Book Review : Afsaneh : Short Stories by Iranian Women.

            

This was a heartbreaking book to read and I wept through reading it. I had to put it away and take breaks from it. I must add I read it while I was grieving and it just wrenched my heart out. Perhaps my grief had something to do with my reaction, I can't be sure. While reading a few of the stories in this collection earlier, I'd had a similar response though I never got around to completing the entire collection at the time. Yet, I wouldn't miss this book for the world.                                               

This particular collection is part of a series of women's short story collections from all over the world. I have read the Indian collection. The Pakistan collection called Kahani and Galpo the collection from Bangladesh lined up next. There are also collections of stories by Palestinian, Czech and Lebanese women, all of which are published by Saqi Books.

The editor's foreword provides a short introduction to modern Iranian literature by women. Kaveh Basmenji is the editor and translator. I probably shouldn't hold his gender against him, but I can't help feeling a woman would have done a very different and better job of curating this collection. 
The characters who inhabit these tales are overwhelmingly women characters.

There are two stories featuring men taking a second, younger wife, both told from the perspective of the daughters of the first wife. In the  the protagonist is a child living a charmed and happy childhood when she realizes that her father is not really on a trip but is gone forever. In Mansoureh Sharifzadeh's The Stranger the teenaged protagonist's father has abandoned her mother, and the daughter now faces threats of violence similar to the violent attacks and abuse her mother had put up with. 

Indeed violence and its threat is the ghost suffusing the pages of this book, its presence lurking from the words, casting a pall over the lives of the women who live in them. 

Most of the stories are pictured in rural settings life and the descriptions are rich with depictions of nature. Agriculture has been a basic mode of living of the people of the land and it is natural that the stories use the agricultural practices and mentions of flora and fauna as regular backdrops to the stories. Gardens are an intrinsic part of Iranian culture.  
Indeed the Mughal love of gardens and their laying them out wherever they went, be it Shalimar Bagh or Srinagar or the rich greens in the cities can be traced to a very large Persian cultural influence. 

A few of the stories with magic realism were difficult for me to understand, and the genre not being a favorite of mine, the convolutions that went on did sometimes get the better of me.The magic realism of Shahrnoosh Parsipour in two stories Crystal Pendants and Mahdokht, though set in very different backdrops,  are tied to their characters' yearning for liberation, even if only in another life. 

Moniru Ravanipour's The Blue Ones and  also rife with fable images of weeping mermaids and sailors who are down to them and thus drown in the sea, was as gripping as it was surreal, yet made me very uncomfortable. The comings and goings of people in a hospital which seemed more a place of cruelty than healing, I couldn't wait for it to end, and the ending left me mystified. I really wasn't sure why the protagonist patient wasn't going home and why she's push her own daughter to help heal the broken heart of a soldier returning from war.

The tragedies of old age, the helplessness that comes with it and the dependence on children who have less and less time for you even as you languish lonely, is depicted in heart breaking detail in more than one story. Whether it is To Whom Shall I Say Hello? or Goli Taraqqi's character Mahin Banoo in  A House In Heaven, the tribulations of old age are poignantly brought to life in these stories.


Mahsid Amarshahy's story of a chance encounter on a train, in Khorramshahr-Tehran tells of a woman who takes a risk with a sexual in nature. A woman with agency and control over her body and her desire is such a welcome departure. 

My absolute favorite story was The Shemiran Bus so wonderfully crafted by Goli Taraqqi. A woman taking a bus ride with her daughter reminisces about her own childhood riding a bus to school and her attachment for the driver of her bus, who by all accounts seems like an uncouth untrustworthy character. It reminded me so much of Rabindranath Tagore's "Kabulliwallah".

There are twenty stories in all, with a few authors getting multiple entries. The editor uses the time frame of the Islamic Revolution to categorize the stories. The revolution however, is actually featured in only two of the stories and it does not seem to have brought any discernible change in the (mis)fortunes of the women who populate these stories. At least no drastic change is portrayed in the stories featured here. A little bibliography states that most of the writers were born in the time period 1931-65 with a mention of one or two more works of each of the authors. 


