In an interview, Daneshvar reflects on her days there and describes the English textbooks used in schools, even those run by the government, as being full of fairy tales and fake mannerisms and specially written for colonized countries. In the same interview, she informs us that there was a sort of anti-Islamic culture and ethos in her school. However, she believes that the school itself offered an antithesis or antidote to its colonial teachings: once a person’s understanding and knowledge grows, he or she stops accepting things at face value and begins questioning and reevaluating received knowledge. For Daneshvar, this happened during her last years in high school. She became one of those products of British education who, as Bhabha asserts, “articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority.”
As an adult, Daneshvar consciously sought to transcend social and ideological boundaries and to situate herself in interstitial space. This was one of the factors in her decision to marry Jalal Al-Ahmad, the famous fiction writer and author of the well-known work Gharbzadegi, in 1950. Daneshvar belonged to an affluent upper-class family, whereas Al-Ahmad had left his father’s house and had few possessions. In her marriage with Al-Ahmad, Daneshvar, still a graduate student with little income, was able to experience the lives of the deprived and impoverished – the class of people she had encountered in her father’s clinic, with whom she had empathized, and whose rights she had always wanted to defend. As a result of this cross-class marriage, Daneshvar could, as she asserts in her 1987 interview with Hariri, transcend or cross over from one social class to the other.
After her marriage, Daneshvar successfully sought to maintain her individuality as a writer and deliberately avoided following her husband’s literary style. In the same spirit of preserving her independent identity, she refused to join any political group or party, despite being in regular contact with the leading Iranian politicians and ideologues who frequented her house, especially during her husband’s lifetime. Daneshvar’s refusal to embrace any single political ideology or party emanated, as she asserts, from her desire to escape ideological limitations, preserve her objectivity, and keep herself open to new thoughts and ideas.
Always eager to broaden her intellectual horizons, Daneshvar traveled to the United States as a Fulbright fellow only two years after her marriage and studied creative writing under Wallace Stegner (1909–93) at Stanford University. Later, she described her visit to the United States as an eye-opening experience. Not only did she work on developing her literary technique and style, she also keenly observed US society, deliberated on US foreign policy, and sought to understand the dynamics of world politics. Incidentally, the day she returned to Iran, she witnessed an event of epic proportions, an event considered to be a watershed in Iranian history and an example of the convoluted nature of international politics: the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddeq’s government in a coup d’état orchestrated by US and British intelligence agencies. Daneshvar and Al-Ahmad wept over Mosaddeq’s downfall instead of celebrating their reunion. While in the United States, she had kept herself abreast of Iran’s political developments and had supported Mosaddeq’s nationalist policies. In the aftermath of the coup, Al-Ahmad was taken in the spree of arrests made by the reinstalled shah’s police, which further embittered the couple.
Daneshvar’s life experiences – her exposure to Western ideas in school and in the United States, and the effect of political events on her personal life – prepared her to produce literary works that reflected the political, cultural, and historical realities of her age. Her education in a missionary school expanded her mental horizons while making her conscious of the colonial nature of the British presence in Iran. In addition to honing her creative writing skills, her visit to the United States provided her with an opportunity to observe US society at close quarters, understand the country’s Cold War policies, and enhance her knowledge of Western political, cultural, scientific, and technological progress. The CIA-led overthrow of Mosaddeq’s government made her aware of the emergence of the United States as a new interventionist foreign power in Iran. Finally, her association with Al-Ahmad was also not without effect. Simin Panah’ifard rightly suggests that she was influenced by his thesis on gharbzadegi (“Westoxification”) at least until the Islamic Revolution. Partly under this influence, she portrayed Islam positively and presented it as an integral part of Iran’s spiritual domain – a domain that, unlike the material sphere, has been an arena of passionate contestation among competing ideologies, political groups, and cultural and religious forces.
Zoroastrian Feast of Mehregan
