The perils of writing

Iran and its authors

The history of modern Iranian literature has been shaped by censorship. Nonetheless, Iran is hoping to be guest of honour at the world′s leading book fair in Frankfurt in 2018.

Reading time just two minutes a day: the majority of Iranians are not interested in reading works that have been subjected to heavy editing by the country’s cultural censors. ″The more closely a work of literature resembles the global republic of letters, the more it is subject to the wrath of the censor,″ explains Cheheltan. Courtesy Qantara

by Amir Hassan Cheheltan, Qantara.de

In a bid to clarify just how much pressure Iranian writers are under, let us consider just a few of the calamities visited upon them during the last three decades.

They spirited a poet away from his wedding celebration and handed him over to a firing squad; a respected translator was found by the road with obvious injection marks in his arm; they conspired (but failed) to plunge a bus carrying twenty-one writers travelling to a cultural event in a neighbouring country into a gorge; they grabbed a poet on his way to a supermarket and an hour later dumped his corpse on the outskirts of the city… The list goes on and on. Writing is indeed a perilous activity, something everyone engaged in it in Iran knows.

In this absurd climate, Iranian writers punish themselves for the sake of writing and resort to self-destruction. Some fall prey to addiction; others choose the path of exile, which, it goes without saying, accelerates the process of self-destruction. Those who remain behind must endure strict and gruelling censorship.

What has happened is this. They have established a ministry in Iran, the principle duty of which is to inspect what writers are writing, what film-makers are filming, what painters are painting – basically what artists in general are doing.

Simin Behbahani: National Poet, Nation's Mother

Behbahani at a Glimpse

Image courtesy of Tavaana

by Tavaana

Simin Behbahani, one of Iran’s most prominent poets, was born to a cultured family and raised amongst the literary elite. Behbahani published her first poem when she was only 14 years old, and in the years that followed, she gradually developed her own style of writing as she became a renowned poet. Prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, Behbahani worked as a songwriter for the Iranian National Radio. She was also a member of the Iranian National Radio and Television Council for Music for some time.

Alongside her career as a poet, Behbahani was always involved in social and civic activism. In her youth, she was a member of the Tudeh Party of Iran’s Youth Organization, and later on, she helped found the Iranian Writers’ Association. In later years, Behbahani became known as a women’s rights activist respected by the young members of the Iranian feminist movement. Even though her poetry mainly touches on personal themes, socio-political concerns, too, played an important part in informing her vision. Social justice, poverty, women’s rights, freedom of speech, and resisting censorship are all central themes in many of her poems.

In recent years, the Iranian government had imposed restrictions on Behbahani’s activism, and the authoritarian voices in the media attacked her character. Nevertheless, Behbahani continued to express herself and chose to address these attacks from a compassionate perspective. She passed away at age 87 in August 2014.

A Poet Raised from Her Mother’s Bosom

Simin Khalili, better known as Simin Behbahani, was born on July 20, 1927 in Tehran.[1] Her father, Abbas Khalili, wrote poetry in both Persian and Arabic. He was the editor-in-chief of Nedaay-e-Islam’ newspaper before starting his own paper, Eghdam.[2] He translated over 1,100 stanzas from Ferdowsi’s mythical epic poem, the Shahnameh (The Book of Kings). Behbahani’s mother, Fakhr-Ozmaa Arghoun, was erudite and progressive: she was born in 1898 in Tehran and had learned Arabic and Persian in elementary school alongside her brothers before continuing her education in French and English at the Joan of Arc French school and the American School.[3]

Poetry of protest gives view into distant worlds

by Maya Weeks, Index on Censorship

A few weeks ago, 13,000 writers swarmed Seattle for the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. In the seaport city known for its ideal reading (and writing) weather — and home to poet Maged Zaher – writers filled hotel rooms and bars. On official panels they debated the state of contemporary literature, and at offsite readings and parties, they celebrated the written word.

The song of the nightingale / Is not up for sale
Ziba Karbassi, Gravequake

On the other side of the hemisphere, Ziba Karbassi doesn’t need to attend a conference to know what contemporary literature looks like. Born in 1974 in Tabriz, Iran, this rising star of Persian poetry, who also writes in her first language of Azeri Turkish, has been living in exile in London since leaving her country in 1989. Karbassi has published eight books of poetry in Persian, and with Stephen Watts, she has translated much of her work into English.

