That is why bird symbolism is so central to the unfolding plot of Vafi’s novel. For over one thousand years, free-roaming birds have epitomized for Iranian writers the liberty to wander at will, while their language, not tied to man-made rules, eloquent and universal, has stood for the song of a soul in its eternal search for identity, for voice and wing. My Bird begins and ends with references to birds. The story opens with a verbal map of the narrator’s new neighborhood. In the cacophony of sounds and smells, in the landscape of smoky rooftops, small balconies, latticed iron doors, and cramped sidewalks where roses and jasmines are so “dusty” they cannot inspire poets and passersby—in this claustrophobic cosmos crowded with people, birds are a continuing inspiration and presence. “The third-floor neighbor keeps parrots,” remarks the narrator in the first few lines of the book. “We also have a bird store down the street,” she adds promptly. Birds appear and reappear throughout the novel and show up five times in as many lines in the last paragraph of the last chapter, bringing the book to a close. “Do I have a bird, too? My bird? But is it possible for anybody not to have a bird?” (131) asks the narrator rhetorically.

Harangued by a nagging sense of entrapment, the narrator goes looking for her bird. And this is quite an accomplishment for a woman who is associated throughout the novel not with birds, but with a zoo populated by heavy animals—polar bears, camels, crocodiles, buffalos, boars. At times, Amir calls her a “polar bear” (30; 52) because she does not participate in his restless and utopian fantasies of escape to Canada, because she fully understands the difference between forced mobility and the freedom of movement, because in his view she likes “to stay put,” because she is “afraid of change . . . afraid of moving” (30). At other times, when he has had enough of her, her legs remind him of a camel (52). Sometimes, he sees her transformed “into a crocodile” (52), or “really fat, like a buffalo” (101). When the narrator’s daughter gets mad at her, she draws her “with two big horns” on her head “and big teeth like a boar” (39). To reject all these unwanted analogies, the narrator gently strokes her own arm. “It’s silky and smooth,” she says with a sense of relief. “My hand should remain on my arm to feel its softness,” she advises herself. “If I remove my hand, I might think I have the skin of a rhinoceros, the thick skin of a rhinoceros that would mistake hitting for caressing” (101).