from Vol. #8, Issue 2: Summer 2017
by Shahrzad Ghobadlou

Review Essay: Presence, time, and resistance in Farideh Razi’s Vis and I

UNDER REVIEW: Vis and I
AUTHOR: Farideh Razi
SOURCE LANGUAGE: Farsi
TRANSLATOR: Niloufar Talebi
PUBLISHED: March 2017
PUBLISHER: L'Aleph
PLACE OF PUBLICATION: Sweden
PAGES: 114
PRICE: $12.18
SALES LINK: Amazon

Feminist literature in Iran represents an oxymoron, where liberty and equality exist as two conflicting values in representing two different aspirations. One tends to explore the occidental rejection of patriarchal society, while the other impinges on a woman's freedom of speech. Women are expected to believe that they are being given a favor in instances in which they are considered men's equals, but they have no right to question the reasoning behind doing so. “Women get to choose,” Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Men Explain Things to Me, “between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.” Writing has a particular stigma around it, for some fear it has the power to spark a movement in women to challenge their own system of social beliefs.

If Iranian female writers question their own position in terms of their interactions with their male counterparts, they have to treat language and literature as a double-edged sword. One edge may cut through traditional barriers, but the other will silence their voice, because their courage to write could result in them being prevented from speaking out. Trapped between the urge to question and the fear of being silenced, women have had to seek other means of asserting their identity through their writing. They have used writing as a tool to emphasize the importance of the female presence in contemporary Iranian literature, and honor the memory of those whose voices were silenced in the past. In order for the female voice to be heard, it must be sustained by hope for a future in which an unknown savior can resolve these long-lasting issues. As Farideh Razi writes in Vis and I, “Somebody, someone or other will write all this down, and that will bring us peace.” The peace that Razi speaks of is the ultimate solution to the issue of the double-edged sword. Instead of creating a divide between men and women, she strives to unite the two, so that they may solve larger issues together.

Razi's novel chronicles the internal feelings of Pardis, a woman who is trying to catch a 3:30am flight that will separate her forever from her beloved, Ramin. When the reader is introduced to Pardis, the time is 1:30am, leaving her only two hours to contemplate her predicament. As she sits in a taxi, Pardis strives to answer how she can face the bitter situation of what-if-all-fails and remedy the lack of confidence that pushes her future into darkness and uncertainty. For Razi “presence” and the “present” are interchangeable terms. She defines the idea of the present as “the very existing miracle,” that stays in a person's grasp for only a brief moment in time. By this definition, the text highlights the value found in a specifically female presence, which allows the reader to experience this moment through the female protagonist's eyes. As she starts with the hope of “capturing the moment”, the narrator feels captured by the moment itself. As the heroine is caught in a downpour, she finds herself gradually drowned with a “bitter dread of separation, a presence that is mixed with the pain of absence.” Throughout the novel, she struggles to hold time like a material object, but realizes that she cannot. She feels completely at time's mercy, and with every drop of rain, senses the pain of the passing moment as it ticks closer to her flight's departure. The value of presence and resistance finds meaning in the present, which does not endure or stand still. Razi embodies her protagonist's train of thought through short, simple phrasing that shifts into a hesitant and hopeful voice: “How blissful is to touch, to feel existence, feel a creature full of desire and need.” The burden of time that pushes the protagonist towards peril passes to the reader, and makes both feel threatened by an already lost sensation of hope on the streets of Tehran.

The story descends into an intensifying anxiety, visible through the diction and style Razi uses when she describes the narrator's struggles throughout her life. The narrative style encourages her readers to ask questions actively and guide them towards a better understanding of Iranian history and sociopolitical beliefs, from the pre-Islamic times to the present. Consequently, Razi is able to introduce the reader into the chaos of her imaginary flashbacks, and foreshadowings. It is all interrupted by the jolting sound of falling bombs in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Falling bombs chase the narrator as she tries to find an escape into her mind, where the cruel element of time starts to threaten her hopes for a future she can define herself in.

