The Daughter of Dal as Posthuman Hybrid: Disrupting the Human/Non-Human Binary

The Daughter of Dal (Dokhtar-e-Dal) is a children’s illustrated book adapted by Ahmad Akbarpoor and illustrated by Nooshin Sadeghian, based on a local folktale passed down orally through generations in Lurish Culture. Acclaimed for its illustrations, the book received the Grand Prix at the 30th Biennial of Illustration Bratislava. Published in 2025, this book is one of the notable recent additions to Iranian children’s literature, “created with the goal of promoting the stories and legends of Iranian ethnic groups and introducing them to children”(Akbarpoor and Sadeghian 37). 

While this story is often situated within the ancient archetype of the fertility goddess, its contemporary retelling as a children’s illustrated book invites a reading that is more in line with contemporary audiences and concerns. This essay argues that a posthumanist analysis dismantles the mythological interpretation to reveal a more urgent narrative: the protagonist is not a passive deity but a hybrid being that disrupts the binary between Human and the Non-Human. Her anthropomorphic form, however, allows a rare opportunity to render the radical idea of non-human equality perceptible to a human audience. This story stages a confrontation between this hybrid entity and an anthropocentric logic embodied in the actions of all human characters in the story. The king, the old woman, and even the prince all partake in exploitation with no regard for its effects. However, the prince undergoes a journey from selfish infatuation to understanding, and the tale ends with a symbolic marriage between the two worlds that heralds a more harmonious future.

Summary 

The narrative begins with a childless couple who receives an egg from an elder, and are promised a child if they care for it for forty days. On the fortieth day, the husband throws away the egg, but a phoenix (Dal) takes it away to a mountain cave. The egg hatches a winged girl, whom Dal raises. A prince sees and desires her, prompting the king to offer a reward for her capture. A cunning old woman tricks the compassionate girl into being captured. The old woman substitutes her own daughter as the bride and leaves the girl tied to a tree. A lion devours the girl, but two drops of her blood fall and grow into two reeds. A shepherd creates a flute from a part of the reed, which, when played, sings the girl’s tragedy. The prince hears this song, discovers the truth, finds the reeds, and releases the girl. They marry and live happily ever after.

Literature Review

Existing academic scholarship on the original folktale of The Daughter of Dal has been almost exclusively framed through the lens of comparative mythology and archetypical analysis. The article “A local narrative of the ‘Fertility Goddess’ myth in Lorestan”  (Firuzmandi et al) established a foundational, yet human-centered interpretation of the narrative. They interpreted the tale as a localized re-enactment of a universal fertility myth, and the protagonist as a Pari (fairy) and a direct symbol of a vegetation deity or a mother goddess. They argue that the story’s core conflict represents the eternal struggle between life/fertility and death/drought. While these readings reveal to us valuable and fascinating knowledge about the past, they do little to connect the story to today’s world. To access this modern relevance requires a shift in theoretical framework, which this essay will now undertake.

Theoretical Framework:

Human culture has long operated through systems of binary oppositions, many of which also carry implicit hierarchies such as man/woman, nature/culture, mind/body, human/animal. While some of these binaries have been openly critiqued, others have remained foundational to Western humanism and thus more resistant to dismantling. Posthumanism emerged as a challenge to these humanistic foundations. As Flanagan notes, posthumanism “seeks to reshape and resituate these boundaries and oppositions, primarily by focusing on the notion of ‘otherness’ and examining how certain subjects and species have been strategically excluded from humanist definitions of humanity” (Flanagan 29).

At its core, posthumanism critiques anthropocentrism or the belief that humans occupy the highest position within a hierarchy of life. Anthropocentrism, as Nayar argues, “positions the animal as an oppositional and inferior other to the human” (qtd. in Flanagan 36).  Posthumanist thought destabilizes the idea of an essential human subject; instead, identity is understood as relational, hybrid, and constituted through entanglements. This aligns with Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure is a hybrid that “blurs categorical distinctions (human–nonhuman, nature–culture, male–female…)”(Braidotti 28) and offers a dynamic model of the subject. While the protagonist of this story is not a fusion with technology, she functions as a cyborgian figure in Haraway’s sense: a hybrid whose very existence blurs and disrupts boundaries. Equipped with these frameworks, the following analysis will read The Daughter of Dal as a narrative of entanglement, exploitation, and possibility of reconciliation between the human and the non-human.

Discussion:

The story’s first moment of human-nonhuman overlap is when the childless couple receive the egg. A nonhuman element is positioned in a human system. Wrapped in a silk robe in a cradle and told stories and poems by the mother, the egg is being assimilated into the human realm. The husband’s violent rejection on the fortieth day enacts the narrative’s first act of exclusion. He shouts at his wife: "You think a child is going to come out of the egg?!" (Akbarpoor and Sadeghian 6) and throws it outside into the garbage pile. Symbolically, he names the egg as definitively other and therefore banishes it from the human sphere to protect the category “human” from contamination. Even though the mother runs toward the egg to retrieve it, defying the hierarchy, a phoenix (Dal) comes and takes away the egg. While her child is being taken away, the mother screams: "God, save my child from the phoenix" (Akbarpoor and Sadeghian 7). This illustrates that while the mother sees the egg as her child, she still sees the phoenix or nature as the other.

