The prosecution tried to get me to say that most people who fantasize are sick, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that people’s fantasies indicate what they want to do in real life, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that Mr. Jones’ calls and emails were typical grooming behavior. I pointed out the fundamental flaws in their reasoning: he had met “Missy” in a chatroom for adults, not for fans of Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers. And after a thousand emails and phone calls, he never said anything like, “Let’s meet. We’ll have a great time. When are you free? I’ll send you money for a bus ticket.”
There were plenty of questions about me: my campaign against the concept of “sex addiction”; my observations that America is panicked over highly distorted estimates of how many predators troll for kids online (I quoted scientific studies, including the latest one from Harvard); whether or not I believed it was OK for adults and 14-year-olds to have sex (which I wouldn’t answer, not wanting to obscure the fact that there was no 14-year-old in this case), and many, many more. That’s how I spent yesterday afternoon.
This morning, the jury gave their verdict. Afterwards, in private conversations, they told Mr. Jones’ lawyer that I was clearly an expert, warm and persuasive, and that they had learned a great deal from me about psychology and sexuality. They said they were troubled by the flaws I had pointed out in the prosecution’s case, and they laughed at the D.A.’s inability to rattle or insult me. Several said if they were ever in trouble, they hoped they’d be represented in court as well as Mr. Jones had been.
But they found him guilty. They were afraid to believe him.
One word: plagiarism. I spend a great deal of time at the beginning of the semester, on the first day actually, talking about it, explaining it and making sure my students understand my policy, which is: If I catch you willfully trying to fool me by passing off someone else’s work as your own, you will fail for the semester, no second chances. I lecture in excruciating detail – with more than a few examples of students who were passing (one was even getting an A) whom I failed because I caught them willfully plagiarizing – about why I take it personally when someone tried to do this: because it means that he or she thinks either that I am stupid, that I won’t know the difference between her or his writing, which I have been reading all semester, and the professional-grade writing that students inevitably hand in when they plagiarize, or that I don’t care enough about my job actually to pay attention to the work that students hand in. I repeat this warning several times during the semester, with a shorter version of the same lecture, especially when I assign any paper that involves even the smallest amount of research. I even tell my students how I am going to catch them. Most plagiarism these days involves students cutting and pasting stuff from the web, and if it’s on the web, I tell them, Google can find it. “Please,” I ask them, “don’t put me in the position of having to fail you. If you are having problems with an assignment, come talk to me. As long as you are someone who has been coming to class and doing the work – even if you’ve been getting D’s – I’d rather work something out (an extension, whatever) to make it possible for you to do the work than to fail you for plagiarism.”
Inevitably, though, there are students who don’t believe me or who think they are smarter than I am, and this semester is no exception. I have caught three plagiarists in my Technical Writing class, and it’s really pissing me off. First, the assignment they plagiarized – writing a set of instructions, a description and a process analysis – while not necessarily easy, is not hard to do well on if you take the time to do it right. Second, two of the students were clearly passing; one of them was on his way to getting a B. (The other would have ended up with a D+ or a C, depending on how he did on his final paper.) Third, the remaining plagiarist does not have English as his first language, and so the work he’s been handing me has not only been sprinkled with the kinds of grammatical errors one would expect from someone writing in his second language; even when his writing was grammatical, it had a slight “accent” that betrayed his country of origin. So what did he hand me? A grammatically perfect description of a light bulb, as if I wouldn’t notice the difference.
All three of them are going to fail for the semester.
And now that I have vented, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.
According to one of my students, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the different approaches to history in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has historically been infused with a “racial ideology of male masculinity” and that is why so many “Chinese Americans believe in racial inequality.” I wish I could quote the entire two sentences for you; they are truly precious. It’s not just the poor quality of this writing per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phrases like “racial ideology of male masculinity” appear all over the essays I have been getting from far too many of the students in the literature class I have been teaching – as if the students were choosing one word from column A, two from column B, etc. in order to come up with a sentence that sounds so intellectually profound that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean anything. It is depressing and debilitating when the papers handed in by my freshman composition students are, in many ways, better written than the ones handed in by the students in an advanced literature class.