The importance of passing time anticipates the use of magical realism as a form of escape and resolution, where Vis, a mythological queen, comes to the rescue of the protagonist and starts a motivating discussion with her. In this sense, the presence of Vis does not play just a tutoring role, but also invokes Vis's wish, which relies on the importance of an actual voice, followed by a persistent fight against discrimination. She shouts “I am that Vis! I am that Vis! I am Vis! ” The repetition of this phrase three times represent the Vis of the past, present, and future. There is a timelessness to this phrase; she has always been and always will be the regal, queen of myth. The repetition commands respect, as it would had it been spoken by a king.

With a great sense of assertiveness, the narrator assimilates herself to Vis and enables the reader to identify with the protagonist. She becomes Vis as who she was, who she is and who she will be. In these terms, through the usage of short, simple, but powerful phrases, Razi subtly mirrors the Iranian woman's concerns on equality and liberty. She does not allow anyone to question her and demands to be treated as a man's equal. The magical realism of Pardis' conversation with Vis provides her with a chance to escape from the real inequality that limits her from having these kinds of conversations. Like Vis, Pardis is afraid that no one would care to remember the voice of a woman who cannot fit in the customs of her time, where “no one accepted her as she was.”

In the Iranian reader's mind, the name “Vis” recalls the name of a mythologic Parthian heroine. This unique old Persian name—meaning the head of the clan—was used for both male and female rulers in the Sassanid period from 247 BCE to 224 CE. This name is used just once in a lyrical prosodic novel, written at around 1150 CE, by Fakhreddin Assad Gorgani, called Vis and Ramin. In the story, Vis fights for the impossible love of Ramin, a knight. The romance details the efforts of Queen Vis, who courageously demands equal rights for women. She endangers her life to reach her beloved Ramin, jumping off cliffs and exposing herself to the discrimination of the King and his threatening discourses. Throughout the story, she defends her right to choose her own path as an individual, not as an entity perceived within restrictive social codes.

In Vis and I, Pardis' fear of oblivion drives her to begin an internal monologue. Later her imaginary dialogue with Vis presents a feeling of separation that emphasizes the importance of the sense of presence and union she will feel, if she is able to catch her flight. Time and distance separate the two lovers, which brings about a fear of losing the connection they had . This separation mirrors the social contradiction between feminine wish and masculine power. The only solution that the narrator can find is to connect the fragments of her memories into one collective narrative. The narrator says, “These disparate fragments, half in Vis, half in me, half in you, all connect with one another to make us whole, to get us close to forsake our howling cries, to become it, creators.” The story's “creators” identify a solution to the problem of feuding ideologies of different genders, insisting on reuniting them, rather than restoring an agitated gender fight in an already troubled situation. The destructive external threat in Vis and I, the Iran-Iraq War, requires the union of a nation as its only remedy. The narrator does not converse with Vis to spark a war over gender roles, but she does so to start a conversation about the establishment of a more equal position for women. Like the mythological Vis, the contemporary Iranian woman demands to have her voice heard.

Historically, Vis and Ramin has not found a welcoming audience due to the restrictive tradition that seeks to eliminate any revolutionary presence of driven and powerful women who not only defy all odds, but succeed at doing so. From the moment in the story where Vis and Ramin embrace and live happily for eighty-one years, the story falls short in sparking the audience's interest, because of its complete rejection of social norms at the time. However, the happy conclusion of the story could also be interpreted as the poet's attempt to reconcile the layers of social and individual conflict in the lovers' union, which provides them with the power to rule the whole society with love.

Fakhraddin Assad Gorgani bravely accepted the challenge of transcribing Vis and Ramin from Old Persian into Modern Persian. A fortunate turn of events in the midst of the Seljuk Dynasty inspired the governor of Isfahan, Toghrol Bek, to commission this risky job from Gorgani. In its early stages of composition, Vis and Ramin became a symbol of the eloquence and beauty of Persian literature, as well as a symbol of confrontation with the prevailing orders of traditional beliefs. As a result of daring to address themes of an impossible love between a queen and a knight that Gorgani's audience was not yet willing to address, Vis' name was relegated to oblivion in Persian literature for some nine centuries.