The egg is carried into a cave on top of a tall mountain. The cave acts as nature’s womb, and the summit, being the farthest place from the human sphere, highlights the opposing end of the binary established earlier. It is there that the egg hatches and a beautiful winged girl emerges. Dal raises the girl and teaches her to fly. She is then both culturally and physically a hybrid between nature and humanity. She is not human first and then associated with nature or vice versa, but rather emerges through a continual entanglement of both. At no point in the story can she be categorized as either of the two binaries.

The prince’s desire for her sets the anthropocentric machine in motion. His declaration, “I can only be happy with her” (Akbarpoor and Sadeghian 15), is a naive, possessive love. Through the king's offering of gold for her capture, the girl is reduced to an object of exchange, a resource to be extracted to satisfy a human want. The prince’s complicity in this system is marked by his willful ignorance; he desires the end without questioning the violent means.

The old woman who promises to bring the girl is traditionally read as  “the symbol of drought and evil, the forces that do not want fertility and light to be on earth” (Firuzmandi et al. 25). But in a posthumanist reading, she represents the anthropocentrism that cares only about its own gain, regardless of what the consequences might be. She weaponizes the girl’s innate empathy and benevolence against her. The girl’s subsequent passivity during her capture is not weakness but an allegory for the non-human world’s vulnerability to human exploitation. The old woman’s exploitation follows a familiar extractive blueprint: harvest the value and discard the source. She steals the girl's clothes and puts them on her own daughter to secure both the reward and a marriage to the prince. And once the girl no longer serves her purpose, she simply ties her to a tree and leaves her behind. This mirrors the way humans extract what they want from nature and discard the remains, an approach that ultimately leads to ecological ruin.

When the lion devours the tied-up girl, two drops of her blood fall on the ground, and there grow two reeds. Nature, which has been personified so far, is now reassembled into a vegetal form and loses its anthropomorphic shape. This symbolizes how the perception of non-humans as equal (human) is lost through the exploitative actions of humans: the king, the old woman, and even the prince. 

The prince, who has been selfish and concerned only with his desire, realizes his folly when he marries the wrong girl and uncovers the old woman's deceit. His grief mirrors a burgeoning ecological consciousness; the realization of mistakes only when environmental disasters and crises started happening. But the story reveals that there's still hope and time to remedy the mistakes. The flute does not produce music but recites a poem that echoes the tragic story of the girl.  While the idea of seeing nature as equal seems to be abandoned, its faint echo sparks a new return and possibility for redemption. The prince’s search for the girl with lanterns in the night signifies a search for truth in an age of darkness, guided by the very voice of the world he wronged. 

The climax is not a heroic rescue, but a reconciliation. Just like a phoenix, the girl emerges from the reeds. Their union is a marriage in the deepest symbolic sense: the conscious, willing alliance between the human and the non-human, the cultural and the natural. It represents the rejection of anthropocentric exploitation and the embrace of a posthuman entanglement. The promised “happily ever after”(Akbarpoor and Sadeghian 35) is the state of harmony possible when binaries are dissolved.

Conclusion

Reading The Daughter of Dal through a posthumanist lens reveals how much we can learn today from a tale that dates back thousands of years. Our ancient ancestors had not yet elevated themselves above the non-human beings and understood entanglement not as a theory, but as the very condition of existence. Children are uniquely prepared for this message, being less inclined than adults to draw rigid lines of category. It is no coincidence then that their stories frequently include non-human characters. This essay has traced a hybrid being that refused categorization through its constant evolution through its conversation with its surroundings. Against her stands the anthropocentric logic that casts everything different as other and continues its destructive machination. The profound importance of this story, however, lies in the possible redemption that it offers: That through the disruption of binaries and a reconciliation with the other, we can take the initial steps that would eventually lead to a happily ever after. 

Works Cited

Akbarpoor, Ahmad, and Nooshin Sadeghian. The Daughter of Dal (Dokhtar-e-Dal). Fatemi (Tuti), 2025.

Braidotti, Rosi. “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism.” Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Richard Grusin, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 21–48.

Flanagan, Victoria. “Posthumanism: Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Modern Children’s Literature.” The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 29–40.

Firuzmandi, Bahman, Mahdi Rezaei, and Kheirolnesa Judi. “A Local Narrative of the ‘Fertility Goddess’ Myth in Lorestan.” Women in Art and Culture, no. 2, Summer 2012, pp. 25–43.