I’m not sure what I feel like writing about tonight, just that I feel like writing. It was a hectic day. I woke up early to get a little bit of work done on my Shahnameh introduction – nothing new, mostly typing up notes I took while I was in DC last Wednesday – and then, after I dropped my son off at school and came back here to make myself breakfast, I rushed out to school to get some paperwork and emailing done before my first class of the day, Asian American Literature. I gave my students the assignment for The Joy Luck Club, which most of them have not yet finished reading. That’s okay, though, since they will have two class periods to work through the short essay questions in groups before they go home to write the assignment up. If they don’t finish the book during that time, it’s their own fault.
Teaching Asian American Literature has been interesting. First, it’s not my field, which has meant that I’ve had to learn not just about the three ethnic Asian communities whose literature we will be reading – Chinese American, Filipino American and Iranian American – but also about the field of ethnic American literature in general. It’s nice, for a change, to be teaching something that teaches me something, but that is not actually what interests me tonight, sitting here in my office while my son goes to sleep and my wife takes a shower. The fact that I am teaching a course that is not in my field has started me thinking about just what, precisely, my field is. Because it’s been some time since I’ve felt like I have one.
In terms of credentials, my field is Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. That’s what it says on my Master’s Degree, and that credential is largely why I was hired by the college where I now teach. Indeed, I spent my first five to seven years there doing almost nothing else but the work of the ESL program that the institution was in the process of building. I loved the work, though I have not taught ESL classes for some time now and don’t plan to anytime in the near future. Indeed, if I were to be completely honest, I think going into TESOL was, in the first place, a way for me to avoid the fact that what I really wanted to do was write.
I finished my TESOL MA in 1987, three years after I graduated from Stony Brook University with a double major in English and Linguistics. In Fall 1984, right after my senior year, I enrolled in the Creative Writing MA at Syracuse University – this was before they had an MFA – where I studied with Tess Gallagher, Philip Booth and Hayden Carruth. I lasted just one year. I was 22 at the time, and I was sure that writing poetry was what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I’d make my living as a teacher, but it was as a writer that I intended to leave my mark. I t was not long before circumstances at Syracuse conspired to make me realize how young I was, and how arrogant.
It was Philip Booth who sat me down towards the end of the Spring 1985 semester and told me that, while I certainly knew how to handle a line of verse, and while I also very clearly knew my way around a sentence, there was not yet a real center to my work, no set of concerns out of which my poetry grew. That absence, he suggested, would make it very hard to write the thesis – a book of poetry – that I would have to write in my second year. What I needed, he said, was to live a little bit and there was just no getting around the fact that living would take time. So why didn’t I take some time away from school, he offered, and see what that did to my writing. Mr. Booth’s words – I never got to the point where I felt comfortable calling him Philip – meant a great deal to me, and if I had to say now what I learned from them it would be that you don’t have to go to school to become a writer.
So I went to my graduate advisor and told him I wanted to take a year off from school to work on my writing. I was not expecting his response. “If you want to go commune with your muse,” he sneered at me (and, yes, it was a sneer), “that’s your business, but you came to school – or at least I assume you came to school – to learn something and that’s not going to happen sitting alone beneath a tree trying to capture the wind in a song!” This was during what I have heard people refer to as The Theory Wars, when literary theorists and creative writing faculty were, quite literally, at war with each other over the legitimacy of their different pursuits. My graduate advisor was clearly in the theorists’ camp, and I guess I have him to thank that not only did I take time off from Syracuse, but also that I never went back. I think I have led a much more interesting life than if I’d stayed at Syracuse and gotten my MA, though it is also true that if I’d known then what I know now about academia, and if I’d known then that I would end up as an academic, I might have made very different choices.