Taken from an incident close to the author’s family in the 1980s, her poem “Death by Stoning” depicts a young pregnant woman taken to prison, tortured, and stoned to death:

I am not a scaffold to be toppled
not a felled tree to be sunk in the flood

I am only a bag of bones and skin
smashed about

The heavy consonants in the nouns and adjectives and the scattered form of the poem demonstrate the mother-to-be’s “anguished, loving, and crazed” state of mind. “Death by Stoning” shows how poetry can give us a view into worlds distant from — but not entirely unlike — our own. Poetry can also play a part in shaping our world.

Rumi’s Norouz Greeting

Text from the facsimile edition of the oldest extant manuscript of the Masnavi, dated 577 AH/ 1278 AD, folio 281A, in the Konya Mavlānā Museum, published by the Turkish Ministry of Culture, 1993. Image courtesy of Alan Williams.

Now leave this, father, New Year’s Day is come,         

the creatures’ mouths are sweetened by our Maker.

Back to our river came the spirit’s water,                     

our King has come back to our neighbourhood.

Fortune parades herself and trails her skirts,                 

and beats the drum to break vows of repentance.

Once more the flood has swept away repentance,      

our chance has come now sleep has got the watchman.

The drinkers quaffed the wine and all got sloshed!    

Tonight we’re going to wager our possessions!

From ruby life-increasing spirit-wine                               

we’re ruby in a ruby in a ruby.

The place has come alive again – delightful!                

Go burn esfand against the evil eye!

I hear the noise of happy revellers!                               

Beloved, we must always be like this!...

Translated by Alan Williams from the Sixth book of Rumi’s Masnavi, ed. R.A. Nicholson vv. 939-946 (ed. M. Este‘lami 944-951).

Alan Williams is British Academy Wolfson Research Professor 2013-2016 and is also Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, England. 

Poetry as Life, Life as Poetry

Fifty years ago, Forugh Farrokhzad’s 'Another Birth' modernized and scandalized Iranian poetry with its radical feminine voice.

Image via Wikimedia, courtesy Guernica.

by Shaj Mathew, Guernica

“Poetry is my God,” Forugh Farrokhzad once wrote in a letter to her father. “I am happy when my soul is content and poetry satisfies my soul, whereas if I have all these good things that people kill themselves for and am deprived of writing poetry, I will kill myself.” Farrokhzad encapsulates this life-or-death relationship to her art in “Another Birth,” the titular poem of a collection that by turns modernized and scandalized literary Tehran when it was published 50 years ago in the spring of 1964. Its first line—“My whole being is a dark chant”—affirms the Persian littératrice’s artistic credo: poetry as life, life as poetry.

This was a revolutionary stance for a woman living in mid-century Iran. After all, men dominate the entire Middle Eastern literary tradition, so much of which is organized around the tension between the active male lover and the passive female beloved. The paradigmatic example of this is of course the centuries-old story of Leyli and Majnun, a sort of proto-Romeo and Juliet that figures prominently in the history of Middle Eastern and South Asian art and literature. (Briefly: The two are forbidden to marry, leading Majnun, which literally means mad, to go crazy, move to the woods, and write poetry; in the end, Leyli dies, as does Majnun.) Originating in the verse of the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami, this legend of star-crossed lovers still permeates Middle Eastern literature. But many later interpretations of the story dwell on the point-of-view of the moon-struck Majnuns and never the Leylis with whom they are helplessly besotted.

Here’s where Farrokzhad offers a corrective: Another Birth, as well as her three earlier collections, The Captive, The Wall, and The Rebellion, inverts this patriarchal dynamic, privileging Farrokhzad’s own feminine voice above all others.

Many scholars take Farrokhzad to be the speaker of “Another Birth,” which begins by observing how poetry has the power to preserve the people who make a life so meaningful—and painful: “in this chant / I grafted you to the tree, / to the water, to the fire,” she writes, probably alluding to one Ebrahim Golestan, doubtless the “E.G.” to whom the volume is dedicated. That’s at least the interpretation of Michael Hillman, the professor of Persian whose excellent book, A Lonely Woman, is one of the few English-language treatments of Farrokhzad’s life and poetry.

Iranian Woman

Songs of yearning, desire, and despair from the female Iranian vocal tradition

Ali Akbar Sadeghi, still from Malek Khorshid (The Sun King),1975.

