Although Vafi, a voracious reader, does not recall ever reading The Awakening, the main character of one of her earliest short stories, titled suggestively “A Woman on the Shore,” from her first published book, In the Depth of the Stage, eerily resembles Edna. When readers first meet the nameless protagonist of “A Woman on the Shore,” she is taking care of her child, while her husband is joyfully swimming. Beckoned by the sea, mesmerized by its whispering voice, its magic and mystery, its majestic vastness, “the woman gets up with agility, rolls up her pants, and puts her feet on the warm, wet sand. A little wave embraces her feet and darts away quickly. Her naked feet follow the retreating wave.”14 The euphoric plunge, however, is short lived, at least for now. The sight of her child approaching the water makes the mother in her return to the shore. But “the desire to swim to the heart of the sea does not leave her alone.” At long last, upon her husband’s return, the woman hands him the child and “slides like a fish in the bosom of the waves.” She does stop at one point to look at her family, but caressed by the seductive waves, she quickly decides to turn her back to the beach. “A feeling of joy forced her to run and to surrender her whole body all at once to the sea.”15

Whether the woman’s sensuous embrace of the sea is a triumphant liberation on dancing waves, an act of rebellion, a defiant refusal to be sucked in by motherhood, or a self-authorized death we will never know. A multiplicity of persuasive interpretations and closures is both valid and viable. Within the context of Vafi’s whole body of work, however, it is safe to propose that the drowning protagonist serves as a warning to the author. The woman on the shore disappears in the roaring waves without redefining or articulating herself. Her voice is thus trapped, silenced, swept away. Literally and literarily, it is buried alive. Forewarned, the narrator of My Bird starts out where the woman on the shore ends up. She rejects her earlier silent expressions of captivity and rebellion, refuses the fate of numerous other defiant but drowning literary antecedents (Ophelia, Maggie Tulliver, Edna, and the woman on the shore, among many others), and stubbornly claims her right to live an independent life and express herself freely. Like a flying bird, she bursts into open space and begins to sing.