Shahrnūsh Pārsīʹpūr: On being distanced from the place and people of your books

“It’s been four to five years that I cannot write. My mind is empty. All things about Iran I have written. But I didn’t touch the life of the Americans. But I am in the United States. It’s difficult to be in another world, and write about an another world… I also wrote a lot. But I think it’s enough. It’s enough. I wrote all the things I knew.”

This is the Iranian writer, Shahrnush Parsipur, speaking of the potential end of her writing life. Born in 1946, she has been writing since the late 1960s. Although her early works enjoyed popularity during the time of the Shah, it became increasingly harder for her to write after The Iranian Revolution of 1979: Her books were banned, changed, and she herself spent almost five years in prison on four separate occasions, at least one of them because of the book “Women Without Men”, who was accused for being anti-islam.

In 1994 she emigrated to California, where she has been living ever since. This distance from Iran and her readers had a very determining effect on her writing career.

Interviewing her in the danish city of Aarhus, where she has been invited to talk about her works, I feel curious how it is to be a writer, whose books are mostly banned in the country that reads them; whose books are distributed in Iran mainly in the black marked; whose masterpieces are admired and read all over the world, but not recognized in the country they take place; how it is to be a writer exiled from the universe of her literature.