by Eszter Melitta Szabó

“A day will come when mothers will fight shoulder to shoulder with us in such a struggle,” begins Marziyeh Ahmadi Oskuʾi’s (1941–1974) memoir, arguably one of the most radical yet lesser known members of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas (OIPFG), an underground Marxist-Leninist guerilla organization active in 1970s Iran. Marziyeh was a revolutionary, poet, educator originally from Tabriz, who, upon an early realization of social disparities and the sorrow and anger observing of poverty in rural areas of Northern Iran became radicalized and participated in the militant operations against the Shah’s regime, eventually becoming a widely celebrated female martyr not only in Iran but on a transnational scale. While her utopian revolutionary ideas certainly did not allow her use present tense, those mothers had been already mobilized and were ready to contribute to the greater socialist goal. Although the role the Left played in the intellectual and political history of 20th century Iran has already garnered some scholarly attention—with recent studies done on radical leftist thought and activism in Iran— women’s engagement with the Left, especially their committed literary production, has been largely overpassed due to and exacerbated by the Left’s historical indifference to women’s and gender issues and the male-centered nature of (literary) historiography.

To provide a background for what follows, it is essential to briefly outline the main literary streams and socio-political changes of the second “episode” of modern Iranian political and literary history, stretching from the late 1940s until the 1979 Iranian Revolution and characterized by the dominance of the Left in political thought and social commitment in literature. Between 1940 and 1979, Iran underwent significant socio-political upheavals, including the Allied occupation during World War II, the rise and fall of nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and the consolidation of Mohammad Reza Shah’s autocratic rule. During this period, leftist ideologies, heavily influenced by global Marxist and socialist currents, gained prominence through the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party, which dominated intellectual and literary circles in the 1940s and 1950s before facing brutal suppression under Mohammad Reza Shah, fueling a climate of resistance that ultimately contributed to the revolutionary fervor leading to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Following Alavi’s discussion on the different types of commitment, this episode was initially shaped by the influence of Soviet socialist realism up until the Tudeh Party lost its dominant status among Iranian writers and in the broader political sphere by the early 1950s. A key event for leftist sympathies was the First Iranian Writers Congress in 1946, where two notable women stood out: Fātemeh Sayyāh, the only female literary critic of the time, who was an advocate for Marxism and socialist realism and who is credited with introducing Comparative Literature to Iran as a university professor, and Zhāleh Esfahāni, the sole female poet representing women. Exiled twice from her beloved homeland for her political affiliations with the communist party—both before and after the Revolution—Esfahāni found solace in exile by maintaining correspondence with Iranian literati and continuing to hope and write for what she valued the most: a just and free society in her much-adored Iran. Simultaneously with her departure from Iran in 1947, her early lyric poetry also began to gradually reflect her political ideologies, a shift particularly evident in her publications in different revolutionary periodicals between 1979 and 1981.

A similar tendency of gradual politicization can be seen in the development of literary commitment in the next two decades leading up to the Revolution.  Following the disheartening experience of the 1953 coup d’état, theories about the relationship between literature and politics required modification to align with the changing socio-political landscape. To circumvent the strict censorship of the Pahlavi regime, several literary techniques had to be invented so that committed intellectuals, including authors and editors, could articulate the struggles of oppressed peoples and to mobilize collective resistance. On the one hand, editors used translations of committed world literature, with special attention to Third World authors, as indirect means to disseminate revolutionary ideas, while, on the other hand, authors developed a highly symbolic language, especially in poetry, to convey their oppositional messages and to call the masses into action against the Western-backed regime. One notable example of these literary activities in dialogue with other global Third Worldist movements is the work of Ahmad Shāmlu, one of the most prominent Iranian poets and certainly the most outspoken among 20th century committed authors, who attempted at a literary solidarity-building translational enterprise using the periodicals under his editorship. Women actively contributed to Shāmlu’s project and the volumes of his 1960s periodical, Khusheh (‘Cluster’), not only with their authored original committed works, as the young poet sisters, Mahvash (1950–) and Zhilā Mosāꜥed (1948–) did, but also with translations of didactic folk tales and socially themed world literature, as did the established translator, Purān Solhekol. In a later publication, Ketāb-e Jomꜥeh (‘Friday Reader’), which Shāmlu edited during the Revolution, literary translations were complemented by more theoretical works, including articles translated into Persian from sources such as the New Left Review. Another noteworthy change in this context was the gradual increase in the number of women contributors to revolutionary journals, reflecting their growing role in shaping and advancing the literary and political discourses of the time.

