Counterviews: Mapping Cesarean Section in Modern Iranian Fiction and Christian Missionary Rhetoric

Abstract

My project will analyze representations of cesarean section in Simon Daneshvar’s Savushun: A Novel About Modern Iran (1969), which is set during World War II, and Dr. Adelaide Kibbe's reports on maternal health in Persia during the same period. The latter was published posthumously as Passage to Persia: Writings of an American Doctor During Her Life in Iran, 1929-1957 (2014). Passage to Persia employs a “white savior” rhetoric to depict cesarean sections as lifesaving while condemning traditional midwifery. In so doing, Kibbe, who was a Presbyterian medical missionary, reconstitutes an enduring topic in Western authors’ travelogs about Persia—high infant mortality rates. An early mention of the subject appears in Justin Perkins’ 1843 account, A Residence of Eight Years in Persian, Among the Nestorians, with Notices of Muhammedans. Perkins, also a Presbyterian missionary, notes that infant mortality rates are high and that few children live to adulthood (Kashani-Sabet, 2011). Other Westerners followed suit, including George Curzon (1892) and James Bassett, another Presbyterian missionary (1893). While most Western men’s narratives stipulate that high death rates were caused by numerous factors, such as epidemics, sanitation, and hygiene, women writers’ commentaries, starting with Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia by Lady Mary Shiel (1856), the wife of British envoy Sir Justin Sheil, blame infant mortality on traditional mothering behaviors that men could not document due to gender segregation. Kibbe’s Passage to Persia is notable among these texts because it adds traditional midwifery to the laundry list of reasons given for stubbornly elevated numbers of infant deaths. It also differs from previous travel narratives in that it advocates for cesarean section as a life-saving measure for mother and child. These commentaries might have remained curiosities appealing primarily to Western readers except that in the first half of the twentieth century the Persian political movement to create a modern state coopted concerns about high infant mortality rates though, as Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet argues, this focus did little to improve women’s health care (2006). Thus, from the early1900s through the 1950s and 60s, social critics including opponents of the first the Qajar and later the Pahlavi dynasties cited rates of both infant and maternal mortality as proof of state dysfunction and cultural “backwardness.” Placing blame on traditional midwives and, ironically, the mothers who relied on them was a signal feature of these maternalistic rhetorics even as female medical missionaries affiliated with the Church Missionary Society (UK) and the American Presbyterian Mission staffed new medical and teaching facilities that professionalized labor and delivery and, according to the missions’ records, performed numerous successful cesarian sections. In contrast to nearly universal condemnation of midwives in Persia’s dominant twentieth-century matriarchal rhetorics, Savushun, the first Persian novel by a woman, repudiates cesarian section and offers an implicit defense of traditional midwifery. To wit, Savushun equates cesarian section with Western colonization, particularly Allied powers’ occupation and division of Persia during World War II. The foundation for this association is established early in the novel by its female protagonist, Zari, who bitterly resents that her three children were delivered by cesarian sections performed by a female expatriate doctor named Khanoom Hakim [Mrs. Doctor]. Significantly, the doctor’s penchant for cesarian section is strikingly similar to Kibbe’s in Passage to Persia, and Zari complains bitterly that “Khanoom Hakim was a great one for the scalpel. She loved to cut and sew” (1969). Zari subsequently compares her cesarean section scars to a map of occupied Persia that depicts Soviet Union control of the north and Britain’s presence in the country’s central and southern regions. Likening the puckered skin “disfiguring her belly with stitch marks” to these regions’ boundary lines (1969), Zari denounces the Allies’ “disemboweling” presence and the Persia’s economic exploitation by the West, which persisted throughout (and well beyond) the era in which the novel is set. Furthermore, as the plot unfolds, Zari issues a maternalistic “manifesta” of sorts that engenders public resistance to local officials’ acquiescence to Western occupiers. This call to action begs comparison with the maternalistic rhetorics deployed by proponents of modern statehood. My approach to Passage to Persia and Savushun treats them as texts that participate indirectly in maternalistic rhetorics used to justify the political movement to create a modern state but did little to improve women’s and children’s health care. This project is a sub-section of a larger work on gender, sexuality, and the emergence of modern statehood in Persia, which examines such topics as colonizing and decolonizing gazes, the country’s transition from status-defined homosexuality to hegemonic heteronormativity, and the twentieth-century women’s movement. The analysis of maternalistic rhetorics builds on Kashani-Sabet’s ground-breaking research in this area. The project also responds to Billie Melman’s call for feminist transnational scholars to investigate female missionaries’ accounts of their lives in Persia, which have not been studied in detail as of this date.