Using fiction to realize a new mental architecture.
Q:
The Woman Who Read Too Much is set in 19th-century Persia (now Iran) and is built in part on the life of a historical figure, the revolutionary female poets Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn. Am I right to think that you came to the idea of this novel initially through learning about her?
A:
The general outlines of this story have been familiar to me since childhood. Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn was my ideal, the “heroine” I learned about growing up in a Baha’i family; she was the first woman to embrace the revolutionary teachings of the Bab, who was the prophet herald of the Baha’i Faith. An erudite scholar, a theologian as well as a poet, Tahirih understood, from her reading of the Quran, that religion, like all other human institutions, has a life cycle; Islam was in need not merely of reform but of renewal. This belief, based on the teachings of Ali Muhammad the Bab, pitched her into a headlong battle with the clerics of her generation, a struggle that is still raging in Islamic countries today.
I learned all this from history; her ideas and her ideals are well documented. But I discovered much later, as an adult, how little I actually knew about her as a woman, how little I could trust about what people have written of her life. It was because there were so many contradictions surrounding this woman that I came to the idea of writing a novel: it was precisely in order to contain all the contradictions and the paradoxes she symbolizes, that I chose fiction.
Q:
While you don’t attempt to hide the source of inspiration for the character of the poet in the book, at the same time, you don’t name her in the novel. She’s simply the Poet. In fact, no characters receive personal names—they’re all identified by their social, political, or official roles: the Shah, the Mother of the Shah, the Vizier, etc. What was your thinking in making that decision?
A:
There were many reasons. I was certainly inspired by Tahirih, but I did not want to write a historical novel about her: I wanted to write about women in 19th-century Qajar Persia. I was fascinated by the challenge that Tahirih must have posed her contemporaries, but it was their actions and not just her motivations that really interested me.
So this is a novel about women—mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives—and not just about one particular woman. It is about the roles women are obliged to play in a sex-segregated society and what happens to them when they are trapped in such roles. It is also about men trapped by power—monarchs, ministers, mayors, and mullahs—and how positions of authority can also handicap, infantilize, and paralyze.
It was essentially a novel about the dangers of role-playing, of stereotypes. But there was also another reason for me to identify characters by their roles rather than by their names. Personal names in an Islamic culture are not personal at all. The numbers of Hassans, Husseins, Muhammads, and Alis in Iran, even today, are legion. And while men are identified according to multiple configurations of Islamic saints and martyrs, women, until the 20th century, were frequently nameless, except within family circles, or else identified as “the mother of Hussein” or the “sister of Ali.”
Since the culture of Qajar Persia is generally unknown in the West, and Islamic names are unfamiliar and “alien” sounding, I felt that these cumbersome labels would keep readers from really identifying with the characters. Names were like veils, hiding personality, whereas by stripping characters down to their roles, I hoped, I would highlight their universality. At the end of the day, it wasn’t so much a decision, as a kind of logic that belonged to the book.
Q:
This isn’t your first novel to be set in the past, but whereas The Saddlebag had the air of a fable, this one feels more explicitly grounded in historical events. Did that make the writing more challenging? Were there ways in which you felt limited by the history?
A:
Of course, if one is inspired by historical figures and events, one will attempt, as far as possible, to respect the world and the people that are the source of one’s inspiration. Otherwise, why bother to tell their story? And if their story has not been told before, which is certainly true of the women in Qajar Persia, one bears an even greater responsibility to tell it as authentically as possible. And when such evidence as remains has been distorted and manipulated, erased and revised, then I guess the responsibility is the greatest of all—not necessarily to set the record straight, but simply to honor the human rights of the dead (that is why there is a Corpse Washer in this story).
Yet none of these responsibilities to history are necessarily limitations. They are literary challenges. They are what make the business of writing so interesting. I have experimented with this challenge in different ways: translating history into fable, in The Saddlebag, as you mentioned; or experimenting with history and allegory as I did in Paper, my second novel. But if The Woman has a different air about it, perhaps it is not only because it is grounded in history but also because the subject matter is so contemporary. The question of the role of women in society, the issue of education in general and the literacy of women and girls in Islamic society in particular, indeed, the challenge facing any reader who wants to unveil the meaning of words, is an immediate as well as timeless concern.
Q:
While The Woman Who Read Too Much is set in the past, the issues it raises remain potent today throughout the world and particularly in Iran: How to balance tradition and modernity, how to reconcile religious teachings with equality, how to establish self-determination for women in a society that’s never taken such an approach. Did you find contemporary questions, or even attitudes, creeping in as you wrote? Or were the contemporary resonances simply implicit throughout?
A:
I don’t really see a huge difference between past and present, when it comes to writing. We live in the present, we could be writing the future, and we cannot help but carry history in us, whether we know it or not. My story takes place a century and a half ago but every twist and turn of reaction and response on the part of the women in this tale is inevitably a reflection of my life too, and the lives of hundreds of Iranian women I have met. And I hope the lives of men as well as women everywhere, not just Iranians.
A writer is like any other human being, only more given to delusions! The important question is not whether contemporary attitudes creep into those delusions, or were implicit in the past which we are deluded into thinking we can recreate; It is whether we are fully engaged in them, heart and soul, whether we are being absolutely honest with ourselves in spite of them, whether we are testing the integrity of every word we are deluded enough to write. It’s a tough call.
Q:
You live in France, and you’ve also lived in the UK, the United State, and Uganda—but you’ve never set a book in any of those places. Does your fiction feel fundamentally rooted elsewhere, in place and time both? Does setting a book outside the immediate realm of your experience open up possibilities that a novel of contemporary Paris would not?
A:
I needed to write about 19th-century Persia in the past precisely because of the deracination you describe. I did not leave my country because of the Islamic Revolution, but have been wandering about since the age of three, belonging everywhere and fitting nowhere: a Corridor Person, with a foot in several rooms and at home in none.
And I’m not unique in this regard, just a wee bit older than most. That is partly why I created my own fictional world in The Saddlebag, Paper, and The Woman Who Read Too Much, a kind of “Middle Orient,” a place out of time I could call my own that’s partly historical and partly fantastic because it no longer exists. But in recent years, I have found myself drawn to a new subject. I no longer need to root myself elsewhere because the Corridor has become an interesting place to be. There are millions of us in it now. Rooms are too small to hold our hearts and minds. Nationalism no longer answers to our needs. Cultural identity is way oversimplified. Frankly, a new mental architecture is required. Another world. A new sense of time. So I’d like to try and construct it, in fiction. That way, hopefully, it will do no harm.
This interview was conducted by Levi Stahl, Promotions Director at the University of Chicago Press.
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