I haven’t been writing and it hurts; it’s a tightness in my chest and a twist in my gut, and there is a part of me that wants to scream. Well, maybe not scream, but at least to grunt, let out some exclamation of frustration that I have not been making poems, and I have not been working – or only recently started working again – on the foreword I need to write for the translation of the beginning of Shahnameh that has been sitting on my desk more or less completed for the last couple of months. The other day, while I was waiting in a hotel lobby in Washington DC for a friend to call, I was able to get just a little bit of work done on that introduction, but it wasn’t writing. I was taking notes on a book that has been sitting on my shelf for at least a month waiting for me to read it. It’s an interlibrary loan, and I am sure it is very, very overdue. (I find it funny that they abbreviate interlibrary loan ILL; whenever I get an email telling me that a book I have requested has arrived, the subject heading is something like “Your ILL Request,” and it just makes me smile. I have a strange sense of humor that way.) Anyway, I was taking notes on this book and just that little bit of work made me so happy. Because it was my work, not for school, not to make money, but just the work that I do, or one kind of work that I do, to make my life meaningful, to make meaningful and beautiful things to send out into the world.
The book is called Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography, and it’s by A. Shapur Shahbazi. Ferdowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shahnameh, an epic poem of about 50,000 couplets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mythopoetic beginnings to the moment right before the Arab Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE. Shahnameh is often called Iran’s national epic, and for good reason. Not only do the stories in the poem still resonate in Iranian culture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the German scholar B. Spuler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shahbazi uses as an epigraph to the book:
In the last analysis it was The Shah-nama […] that became the milestone for the self-affirmation of the Iranian identity. [T]he importance of the poems of Ferdowsi (and subsequently of later poets) for the preservation of the Iranian character can in no way be overestimated. They provided the entire Iranian folk – nobles, townspeople, artisans and peasants – with that “Iranianness” which despite all social differences united them, perfectly mirrored their image, and allowed them to identify themselves as fully and totally Iranian.
The book is called “a critical biography,” at least in part because Shahbazi arrives at his understanding of Ferdowsi’s life through a critical reading of Shahnameh. The poet left no notebooks, no memoir and the information that we have about his life from outside the epic, as Shahbazi shows, is entirely apocryphal. Indeed, an interesting question raised by this book, though I doubt Shahbazi intended this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to prefer a truthful accounting of a great writer’s life to the myths and legends that grow up around him, especially when the work he is famous for is as important to a nation’s cultural identity as Shahnameh.
So, for example, the traditional story of the poem’s composition has the peasant Ferdowsi laboring for 25 years to write the poem, hoping to earn from it a dowry for his daughter. When, through the good offices of an intermediary, he presents the poem to Sultan Mahmud of Gazna, however, the intermediary’s enemies among the Sultan’s advisers convince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, especially since Ferdowsi is a Shiite and therefore a heretic. Taking his advisers’ advice, the Sultan pays Ferdowsi only 50,000 pieces of silver, not gold, an amount which Ferdowsi sees as an insult. So, instead of taking the payment for himself, he divides the money between two people who have served him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sultan in a satire of which only a small number of lines survive. Eventually, he returns home, though he continues to live in constant fear of the Sultan.
One day, something happens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the greatness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his earlier to decision to underpay the man. So the Sultan sends along with a suitable apology, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin increase over the amount Ferdowsi had originally expected. Just as the couriers arrive with the money, however, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being carried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daughter, according to this story, refuses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.
Shahbazi shows that this story is completely false. It is now generally accepted, he points out, that Ferdowsi was not a peasant, was never in Sultan Mahmud’s court and never had a daughter. Yet which story is better, which one should be the story about Ferdowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Ferdowsi was a member of the landed gentry, that he composed the Shahnameh while living on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really matters is the truth, but the lessons in the apocryphal story are also truths that are important to tell and the way that Ferdowsi and his daughter behave when confronted with the different payments from the Sultan embody values it is worth emulating, or at least honoring. I’m not suggesting that we should accept falsehoods as history, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the falsehoods become part of the history, part of Ferdowsi’s biography, even as he (Shahbazi) claims to be arriving at as accurate a factual biography of Ferdowsi as can be gleaned from the text of the Shahnameh itself.
But I started writing about how painful it is to be not to be writing, which is ironic, of course, because I am writing this blog post, and I will admit that sitting here in my bed, half listening to the TV program my son is watching in the next room, pecking away at these keys is making me feel better. Except that my foot is starting to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the middle of one now for a couple of days, the result of having lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver detoxification regimen my doctor put me on. The pain is starting to distract me and so I have lost track of where I wanted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which writing seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actually reduce it, the way writing is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am wondering about the connection between the pain I feel when I am not writing, the pain of my gout, and the way writing seems to alleviate both.