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

It stands in supplication, rending its breast, crying out to the heavens above, a look of anguish on its stony, weathered face. With curiosity and awe, I regard the statue of a singing woman, unearthed from a grave in Marlik, an ancient site in the foggy, leafy, Northern Iranian province of Gilan by the Caspian Sea. Images from Ebrahim Golestan’s haunting documentary, The Hills of Marlik flash before my eyes, and for a moment, I try to imagine the story behind this, as well as the other myriad statues of men, women, and animals sculpted some 3,000-odd years ago by the roughened hands of my ancestors. And the fruits of the earth once again returned to the earth; and the earth is a woman deep in slumber, with secrets and dreams. Who was this woman, I ask myself; what was her song, and to whom was it addressed? Gazing at these earthenware sculptures, almost childlike in their simplicity and earnestness, I find myself in disbelief, tempted to look upon them as the stuff of myth and fable; but again, the images flicker before me, and I’m reminded of the reality: But they were – they ate, slept, laughed, and dreamt.

From the songs of Marlik to those of today’s generation of musicians, Iranian women have been continuing a tradition that, while suppressed at various points in Iranian history, still remains ever strong and forceful. With the fall of the Sassanian Empire and the ushering in of new traditions, the female vocal tradition was relegated more or less to haram (lit. ‘forbidden’) territory, although it nonetheless managed to survive the ravages of time, and even enjoy a popular resurgence from the early 20^th century onwards. Today, efforts are yet again being made to stifle the sound of Iranian women. While a ban on solo female singing in Iran is in place, that hasn’t diminished its popularity in any respect, nor has it deterred female Iranian singers from performing, recording, and touring, albeit outside the country. If you want these bonds broken, wrote Forough Farrokhzad in a poem addressing the Iranian woman, grasp the skirt of obstinacy!

Phoenix

by Molly Brodak, Guernica

Leeuwenhoek was a draper with soft brown hair cut in two sloping planes like collie ears.

Close up he saw threads and then worldthreads and what was inside of that?

He held a rod of soda glass in flame until it pulled apart into whiskers.

The whisker tips tinked off into mini orbs, eyes and eyes upon his eye.

He saw kind rich men walking through the dark as if through a city.

Their silk ties lifting in wind. And tender underneath.

Phone wires bowing like sails. Skin smell and mush smell of roses.

A radio helplessly beaming horror whistles from Jupiter.

A girl holding a hair-threaded needle.  

Imagine what must be very far away, he thought,

very very far away!

Whispers of Love

One man’s quest to translate the great poetry of Persia.

Hafez, Iran’s ubiquitous poet, as depicted in 16th Century painting by Sultan Muhammad. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum Of Art/President And Fellows Of Harvard College and The Daily Beast

by Brad Gooch, The Daily Beast

When Dick Davis, the preeminent translator of Persian poetry of our time, was a boy in Portsmouth, England, in the 1950s, he found on his parents’ bookshelf a copy of Edward FitzGerald’s swooning Victorian translations of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Its presence was not so unusual, as those verses (“A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou”) had set off a minor craze. If an English middle-class family owned just three books, along with the Bible and Shakespeare would be FitzGerald. “It was a kind of universal badge of culture,” Davis jokes. Yet he absorbed so much of what he later described as “the candied death-wish of FitzGerald” that he knew most by heart. Instead of anxiety of influence, he experienced an opiated hit of influence.

Teleport forward 60 years, and Dick Davis, white-haired, spectacled professor emeritus of Persian at the Ohio State University and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is still adding tile by colored tile to a busy mosaic of translation that former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia insists is the “most remarkable poetic translation project in the last 20 years.” He began with epics the equal of The Iliad in Persian civilization—the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, and The Conference of the Birds, Attar’s flight of Sufi fancy about various birds in search of the eternally elusive Bird of Birds. Now Davis has succeeded at the enigmatic 14th-century poet Hafez, along with his contemporaries female poet Jahan Malek Khatun and dirty-minded Obayd, in Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Hafez is so beloved in Iran that cabdrivers recite his lyrics by heart and families at holidays tell fortunes by opening to random lines of his poems—attesting to both their seductive beauty and their Sphinx-like ambiguity. Davis reminds us by folding in these two other court poets that Shiraz in Hafez’s lifetime was a poetry genius cluster.

