Simin Daneshvar: The Woman's Voice in Persian Fiction
That is, the Persian novel was born in the opening decades of the twentieth century in men’s voices. In those texts, woman was often either a symbol (homeland, chastity, lost land) or a source of transgression, a being who was talked about but who herself had no room to speak. In the works of writers such as Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh, Sadegh Hedayat, and later Sadegh Chubak and Bozorg Alavi, women are present, but the gaze is a man’s, staring at them from the outside. Changing this balance was the work of a generation, and at its center shines the name Simin Daneshvar (1921–2012); the first woman writer in Iran to write a full-length novel in a woman’s voice and turn that voice into a respected literary language.
Savushun; When History Is Narrated from the Window of the House
“Savushun” was published in 1969 and went through successive printings within a few years. The story takes place in Shiraz during the years of Iran’s occupation in World War II; famine, the presence of Allied forces, tribal unrest, and disease fill the city’s atmosphere. But the narrator of all this is Zari: the wife of a landowner who bustles in the kitchen, raises her children, and looks out at the square from behind the window. Politics never enters this novel in the form of a manifesto; news reaches the house through the conversations of servants, neighbors, and travelers, and the reader, like Zari herself, pieces it together bit by bit.
Yusuf, Zari’s husband, is a man who under pressure refuses to remain silent; and this is what gets him killed. The novel’s ending is Zari’s mourning and her remaining. By choosing the name “Savushun” (the mourning ritual for Siyavash), Daneshvar places a mythological layer beneath the text, but she does not impose the myth on the story; she uses just enough of it to enrich the meaning without making the everyday narrative heavy. Zari is neither a hero nor a pure victim; she is a woman who is afraid, doubts, sometimes thinks her husband is right and sometimes is wounded by him. This very uncertainty makes her voice believable.
In Savushun, history reaches us not from the tribune of newspapers but from the cracks of half-open doors and the half-finished words of the kitchen; where women have always been the first listeners to bad news.
A Few Techniques That Made the Woman’s Voice Believable
Instead of sloganeering about “womanhood,” Daneshvar built specific narrative tools that remain instructive for any writer today:
- A witness narrator, not an all-powerful narrator: Zari does not make big decisions, but she sees and records everything; this very limitation raises the credibility of the narrative.
- Domestic details as political data: the rising price of cooking oil and bread and nighttime fear reveal exactly what official reports do not.
- Tone and dialect: Shirazi conversations and the language of different classes build the novel’s sonic texture and place the woman’s voice within the voice of the city.
- Controlled symbolism: Siyavash and Yusuf, without being explained, multiply the text’s meaning.
- Open ending: Daneshvar leaves the answer to the reader; the woman remains and life goes on, without a ceremony for hero-making.
From Zari to the Trilogy; A Voice That Changes with Time
Decades later, Daneshvar continued along the same path, but with a gaze that had itself grown old. In “The Island of Wandering” (1993) and “The Wandering Cameleer” (2001), the narrator is an educated woman caught between tradition and modernity, between love and responsibility, and ultimately between staying and emigrating. This time the narration is third-person, but the point of view remains confined to that woman’s mind.
| Work | Year of Publication | Narrative Form | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Extinguished Fire | 1948 | Short stories with different narrators | The everyday loneliness of urban women |
| Savushun | 1969 | First person (Zari) | The house against history |
| Whom Should I Say Hello To? | 1980 | Short stories | Voices seldom heard |
| The Island of Wandering and The Wandering Cameleer | 1993 and 2001 | Third-person limited | An intellectual woman between two generations |
The Hidden Workshop: Translation, Editing, and the Shadow of a Great Name
A major part of the power of Daneshvar’s prose comes from translation. She taught literature at the University of Tehran for years and translated works such as The Scarlet Letter and Forty Parrots (the latter in collaboration with Jalal Al-e Ahmad). This back-and-forth between Persian and English taught her how to make sentences short and precise—something clearly visible in the dialogues of Savushun.
The point that is often overlooked is that Daneshvar is known first and foremost as the wife of Jalal Al-e Ahmad. But she had her own path: she took on the presidency of the Iranian Writers’ Association during tense years and remained in Tehran until the end of her life, writing. This professional independence is itself part of the meaning of the “woman’s voice” in our literature; not a literary subject, but a professional stance.
Why She Still Needs to Be Read
Without Savushun, it is difficult to imagine novels such as I’ll Turn Off the Lights by Zoya Pirzad or works by Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Shahrnush Parsipur, Moniru Ravanipour, and Fariba Vafi. Daneshvar showed that a woman could be the main narrator without the novel turning into a manifesto. Her model is simple but difficult: honesty in details, respect for doubt, and trust in the reader. If the debate over “women’s narrative” in Persian literature is taken seriously today, we owe a great deal of it to a woman who, in 1969, turned a house in Shiraz into the heart of Iranian history.
