Exceptions aside, for centuries the power and privilege of the written word belonged mainly to men. In a society concerned with keeping the worlds of men and women apart, with an ideal of femininity as enclosed, silent, and invisible, women writers could not easily flourish. They had to subvert a powerful system and negotiate rules of modesty that not only minimized physical contact between the sexes, but also forbade free circulation of their bodies and their voices in open spaces. It is only in the mid–nineteenth century that more and more women appeared in public places and demanded expansion of their citizenship rights. Women writers, always at the forefront of sociopolitical movements in Iran, broke the spell of their textual quasi invisibility by entering public and discursive spaces. They were no longer isolated exceptions. There were finally a considerable number of authors and texts and an uninterrupted chain of literary foremothers.

Today, more than three decades after the Islamic Revolution and in spite of all the problems—social and economic hardships, censorship, the need to conform to Islamic morality, the eight-year war with Iraq, incarceration, cancellation of permits to print—or perhaps because of them, a larger and more diverse group of women has appeared on the literary scene, enjoying the kind of fame and popularity reserved hitherto for male writers. Religious and secular, westernized and traditional, highly educated and holders of high school diplomas, upper-, middle-, and lower-class women write from a variety of perspectives and enrich the literary discourse. Women’s issues are no longer considered solely the concerns of elite women, personal, private, or unavoidable. They are presented as gendered inequities, endemic to an entire social structure that can and ought to be changed.

Fariba Vafi, whose most highly acclaimed book is translated here for the first time, is one of the leading voices in this vibrant scene.5 She was born in the city of Tabriz, 335 miles northwest of Tehran, on January 21, 1962. Unlike the majority of women writers who are from the capital city and belong to well-educated and elite families, she grew up in a provincial capital where Azari Turkish is the spoken language, attended public school there, and underwent a traditional upbringing in a family she characterizes as not highly educated. Soon after graduation from high school, she began working in a plant that manufactured women’s clothing, and later worked in a nursery school in order to be economically independent and able to buy books.6 Leaving both jobs, she spent a year in a police training school in Tehran, which became the inspiration for her second novel, a book titled after its main protagonist, Tarlan.7 Upon her return to Tabriz, she served as a warden in the Women’s Prison, where she lasted only three months.