I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how people experience pain as something alien, something other, something not of the body. Which is ironic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The preposition is significant. Metaphorically, it suggests that pain is something physical we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is correct, and if I understand her – or my memory of what she wrote – correctly, we experience pain as something inside of us that we need to get out of us, something that cannot be integrated into who we are. It can be forced on us, as in torture – and the first part of Scarry’s book is a discussion of torture – but it is not something that we can integrate, that we can make a part of ourselves, the way we make pleasurable sensations welcome within us, make them part of who we are in the world.
Language (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain meaning – language, after all, is how we give everything meaning – but it is the only way we can make the reality of our pain comprehensible to someone else. Indeed, perhaps on some level we need to make our pain comprehensible in ways that we don’t need to do with our pleasures. After all, it is – at least for me – perfectly possible to keep one’s pleasures entirely private, not to name them, and still find them immensely satisfying. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, especially but not only emotional and psychological pain, I need community; I need to be able to tell someone, and while I sometimes may be the only one I tell by writing about it, that is never an entirely satisfactory solution. I need to know there is someone else who understands me or who has at least tried to understand me.
And so I wonder about the degree to which community, the human need for community and communication, is rooted in pain, and I wonder if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body reminding me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No matter how deeply internal and personal and interior the motivation to write may be, no matter how solitary the act of writing is, everything I write is also an invitation to community the goal of which is not so different from the way Spuler describes the Shahnameh as being “the milestone for the self-affirmation of the Iranian identity.” Sometimes, especially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sadness, because I know I will keep writing anyway, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled instead with a giddy hopefulness, and that makes me happy.
Two days ago, I received a letter from Milkweed Editions rejecting my second book of poems, which is called All That Struggled In You Not To Drown. In explaining his decision, the editor wrote, “Although I recognize here an original and compelling persona, I felt that the preponderance of first-person poems with an autobiographical slant limited the potential appeal.” In other words, if I understand him correctly, he thinks that the first-person narratives dominating the book will make it hard both to sell and to get a decent level of critical attention. Whether or not that is true, his perception of the manuscript is accurate – it is made up almost entirely of first-person narratives – and, given that accuracy, if he cannot find within his own aesthetic sense and/or his sense of where poetry is these days and/or his sense of the market enough enthusiasm for publishing my book, I think his rejection is a fair and reasonable one. It’s also ironic, because CavanKerry Press, publisher of my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men, rejected All That Struggled In You Not To Drown because there was not enough of an autobiographical slant. “I’ve seen this a lot,” CKP’s publisher told me. “A poet whose first book is deeply personal will often write a second book that is just the opposite. You’ve written a good book; it’s just too impersonal for our list.” This rejection (more irony here) also seems to me to have been fair and reasonable. For while All That Struggled In You Not To Drown is, to me, deeply personal and autobiographical, it possesses and explores those characteristics differently than The Silence Of Mendoes, and if CKP’s list is slanted towards the kinds of poems that are in The Silence Of Men, then it makes sense that CKP would also reject my second book.
I have a lot of respect for the work that small press editors and publishers do, not just because it is so often un– or underpaid work – which it is, and which is something that any writer who deals with them needs to understand and appreciate – but also because publishing books requires a commitment to understanding, articulating and either implicitly or explicitly defending one’s own aesthetic sense in a highly saturated and competitive marketplace. Especially when it comes to poetry. Sometimes it seems to me that everyone and her or his aunt or uncle in the United States thinks that he or she is a poet whose work the world absolutely must have between the covers of a book or burned onto a CD or DVD. More to the point – at least in my experience – more than a few of the people who think this way haven’t read (or at least write like they haven’t read) a single book of contemporary poetry. To be a small press editor and/or publisher in this kind of environment is to submit oneself to a mind-numbing onslaught of language, which takes a level of commitment that most literary people I know, including myself, cannot and will not make; and that commitment ought to command our respect, even when it means that a given publisher decides not to publish a book we have written.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I think anyone who wants to write poetry should write poetry. The impulse towards poetic expression is a powerful one; witness the way people turn to poetry in times of difficulty, from personal tragedies like the death of a loved one to national tragedies like the September 11th attacks. Moreover, the good that poetry does for the people who write it, and for the people who read it, whatever kind of poetry it is, is not something that can be measured by either the dollars and cents that a publisher commits to putting a book out or the unpaid hours that the poet sweats through trying to make her or his lines bespeak the particular experience he or she wants to communicate. Still, there is a difference – actually, there are probably many differences – between being someone who writes poems and someone who wants to publish books of poetry, not the least of which is that once you decide you want to publish books of poetry, you have made the decision to treat your work as a commodity. You have entered, whether you like it or not, the world of (usually very small) business; and so I have to confess that the letter from Milkweed Editions is one I should never have received. Instead, I should have written to them and withdrawn All That Struggled In You Not To Drown from consideration because a third press had already agreed to publish it.