It should be noted here that the label “leftist” is used in its broadest possible sense, as it refers to a heterogenous group of women from radical guerilla fighters (Marziyeh Oskuʾi) to poets loyal to communist parties (Zhāleh Esfahāni) and other literary figures without official ties to political entities, whose work, in line with the dominant literary currents of the period, reflects leftist sensibilities (Mahvash and Zhilā Mosāꜥed). In the case of Zhilā Mosāꜥed, these include a decided attention to social inequalities and the oppression of the working class, especially of mothers and children, in addition to her employment of a poetic “secret language” of common nature tropes loaded with hidden political messages such as “night” for oppression, “rain” for hope, “wind” for change, etc. which had become established and widely intelligible among oppositional thinkers by the mid-century. For example, in a poem titled “Woman” from her first collection, Ghazālān-e chālāk-e khātereh, (‘The Nimble Gazelles of Memory’), published in 1977, she acknowledges her own class privilege of a comfortable life and responsibility to raise her voice for those in need (30–31):

With blood-stained trenches in her eyes, / simple and aged, / she arrives from the road. / Her hands are two hundred years old. / Due to the wounds / throughout her entire body, / she speaks endlessly, / weaving dreams. / … / She curses the world, / and I feel / that world is me. / It is me, who, beside the stillness of the house wall, / stands silent, / while she, for the bread of her children, / flutters all day / like an insect. / Her dream / is my nightmare. / Mine, with unscarred hands, / and with the imagination of my muscles / that cannot comprehend / even a moment of her struggle.

Over time, with the emergence of armed underground groups, militant and Islam-colored interpretations of commitment rose to prominence in the 1970s, pinnacling during the Revolution and shaping the overall character of its literature. In terms of women’s participation, their numbers both in translation and poetry proliferated, reaching at least seventy either well-known or unidentifiable poets and at least twenty women translating for different literary–cultural periodicals. Among them were Robāb Tamaddon (1928–2007), a contributor to the left-wing weekly, Āhangar (Ironmonger), whose revolutionary poetry might be the most radical—directly scorning the violence of the Pahlavi regime’s intelligence agency and including clearly anti-imperial themes. Even though symbolic poems with social connotations remained the default mode of poetic production until the Iran-Iraq war, some explicitly political poems appeared in the brief transitional period between the victory of the Revolution and the Islamic Republic’s consolidation of power, also known as the “Spring of Freedom,” when the press enjoyed a few months without state censorship. Her most famous piece titled “Message of an Iranian Mother to a Palestinian Mother” (Payām-e mādar-e irāni beh mādar-e felestini, 1975), dedicated to Palestinian mothers of martyrs, was circulated both on television and in periodicals during this phase of the Revolution. By drawing parallels between the self-effacing support of Iranian mothers of martyrs to the Revolution and Palestinian women’s experiences, her piece exemplifies women revolutionaries’ transnational solidarity with global Third Worldist movements. She wrote:

… / in the face of oppression, / In the chest of aggression and colonialism, in the eyes of the tyrant of despotism, / We must stand firm like an unyielding nail, / … / O, brave Palestinian mother, / I am, an oppressed mother of Iran, / A comrade in the trench of your battle, / In your mourning, in your anger, I share your pain. / … / The pure blood of Muslims, / Of the proud men of “Palestine,” of the courageous men of “Iran,” / Must one day nourish the saplings of truth and justice / By watering them with all this blood. / … / Oh, courageous Palestinian mother, / You have seen that magnificent martyrdom… with your own eyes, / Oh, prouder than all the mothers of the century, / I have seen that magnificent martyrdom… with the eyes of my heart, / At the peak of the proudest mother, / I, oh, great woman, / I am your comrade in the trench of your battle, / Look at your happiness… I am pleased.1

