I begin with my name, because My Name is the first identifying factor in my mind when I am Observing or Reporting my self. I don’t have an understanding of my gender, whether female or male, but I’ve been living in the skin of a woman all my life. Even though most of the time I was unaware of this body, still it means I have more understanding of how a female body functions, feels, whereas, my understanding of a male body is only second-hand knowledge.
Right after my name, the other factor of my identity is how I choose to manipulate and be manipulated by words within my poetry and fiction.
I was raised to become a writer; more precisely, a poet. My parents never mentioned any other calling or career when I was growing up; writing was the obvious choice. Regardless of what my parents thought, the force behind the desire to write, was the fate my grandmothers shared, both victims of rigid rules of an exiled clan of the Qajar Dynasty. I’m doubtful about their gender identity and sexual orientation since both were labelled Hysterical Women and, Unwilling to commit to wifely duties. I had the strangest urge to discover how they felt, as victims of brutality, one dying at 28, battered by her husband, the other dying at 38, chained to the wall of a room in her father’s mansion. Even though I haven’t seen either one of them, I believe I’ve inherited their memories of mental struggles. When I write, I am very much aware that my mind is greater than a single self in the sense that I am more than my single self.
Of Lies, my first collection of poetry was published on 1997, the 2nd, and The Whore Is the Savior, on 1998, the 3rd Saghi Ghahraman, all in all, 2003, my collection of short stories, But When you’re On Your Own, It’s Painful To Be A Cow, also on 2003. It was around year 2000 that I joined PEN Canada, as a writer in exile, and a year later, initiated and moderated the Writers in Exile Club, where many of us Writers in Exile heard our own voice, reading our own poetry and fiction in English.
English language, to me, was a huge refuge; I wrote in English what couldn’t be imagined or blurted out in Farsi. Or, I wrote in English what my mature self experienced in Canada, away from the Farsi sphere of my memories. I wrote the long poems of “My Mother’s Mother”, “The Minister of Labor”, also, “The Child Is 18”, “The Iceland”, “Cross Dressers” in English, all of which losing originality when translated into Farsi.
To write in English, back then in the 2000s, I read many ordinary things like cook books, magazines, and teen novels to build my vocabulary and learn words I wouldn’t come across otherwise. I kept a list of words I learned.
When I left Iran, I was afraid of anything that sounded like Farsi because it sounded threatening, intimidating. Farsi made me feel like I was on the brink of being arrested and tortured. For me, this was not a friendly language, not like a Mother Tongue should feel. These were words that came out of the mouth of the regime and its supporters. I didn’t feel safe with those words. I started thinking in English before I could speak English. Dreams appeared in English because in my dreams, those were foreign, but safe words and sounds.
When I wrote the ‘Minister of Labour’ I wrote it in English, because it was my experience in the English World of Canada – I had no similar experience in Iran. In this piece, the narrator is a refugee, a woman, a lesbian, a victim of the politics of the kind I met in Canada.
I must add that after living in Canada for 35 years, I don’t Speak English, my mind keeps English words far from reach when I need to express myself.
I haven’t published any new work after 2003, I was busy creating and running Iranian Queer Organization with a number of colleagues. The organization was voluntarily dissolved in 2019, when I decided it was time to let go, .
Here, I would like to relate to the topic of the Panel: Why Women Write.
Not all women write; only those who are writers. Which, could mean that the person, even if born with a male body would write. And wouldn’t write, in a female body, if the person was not a writer.
Not All Women Write. Putting every female body in one box, is not only suffocating, but it also is comparable to the oppressive patriarchy that considers any female body identical to the next. Patriarchy believes any female body feels and wishes and aims in the exact same way all other female bodies and minds would, or, patriarchy would like them to be exactly the same.
So, I think by saying Why Women Write, without mentioning that some of these women are living in the skin of a man, or some women aren’t writing as women, we dismiss a big portion of reasons many of us write.
But, why do those women who write, write?
Some of us, living in the skin of a woman, write to state the fact that We Are Not Women. In other words, we are Queering Womanhood via writing our selves.
Writing, then, is an act of protesting the uniform identity forced upon us.
I believe that Freedom and Equality for women would not actualize unless the borders of manhood and womanhood are blurred, starting at the level of gender and sex boundaries, not the other way around, not starting in the workplaces and state-politics.
As a writer, I have an open relationship with my audience, my readership. I’m not committed to pleasing them and they’re not committed to read me, and keep reading me.
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Text above is what I shared at the online panel, Why Women Write on Feb 6, 2021
Saghi Ghahraman
Toronto, Canada