Poetry Of The Revolution
One of the most powerful videos to come out of the turmoil in Iran is of a woman reciting a poem from the rooftops of Tehran at night. Recorded on the eve of the first wave of violent crackdowns against protesters, the poem gives voice to the inner turmoil of a people coping with a sudden and potentially violent revolution and struggling with a new conception of their homeland. Behind the poet's shaking speech--which seems more full of heartbreak than fear--you can hear cries of "Allah-o Akhbar" and feel the tension in the air. If you haven't watched it, you absolutely should.
Poetry is a far more important part of Iran's culture than our own. In the Arab world, political and social movements have long adopted the art as a means of galvanizing support and bringing unity and focus to a cause. Thus, it's no surprise that when the head of Iran's Security Council threatened opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi with death, his wife Zahra, who herself has become a powerful symbol for change in Iran, responded with a poem that she twittered out to millions:
Let the wolves know that in our tribe
If the father dies, his gun will remain
Even if all the men of the tribe are killed
A baby son will remain in the wooden cradle.
She wasn't alone. Scores of Iranians have turned to poetry for expression and in an effort to make some sense of the revolution's violence and chaos. Sholeh Wolpe, an Iranian-American poet, wrote "I am Neda," one of many powerful poems inspired by the death of Neda, the now iconic figure shot during a protest by Basij:
Leave the Basiji bullet in my heart,
fall to prayer in my blood,
and hush, father
--I am not dead.
More light than mass,
I rise through you,
breathe with your eyes,
stand in your shoes, on the rooftops,
in the streets, march with you
in the cities and villages of our country
shouting through you, with
you.
I am Neda--thunder on your tongue.
Poetry is also present on the streets of Tehran. In a first-hand account published on the news website Haaretz.com, a writer recounts how some protestors had written poems on placards, like this biting verse from Iran's national poet, Ahmad Shamlu:
To slaughter us
Why did you need to invite us
To such an elegant party
Robert Fisk, reporting for the British Newspaper The Independent, provided this account:
Moin, a student of chemical engineering at Tehran University - the same campus where blood had been shed just a few hours before - was walking beside me and singing in Persian as the rain pelted down. I asked him to translate.
"It's a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, one of our modern poets," he said. Could this be real, I asked myself? Do they really sing poems in Tehran when they are trying to change history? Here is what he was singing:
We should go under the rain.
We should wash our eyes,
And we should see the world in a different way.
He grinned at me and at his two student friends. "The next line is about making love to a woman in the rain, but that doesn't seem very suitable here."
Reading the Sepehri poem reminded me of one by Rumi, the great 13th Century Persian (and Islamic) poet, entitled "Not Here."
There's courage involved if you want
to become truth. There is a broken-
open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp
compassion in this group? What's the
use of old and frozen thought? I want
a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.
We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm
won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.
Not here. Clearly, in Iran now, there is no holding back.
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Farsi is just the local word for Persian.
So when you are writing in English, you must say Persian!
In Persian we call it "Farsi". In English it is "Persian".
It is not really that complicated!
And Iran is not a part of the Arab world.
We speak Persian and they speak Arabic!
It is impossible to overstate the importance of poetry in Persian culture, and this is a wonderful example of their culture. If anyone knows of a site collecting these Second Revolution poems, please let me know.
By the way, the Arabic mistake I'm sure was an oversight in an superb article. Iranians are Perisans and while weaving carpets in their widest known claim to fame, Persian word weavers make fabric of much more beauty, utility, and durability.
Beautiful, just amazing.
Goosebumps
I appreciate the article, but Iran is NOT "in the Arab world":
"In the Arab world, political and social movements have long adopted the art as a means of galvanizing support...
Arabs speak the Semitic language, Arabic. Iranians speak the Indo-European language Farsi. The so-called "Arab world" in itself is extremely diverse--the term "Arab world" doesn't really say much, nor does it makes sense to include a vastly different culture--the Persian (Iranian) culture--into the vague category, "Arab world."
Let's try to be enlightened Americans here, and not just throw everyone into the same pot because we don't want to take the time or energy to understand the various cultures and histories of the world.
Elegy for a Young Woman Assassinated in Iran
Yours the first death, the messenger, the voice,
Crying out of Persia,
By a single shot from this life untimely ripped.
Louder now than that gunshot grows the noise,
Neda, rohat shad,
Anguished lamentation, by sorrow swept.
Where now your heart, bullet sequestered
Like a stricken love
In your severed auricle? Sister, you fell
Burning, but with that fall you shattered
Our glass lives, removed
From our unseeing eyes the folded veil.
For now we cannot mourn you at Haft-e Tir
Or Behesht-e Zahra,
Instead commemorate you from our homes.
With prayer we recall you fallen, martyred
As if in Karbala,
Solitary voices raised, no longer alone.
Thus we offer up our invocation
To your final breath.
Beyond the seventh and the fortieth day,
Let resound life’s majestic insurrection
Against this first death –
Be not afraid, be not afraid, be not afraid.