The Islamic undertones of Tamaddon’s poem also reflect the syncretic ideologies of the revolutionaries, despite her work appearing in the pro-Soviet communist party’s organ, she combined her Muslim faith with her leftist, anti-imperial stances. This amalgamation of conflicting ideologies and the Revolution’s populist nature was apparent at the level of armed political organizations such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), reconciling revolutionary Marxism with Islam, as well as in literature within the columns of periodicals. On the other side of the Left were secular leftist women for whom the “Spring of Freedom” coincided with a bitter realization that the Left—as was the case in 20th century socialist movements worldwide—was not interested in addressing issues of gender equality and women’s rights, to say the least, nor did it counter the implementation of discriminatory policies against women. A group of socialist-feminist women of the National Union of Women (Ettehād-e Melli-ye Zanān), a women’s organization within the Fedais, attempted to raise awareness and defend women’s rights and individual liberties, insisting on social and political democracy as opposed to religious authoritarianism through their ephemeral publication of Women in Struggle (Zanān dar mobārezeh). As Haideh Moghissi, a secular feminist historian who was a member of the journal’s editorial board, recalls, shortly after its establishment, Women in Struggle began to loose its independence and democratic nature due to its forced alignment with the position of its parent organization, its internalized patriarchal morality, and increasing anti-feminist stance. Before its closure, the journal’s six issues featured articles introducing socialist-feminists (Clara Zetkin, Käthe Kollwitz and Vilma Espín), discussions on the economic situation of working-class women in Iran and worldwide, global feminist movements, and also articles on pioneering socially conscious Iranian women. Framing the present writing with Marziyeh Oskuʾi, the fourth issue of the publication contained an article about the two celebrated Fedai guerrillas, Marziyeh and Fātemeh Amini (d. 1975, PMOI), detailing their revolutionary activities along with poems attributed to Marziyeh. Among these was a poem titled “Pride,” mistakenly linked to her but actually written by her Fedai comrade,  Paridokht Ayāti (1952–1977), which extended her legacy beyond national borders by propelling leftist and women’s movements in Afghanistan and India. The entirely forgotten words of Paridokht, absent even from the collective memory of the Iranian Left, serve as a truly remarkable testament to leftist women’s social awareness and decades-long courage in confronting systemic and gendered injustices (12–13):

I am a mother, / I am a sister, / I am an honest wife, / I am a woman, / A woman from the dead hamlets of the South, / A woman who from the beginning, / Has raced, / Barefoot, / across the spat soil / All over the fields. /… / A woman for whom there is no word in your shameful glossary. / A woman whose heart in her bosom, / Is brimming with putrid wounds / And fury. / A woman in whose eyes / The crimson reflection of freedom’s bullets / ripples. / A woman whose hands have been trained to hold / a weapon by hard labor.2

  1. Gozāresh-e ruz (1358 Farvardin 23 [1979 April 12]): 42. ↩︎
  2. Anonymous, “Zanān-e razmandeh-ye Irān: Marziyeh Ahmadi Oskuʾi va Fātemeh Amini,” [Women fighters of Iran: Marziyeh Ahmadi Oskuʾi and Fātemeh Amini] Zanān dar mobārezeh [Women in struggle] 4 (1358 Esfand [1980 February–March]): 11–15. ↩︎

Eszter Melitta Szabó is a PhD student in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research examines women’s revolutionary poetry published in periodicals during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. With a background in Indian Studies, her research interests include modern Persian, Hindi, and Urdu literatures, with a particular focus on women’s political poetry, the study of periodicals, world literature, and translation studies. She is currently a Research Assistant and part of the editorial team for Women Poets Iranica, an only encyclopedic project dedicated to documenting the contributions of women poets writing in Persian.

Edited by Rajosmita Roy.

Featured image: Photo by Maryam Zandi, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.