Call to Arms

Only you, O Iranian woman, have remained in bonds of wretchedness, misfortune, and cruelty; if you want these bonds broken, grasp the skirt of obstinacy - Forough Farrokhzad, Call to Arms

Mona Shomali and Haleh Jamali Explore Female Iranian Identity in a Joint Exhibition

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

Opening February 19^th at Philadelphia’s Asian Arts Initiative is That Person Who is Your Creation, an exhibition of the works of two female Iranian artists, Mona Shomali, and Haleh Jamali. A collaboration between From the Mouth of the Lion, Sara Zia Ebrahimi’s US-based non-profit organisation dedicated to showcasing the works of emerging Iranian artists in the diaspora born on the cusp of the ’79 Islamic Revolution and artclvb, an online platform for contemporary Middle Eastern art, the exhibition will feature five paintings from Shomali’s Naked Folklore series, and two video installations by Jamali.

Taking its title from Call to Arms, a poem by the late Iranian poet (and director) Forough Farrokhzad (1935 – 1967), the exhibition explores the subject of female identity from the perspective of two Iranian women living in the West. Through the medium of painting and film, Shomali, an artist born and raised in the United States, and Scotland-based Jamali, curator of the Edinburgh Iranian Festival, examine what it means to be an Iranian woman, challenging both Eastern and Western perceptions and notions in the process.

Last week, I talked to Mona, Haleh, and Sara about some of the ideas and themes of the exhibition, the works on display, and naturally, the connection with Forough Farrokhzad.

Despite having passed away at an incredibly young age, leaving behind a relatively small body of work, Farrokhzad’s influence and impact on Iranian artists of all mediums – female artists in particular – has been immense. How, nearly 50 years after her death, has Farrokhzad inspired you as artists?

Mona: When I was a teenager, my mom talked quite a bit about how sexuality was different for women in America than it was for her in Iran. For example, she told me that no one ever said ‘vagina’ in front of her when she was younger, and she didn’t really know what the proper word was in Farsi, because it was so often referred to as ‘down there’. She made it seem as if Iranian women between the 50s and 70s were dispossessed of their own bodies. She was the first person to tell me about Farrokhzad. Her description of the poems was special, because she believed they were the first widely-read poems where an Iranian woman was talking about her own sensuality and sensual feelings in a way she saw fit for herself. Her excitement over Farrokhzad’s poetry was palpable, as if it were something rare and exotic, and she saw Farrokhzad as taking a stand and owning her sexuality in a way that hadn’t been done before. I continued to read Farrokhzad’s poetry in college when I took a Farsi class and studied with a Farsi tutor. I gained a deeper appreciation for her when I realised she was not just a pioneer when it came to sensuality, but also that her criticism of Iranian culture was very illuminating and truthful.

The tortured face of Iran

A banned novel by Iran’s greatest living writer and a collection of poetry from the country and its exiles give voice to the terrible cost of oppression. 


By Arlice Davenport, The Wichita Eagle


This is how the world ends.

An old man, drenched from relentless rain, having just buried his teenage daughter – who was tortured to death for distributing anti-government pamphlets – meditates on the horrid fate of his five children – three dead at the hands of successive, oppressive regimes; one driven mad in prison and now hiding in his father’s basement; one surviving through marriage to a profiteering sycophant, who props up whichever corrupt despot is in power.

At the same time, the old man reviews the shame and humiliation of his mortal sins – murder and military insubordination. He dons his dress uniform, stripped of its insignia, takes down the gleaming saber from his living-room wall – the saber he ran through the heart of his adulterous wife, then eviscerated her with – feels the edge of the blade, runs his thumb across his jugular vein, steps out into the courtyard, crowded by the specters of his past, and takes his own life.

Rumi’s ‘The Elephant in the Dark’

or

‘Disagreeing over the Description and Shape of the Elephant’

An elephant was in a darkened hall –

            Hindus had brought it as a spectacle.

Into that darkness everybody passed

            to have a look at it, so many people.

Since seeing with the eye was not permitted,

            they felt it in the darkness with their hands.

The hand of one fell on the elephant’s trunk.

            This someone said, ‘This structure’s like a drainpipe’.

The hand of one reached to the creature’s ear –

            It seemed to him as though it were a fan.

When one hand felt its leg the person said,

            ‘To me the elephant’s shape is like a pillar!’

