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A Walnut Sapling on Massih's Grave: And Other Stories by Iranian Women

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This book was published in 1993. It contained 14 short stories by 12 writers who were women.

The oldest authors were Zahra Khanlari (ca. 1915-91), Simin Daneshvar (1921-) and Homa Nategh (1934-). Among the youngest were Mihan Bahrami (1947-), Fatimah Abtahi (1948-) and Mahdokht Kashkuli (1950-). Also included were Goli Taraghi (1939-), Mahshid Amir-Shahi (1940-) and Shahrnush Parsipur (1946-).

As far as could be determined, the stories were published in Iran between 1945 and 1989. Half of them were from the 1970s, one was from the 1940s, and the rest were from the 1960s and 80s. Four of the pieces were set recognizably around the time of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 -- immediately before (Abtahi), during (Taraghi) or just after (Nategh, Kashkuli). One other was published in 1979 but didn't appear to refer to the revolution directly (Bahrami) and another was published a decade later, in 1989 (Nikzad).

With the exception of Nikzad, it appears that all authors began their careers before the revolution. At the time their works in this collection were written, all the authors were living in Iran. By 1993, the year this collection was published, four of them had gone abroad, to France, England or the United States (Nategh, Taraghi, Amir-Shahi, Mirzadegi). Since then, at least one more, Parsipur, has left the country.

More than half of the authors wrote in the first person, with a female narrator. When they used the third person, nearly all of them wrote from the point of view of a man -- and one, Sazgar, included the perspective of a fish. Many of the pieces focused naturally on the situation of women before the revolution, in the country or city, touching on inequality, limited opportunities, superstition, oppression by husbands or other wives, or divorce. None of the stories dealt with exile. A certain number of the pieces were written in a discursive style, approaching stream of consciousness, that this reader found hard to penetrate; others were realistic.

The pieces most accessible to this reader were Nategh's, written just after the revolution, in which a journalist visited northern Iran and wrote down children's stories of poverty, environmental destruction and lack of development so that she could communicate them when she returned to the city. Amir-Shahi's, in which the narrator from a relatively privileged background recalled feelings of jealousy and love for her baby sister. Taraghi's, which communicated well the feeling of fervor and dislocation, hope and fear, during the period of transition to the new government. And Nikzad's, in which a narrator -- distracted by the demands of her husband and children, shopping and cooking -- tried to finish a story about a rabbit stuck in a hole, though she was unsure how to free it from its predicament.

Other works of interest in the collection included Khanlari's "Gowhar" (1945) -- about the ordeals of a woman betrayed by her husband -- which was called the first short story by an Iranian woman to appear in a major literary publication, a work from the 1960s by Daneshvar, and an early story by Parsipur from the 1970s. A long work by Bahrami from the 1970s included a scene describing the performance of a Shiite passion play in the countryside and the audience's reaction to it.

The collection wasn't comprehensive, omitting writers from the 1950s to 80s such as Mahin Tavallali, Maymanat Dana, Khatereh Parvaneh, Shahla Latifi, Mahvash Nabavi, Layla Kasra and Ghazaleh Alizadeh. For those who were included, little background or context was provided, although the final pages contained a detailed list of works by female writers during the period.

Other relatively easy-to-find collections of writing by women are Stories by Iranian Women since the Revolution (1991), covering mainly the 1980s; In a Voice of Their Own: A Collection of Stories by Iranian Women Written since the Revolution of 1979 (1996), which covered mostly the 1990s; and A Feast in the Mirror: Stories by Contemporary Iranian Women (2000), which covered the 1980s and 90s.

Larger, more comprehensive collections include Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology 1921-1991 (1992) and Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (2005).