My Women in Translation Book Review: My Bird by Fariba Vafi (trns. by Mahnaz Kousha and Nasrin Jewell)

´Maman says that everybody has a bird. When the bird flies and lands somewhere, it calls out for its owner to follow´.

A couple, a woman and a man living on different temporary timelines. He, he is focused on the future, dreaming to move one day to Canada. ´When the future is in Amir hands, it can take any shape´. She, the storyteller, she is rather focused on the present, which involves taking care of the children, exchanging letters and calles with (mostly) women relatives. 

My Bird by Fariba Vafi, translated from Persian by Mahnaz Kousha and Nasrin Jewell, is a shortly over 100 page-long, made of a succession of short installments. There are mostly home-based accounts, told by the woman-narrator, who despite being in control of the story she is less clear as a character compared with Amir, her husband, as well as her late father, mother, sister, children etc. In addition to the long list of family members, there is the sounds and breaths and colours of the neighbourhood - not the North of Tehran, frequently featured in literary works, but a less significant one, probably more normal and affordable for the average Tehran resident. ´The neighbhorhood has became like a gigolo who wears sunglasses and slicks his hair back, but his shoes are always old and torn´.

The story is about love and the lows and deceived expectations of relationships, maybe also about the search for a love that defies the clear social and political limits imposed in the nowadays Iran. ´Perhaps love is inside us. I think that love is a visa you can go anywhere and live there´. And no, the book does not take any political stance but offers an insightful slice of the everyday life of a woman in Iran. It may sound suffocating sometimes and self-centered and the story does not have a linear structure but nevertheless there is a story to be told, read and heard there.

I´ve found the translation inspiring and as made by native speakers reflecting the inflections and complexities of the Persian language. For me, this book is, unfortunately, my only contribution to the August series of Women in Translation but I promise to cover more beatiful works written by women and translated into English - or French, or German, among others - in the next weeks and months. 

Rating: 3 stars