- http://sem
It is no wonder that on Nicos' Iran live-blog we were all sharing poetry in our late-night shift last night... The passion, expression, pain and struggle of the current events seems to call for it, and the Persian culture is rich with it.
Poetry touches those deep places of the spirit - and I'm glad to see an entire post devoted to it!
Poetry is one of the few means by which one can even attempt to articulate the reality of today.
Or any day for that matter.
Why is it that every time a major event happens in the Muslim world, we Americans step up to advertise the fact that we're ignorant about that world?
In early 2003, the majority of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks.
Many prominent members of Congress--including John McCain--have demonstrated that they don't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'ite.
Conservative political commentators repeat bizarre claims, such as: 1) there are no Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, and 2) Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.
And now this article equates Iranians with Arabs. Mr. Lundberg, I know you mean well, but you're only reinforcing our image as ignorant of the Muslim world.
It would be helpful to have, at the very least, an honest poll as to the percentage of Americans who truly believed GWB's none-too-subtle diversion from his refrain "Bin Laden. Bin Laden. Bin Laden..." to "Saddam Hussein. Iraq. WMD. Yellow Cake..."
It was so abrupt a switch that it made my head swim.
It's a simple equation: Arabs are Arabic speakers.
They speak Farsi, not Arabic.
ha ha. Point made
Red Sea Rose: No, Iranians are not Arabs. They are Persians. they speak Farsi. They were Zoroastrians before converting to islam. The Middle Eastern history is very complex and the culture is very rich. Also for your information just because a person speaks Arabic in Middle East it does not necessarily means that they are Arabs, they can speak Arabic and can be a Kurd, Yehudi, Süryani, Azeri, Yezidi or even Greek, etc and not necessarily Muslim.
I believe you do not know the area very well to simplify it with one sentence. One must be from the area or must have lived there a while to understand it.
I don't see any evidence that Red Sea Rose was equating Iranians with Arabs (as opposed to John Lundberg, author of this article, who did seem to be making that false equation).
Also, Red Sea Rose is, loosely speaking, correct: the Arabic language is the primary means by which Arabs are identified as Arabs. That's how such a wide range of peoples from Spain to Iraq--people who are not originally from the Arabian peninsula--came to be identified as Arabs. The spread of the Arabic language meant the incorporation of local peoples into the Arab identity. It's not a hard-and-fast equation, but it's not a bad rule of thumb for distinguishing between Arabs and groups (like Iranians) for whom Arabic is not the mother tongue.
Not strictly about revolution but about individual freedom and resistance to evil, this poem by Osip Mandelstam adapted by Robert Lowell:
In the name of the higher tribes of the future,
In the name of their foreboding nobility,
I have had to give up my drinking cup at the family feast,
my joy too, and then my honor.
This cutthroat wolf century has jumped on my shoulders,
but I don't wear the hide of a wolf--
no, tuck me like a cap in the sleeve
of a sheepskin shipped to the steppes.
I do not want to eat the small dirt of the coward,
or wait for the bones to crack on the wheel.
I want to run with the shiny blue foxes
moving like dancers in the night.
There the Siberian river is glass,
there the fir tree touches a star,
because I don't have the hide of a wolf
or slaver in the wolf trap's steel jaw.
how precious our freedoms!
how fleeting is life!
how shameful to be idle!
how powerless the mighty!
Respectfully, how can you write such an article and suggest the "Arab World" deploys poetry as a means of resistance and protest when Iran isn't an Arab country? This is basic information that is too often erroneously published. It is shocking to see, time and again, that these pieces are published with such an enormous factual error. Because it is Muslim doesn't mean it is Arab. A small minority of Muslims are Arab. Another example of mechanistic, automatonic reporting.
what a brilliant photo!
"Arab" mistake aside (I think you meant Islamic), this was a very informative article. I'd heard about Rumi for years, but had never read anything he'd written. I'm not a big poetry fan, as a rule, and besides, I figured, how relevant could he be, 700 years later? Quite. Now I want to read everything he's written.
In 'Easter 1916', William Butler Yeats wrote of a rising in Dublin. The native Irish wanted to be independent of England. The English executed brave Irish patriots who led the rising. Here's a bit of it:
I write it out in a verse
Mac Donagh and Mac Bride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Whenever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly :
A terrible beauty is born.
Reference to green is of course a reference to Irish nationalism. It is also the color of the Iranian dissidents (the main opposition party). Note the names of the murdered Irish patriots and subsitute Neda's name:
Neda and her sisters and brothers
Now and in time to be,
Whenever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
wow, makes you think - are we all tied together throughout history? Is there a grand destiny for all of us?
"Poetry is a far more important part of Iran's culture than our own. In the Arab world...Th
Jesus. Really? You're still making this mistake?
Iran has been headline news for weeks. During that time, many people have made mention of the fact that Iranians are not Arabs.
I know you mean well, but get with the program, son.
Iran is the key Obama may use to bring freedom to the Arab world. Is there no way to help those who wish to be free, those who are crying out for freedom? Thank God for the internet, which allows us to hear each other. No longer can they simply tell us what they want us to believe. Thank you for this story.
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