The essence of Vis' actions, although purposely neglected in literary works for centuries, has recently been drawing the attention of Iranian scholars like Mohhammad Jafar Mahjoub, and writers like Farideh Golbou and Farideh Razi. They have attempted to transcribe this old lyrical novel into contemporary parlance with the hope of making it accessible to the younger generation. Razi couldn't have canvassed the issue of women's sense of integrity in Iran any better than by soliciting Vis's objectives.

Through uniting old and new traditions, translators have become more actively engaged in the spread of Vis' word and wishes. The positive reaction of young translators is something to be celebrated, now that the focal point of these artworks can be translated and transmitted into other languages, finally allowing them to be read across the world.

Translator and scholar, Niloufar Talebi's translation of Vis and I into English has proved her dedication to explaining the concerns of Iranian women to an international audience. In doing so, she has given Vis' story the ability to reach audiences outside of Iran. She has also realized the primitive will of Gorgani, who in the prelude of his masterpiece, claims that a “poet's discourse should be so powerful that once coming out from the poet's mouth, his speech should travel the world.” This discourse starts a conversation about Vis and Ramin, and identifies the challenges translators face from the beginning. When lyrical themes of a novel confront the sociopolitical beliefs of the epoch, the act of translation becomes the most vital part in the maintenance of the work's survival. Translation provides scholars with the chance for their work to be commemorated as the classical masterpiece of a nation under the careful guidance of their skilled and compassionate hand.

Reading through both the Persian and translated versions of Vis and I, allows the usage of pronouns in Talebi's translation to stand out since Persian pronouns don't have gender. The translation of the internal monologues of the narrator becomes a particular challenge. The subjectivity and the subjugated position of women confuses the usage of pronoun “I” even in the source language. Sometimes readers cannot identify between their own perspective or the ones of the narrator and Vis. As a result, there are some moments where all three seem to represent one person. The self-identification becomes problematic, particularly in the moment when dialogism anticipates the social codes of a patriarchal society, and tends to either subjugate the female perspective and the reader. For instance, Vis converses with Pardis and says, “I [ the locutor is not well defined] must resist, or else I will be destroyed, my name relegated to oblivion. Do you know how time will pass without me? Me, the only harbinger bearing the message of light, steadfast to my vow. Hear my message: I am that Vis, Vis, Vis.” In this passage, the complex message of the old Persian character is well transmitted into English. One must consider the person the wish in question belongs to, whether it is the narrator's, Vis' or even the reader's.

Other difficult moments are those metaphors in relation to time, when the text materializes the concept of time that is characterized by cultural connotations and refers to events that are familiar to an Iranian audience. The text reads, “The splendor of being and desiring” captures the narrator in prison, “the rebellion surges inside [Vis],” and then impacts the narrator, who decides to sing her similar desires but suddenly, “the song chokes in her throat.” Deprived of power and stigmatized by the fear of how others would view her for her intransient behavior, the narrator experiences the same concerns as Vis and desperately sings:

Look at this story of mine, told and sung
My name in every mouth, on every tongue
Listen, hear them singing songs of my pain
By every river and on every plain.

The verses above resonate the sorrow and grief of Vis' marginalized voice. Razi's novel and Talebi's translation show the tenacity of a voice silenced for nine centuries but revived at last. It demands to be heard and united with other voices, and marks a turning point in Iranian women's writing.

The reviewer wishes to thank Samantha Arnold, Zachary Bos, Danial Shariat and Sassan Tabatabai for their help with and feedback on this essay.

About the author: Shahrzad Ghobadlou earned her undergraduate degree at Alzahra University in Tehran, Iran, and hold master's degrees from Islamic Azad University and Boston University. She has taught French language and literature at BU and Tufts University, and is a specialist in feminist approaches to literature, Oulipo, translation, and remediation.

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