As for the translation, the attempts to use Americanisms becomes glaring and the translation is jarring at times. Even though I am not conversant with the Persian language, I could still guess where the translation has floundered. When the sensibilities of the speakers of two languages differ so widely, transferring the syntax to another language is always a challenging task and here the gaps show up. 

This is my first introduction to modern Iranian literature, and I am not aware of the variety of writing available, but perhaps the collection could have been a little more varied.  The stories can get a tad repetitive. The depiction of the harsh realities of ordinary working class women's lives in Iran may come from a place of truth-telling, but the relentless misfortune that dogs the women in most of these stories does get a bit harrowing. 

 Afsaneh  a word commonly used in Hindi and Urdu, is familiar to me. The word itself is magical to me, with it's connotations of fable. And much of the delight I took in reading this book was the pleasure of stumbling upon familiar words, from having been absorbed from Persian into Hindi. Realizing how the culture of this vast, ancient land has influenced Indian, specially the Awadhi culture of Lucknow was another bonus.

If you are at all curious about Iran and the lives of its women this book comes highly recommended.

My Rating: 

Book Review: Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

                                               

 Although it is touted as a book about three Omani sisters Mayya, Asma and Khawla, this slim volume contains the stories of a multitude of characters, all connected through the three sisters and the men they marry.

Many of these characters get a page or two to themselves. However, the book isn't long enough to flesh out each of these lives. Yet, one still ends up sympathetic to most of the people populating this book.

The books has numerous allusions to bits of black magic and the often the narrative shifts between different time periods. At other times, it is just the hallucinations of the characters, but with so much going on, it all gives rise to some confusion.

The allusion to the moon is made often, as it is an icon of traditional Arabic poetry, specially the classic love poems. In the midst of it all is a strange, passionate love story between the father of the three girls and a typical femme fatale character. In itself it seems lively enough yet somehow its attachment to the rest of the narrative is wanting. Why is there absolutely no explanation of why he cheats on his wife? It seems to have been thrown in almost as an afterthought.

 The character who is most sympathetically fleshed out and who I grew grew quite fond of is Abdallah who falls in love with and marries the eldest of the three sisters, Mayya. However even in their relationship all is not smooth sailing.

Abdallah loses his mother when very young and grows up under the watch of the strict disciplinarian of a father and the violence that he faces at his hands makes your heart break. Throughout the length of the book Abdallah keeps on trying to recreate images of his mother trying to remember whatever little details he can. Her death, narrated rom different perspectives is like the unravelling of a mystery. Here is another convoluted story which remains unpredictable till the end.

 Abdallah faces violence that is father's hands and the trauma of it never really leaves him. On the one hand the desertion by his mother- at least that's the story told to him-haunts him all along. His desperate attempts to establish intimacy with his wife also leave you sympathetic to him, as she remains aloof.  

The reasons why Mayya refuses intimacy are not very clear other than her short lived romance with a young man before her marriage. Does she holds onto his memory, or is it simply depression does not become clear.

 The second sister who is desperate to get out of her parents home so she simply latches onto the best offer that comes away and she gets married. This is as much a reflection of the lives of so many women at least in parts of Asia where marriage is the one step which ensures at least some degree of freedom because till a woman is married she is not even considered an adult.

 The third sister Khawla gets the least time in the book

 This slim volume is populated by so many characters

 the various threads are all woven into each other and that the author is able to hold on to the various threads in making them into a coherent wholes is a definitely a big achievement

 It is also reminiscent of a lot of the customs and mannerisms of Indian women. The effort to keep up with the joneses specially in the matters of gift-giving to the bride at the time of the wedding in terms of a trousseau, the need to show off via the various customs, the internal wranglings between the women in the household and ultimate the word 

Patriarchy is more powerful than any law-these are the aspects that seemed very familiar to me.

 Even as these women live traditional lives they are hemmed in by the rules that bind them. They are able to find strength to not only guide their lives in their own way, how they best see it fit, but also navigating the different courses of life as it unfolds.  The book is also an intimate peep into Omani society, how it functions and how it is transitioning from the days past when it was a society of nomads of the bedouin tribes and now mostly city dwellers, living modern day lives in large metropolises.

If you, like me have had no introduction to Omani literature, this is certainly a great place to begin.