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Of Gardens and Graveyards: Examining Heterotopic Space in Postrevolutionary Iranian Fiction
Abstract
The garden is an ancient and revered trope in Persian storytelling, simultaneously a literary and religious convention, celebrated in Iranian letters even before the advent of Islam and given renewed signification in the Islamic identification of paradise as a lush garden populated by h?ri and gh?lm?n (lovely girls and prepubescent boys, both of whom are eroticized in Islamo-Persian poetry). The beloved, too, is often associated with the garden—a place of lushness and release for the male poet or writer. In the imagination of the Sufi poet, the garden is the site of union with the divine beloved, God. It is set up in opposition to the world outside the garden, where nature vanquishes man; in the garden, the situation is reversed: here, nature is subdued by man. The remaking of the garden in postrevolutionary Iranian fiction like Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men and Tuba and the Meaning of Night develops a line of feminist argumentation begun in the poetry of For?gh Farrokhz?d. Farrokhzad’s transformative use of the garden in the iconoclastic poems “Another Birth” and “Triumph of the Garden” make the garden a site of non-hierarchical, mutual pleasure and of feminine regeneration, not exploitation. For Farrokhz?d as for Parsipur, the garden remains a place outside of society, as in the classical tradition, but they develop this theme differently: Farrokhzad by proposing it as a place of radical equality between the sexes; Parsipur by positing it as a homosocial, feminine space, but at the same time, a place where women abused by the conventions of an oppressive patriarchal tradition are literally and metaphorically buried—making the garden simultaneously a graveyard. Though not unproblematic, Foucault’s reading of the garden helps us see how in Iranian postrevolutionary fiction, then, literary space itself functions as a kind of heterotopia—a mirror space that is nowhere and everywhere at once.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries