The award-winning novelist talks to Shiva Akhavan Rad about the fight for equality in Iran
The award-winning novelist talks to journalist Shiva Akhavan Rad about the fight for equality in IranTwo women walk over the Imam square in Isfahan, Iran.Last modified on Sat 26 Nov 2022 21.42 GMT
In my opinion, being a woman in Iran is a political act. That’s why some people believe that the movement that has formed in Iran today is the first feminist revolution in the world, which introduced itself with the slogan “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” .
I’ve always admired those who openly confront the violence of power, and I always wonder if I would be capable of it. I think of myself as timid, but I can’t tolerate anyone who instils fear in me. Citizens should strike fear into their repressive rulers: the opposite enrages me. And rage, in general, makes me forget fear.
In your opinion, how can this historical awareness help the women’s movement in Iran and their emancipation? Is it possible for them to skip the historical mistakes and not fall into the pit again?Education is fundamental. Studying, remembering and self-analysis are indispensable for making a conscious choice about the form we wish to give our life. Put like that, though, it’s too linear. We mustn’t forget that every human being is a tangled knot.
An Iran supporter ahead of the Qatar 2022 World Cup Group B football match between Wales and Iran at the Ahmad Bin Ali Stadium on 25 November.Italy has a strong tradition of socio-political literature. In Italy, many novels with socio-political and antifascist contexts were written by influential writers such as Ignazio Silone, Cesare Pavese and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Your novels are also created in the same context.
One is not an author full time. For example, in daily life I do many other small things that are important to me. The urge to write is my moment of greatest truth. I call that moment Elena Ferrante, which for me, and for readers, is my true and only name.
What do I mean? I mean that, in all of our manifestations – even the perception of our body, even maternity – we assume the form of a woman through the forms that patriarchal domination has invented for us over millennia. Everything that I, a woman, seek to express moves necessarily from within the male tradition, and violence is no exception.
Even when we women do violence – and now I’m talking not about adultery but about violence in general – we do it according to forms that were designed by men and based on male anxieties and fears. Our forms of violence – if they exist, and I hope not – have still to be invented. Even when we rebel at the cost of our lives, even when we are the absolute protagonists of our rebellion, we have to beware of the male categories we’re in danger of using to account for ourselves and our rebellion. We have to criticise those categories and search for new ways, our own.Italian society has experienced the terrible era of Mussolini’s fascism and dictatorship, and we have been experiencing similar dictatorship in Iran for years.
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