And one who put his hand upon its back

            remarked, ‘This elephant’s just like a sofa!’

Just as each one had touched whatever part,

            so people formed their view from what they’d heard.

Their statements differed as their point of view –

            one man would call it ‘chalk’, another ‘cheese’.

If each had held a candle in his hand,

            the disputes would have vanished from their speech.

The sensual eye is like the hand, that’s all –

            a hand can’t grasp an elephant entirely.

The Ocean’s eye is one thing, spray’s another.

            Give up the spray! Look with the Ocean’s eye.

Spray leaping from the Ocean day and night,

            you see the spray not Ocean – how surprising!

Translated by Alan Williams from the third book of Rumi’s Masnavi, ed. R.A. Nicholson III.1259-1271, (ed. M. Este‘lami III. 1260-1272).

Alan Williams is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, England, and the author of Rumi Spiritual Verses: The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2006 and an audiobook, The Spiritual Verses, read by Anton Lesser, translated and abridged by Alan Williams, London: Naxos, 2007.

Missing

Agahi (‘Missing’), a poem by Shafi’i Kadkani
Translated from Persian by Alan Williams

A child called Happiness has recently gone missing 

bright sparkling eyes

with flowing tresses and high hopes.

If anyone catches sight of her 

inform us 

this is our address:

Between the Persian Gulf 

and the Caspian Sea

One Born

Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,
‘a mighty fortress is our God’,
But Christmas comes too often.
There’s not a single year forgotten
but that I think ‘Please fortify
my brain
with this campaign’.

I now announce
(in Christian spirit)
that Christmas comes too frequently,
theologically too plural!
I once was a duophysite
– two years between each one might well be fine –
but for a Trinitarian, three years is more divine.

Design the Church’s calendar
(society’s as well),
then once in three years
hit the pages with the news that Christ is born,
and fit to govern for a thousand more!
On Christly love and ethics,
the people all agree.

Our campaign slogan’s ‘One in Three!’ not ‘Three in One’.
Invent a reason,
colleagues, friends and retailers,
and manufacturers?
But no, it will not work.
For ‘Christmas is a yearly feast. We need it now. Beginning early.
In the autumn. Rejoice, then, now and later.’

But didn’t Meister Eckhart say
once, ‘Christ is born each minute
in my soul’?
So constant Christmases are more the thing
The laughter, giggles, whispering
And mysteries stored
Divinely in the word.

© Alan Williams 2011

Andrei Rublev, Trinity, 1411 or 1425-27, Tempera, 142 cm × 114 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Image courtesy Wikipedia 

Forbidden Peace

Foroutan, Aida. Forbidden Peace, A Long Poem in English, Published by Alfabet Maxima, Stockholm, Sweden

2003. - 79 s. ; 15 x 21 cm. ISBN 91-974418-4-8

Forbidden Peace is the story of the struggles, thoughts and perspectives of a child growing up in a climate of war: a child who, in spite of his own wishes, ideals and natural human desires, has to give in to the status quo. Yet he never for a moment stops believing in life and survival – in fact it makes him all the more determined to create a better world.

Forbidden Peace is a long poem written in a particular time frame. It opens in the voice of a mature man who has become exhausted by his struggles yet who still tries to continue his life journey, reflecting and speaking of his old dreams and the present reality. The narrator revisits his childhood, referring his questions to a ‘Mother’, who is someone who represents secure growth, pride and many other meanings. He tries to fathom out the words, and in doing so the very presence of the words, and other words which scarcely have any meaning left today, is juxtaposed with ‘Mother’ and ‘World Mother’. Having endured war and come to believe in death, he is determined to experience life – even though the conditions of life and survival are very hostile. He takes himself to another part of the world, and faces problems of a very different nature. The child has now come of age, yet he still continues with the questions of his childhood, even though he knows that there are no more answers to his questions. There are many words in many languages, for common concepts which are abandoned and deserted – a problem for all who are émigrés and in exile – and many words for what he has experienced, which have made him a weaker creature, in spite of his own strong being, because of his ignorance of those languages. He cannot blame anyone. He can only blame himself, realising that he has struggled in vain to create a world full of love and freedom. The final chapter addresses the future, in which the narrator paints a picture of the ideal world of his cherished beliefs, where his true home lies, a world beyond convention, where peace is not forbidden.

 

“Forbidden Peace”