I didn’t contact Milkweed because I’d allowed my record-keeping to become sloppy and so I’d actually forgotten I’d submitted the book to them; and so I am relieved that Milkweed rejected my book, since it means I do not have to deal with the awkwardness of having to choose between two very fine publishers. The world of small presses is not like the world of commercial publishers, where the bidding war that can result from having more than one editor eager to publish your book can be a very good thing. There is not enough money in the small press world to make such a bidding war possible. I may have only a verbal commitment from the press that has accepted All That Struggled In You Not To Drown–which is why I am not naming that press in this post; our agreement will not be official until I have a contract, and a lot can happen between a handshake and a contract – but precisely because of the aesthetic and other kinds of un– or underpaid editorial commitments I was talking about above, the verbal commitment I have with this press means something to me, and so it is a commitment that I want, all else being equal, to honor. If all goes according to plan, I will be very proud to publish my book with this press, as I would have been proud to publish with Milkweed, or with CavanKerry Press. But here’s the final irony: The press that accepted my book did so for precisely the reasons that Milkweed rejected it, because of “the preponderance of first-person poems with an autobiographical slant,” which the editor feels will help to garner All That Struggled In You Not To Drown some serious critical attention, while at the same time making the book something that people will want to buy. Go figure.
1 (Girl in street): Defending civil rights
2 (Boy next to old man): Counterbalancing poverty/deprivation
3 (Boy pushing away donation box): Nationalizing oil income
4 (Man standing on rooftop): Reducing tension in international affairs
5 (Boy sitting next to satellite dishes): Free access to information
6 (Girl sitting besides her mother): Supporting single mothers
7 (Girl with cast): Knock down violence against women
8 (Boy): Education for all
9 (Boy infront of man locking car): Increasing public safety
10 (Girl on rooftop): Ethnic and religious minority rights
11 (Man on rooftop): Supporting NGOs
12 (Girl in front of wall): Public involvement
13 (Boy and girl): We have come for change
14: Change for Iran
Now, a campaign ad is a campaign ad, and it’s very easy to be cynical about them. Just imagine for a minute, though, in the context of Iran, how chutzpadik–it’s a Yiddish word meaning audacious, ballsy, and it’s the only one that fit my response to seeing the ad – it was for an Iranian politician to say he wants to accomplish these things; and notice as well the prominence given to two issues related specifically to women’s status.
So I thought I was going to start my series on classical Iranian poetry with Shahnameh, Iran’s national epic, because it is what I am working on right now, but President Obama’s videotaped Nowruz message to Iran, in which he quotes the 13th century poet Sa’di, has forced me to change my plans. Those lines, The children of Adam are limbs to each other/having been created of one essence, are among the most famous lines of poetry in the world, though few in the United States have ever heard them. They are inscribed on the wall of the Hall of Nations in the UN building in New York City, and the sentiment they express, which you find throughout Gulistan, the book from which they are excerpted, helped in 16th century to catalyze a sea change in the way Christian Europe viewed Muslims and Islamic culture, from one that was governed by the mutual hatred of the Crusades to one that accepted as real the possibility that Muslims were no less human, and believed in humanistic values no less strongly, than the Christian Europeans themselves.
Before I talk about the lines Obama quoted, however (I will have more to say about Sa’di and the rest of his work in another post) I want to acknowledge the importance of the message itself, not just because he sent it – and if you don’t know much about US-Iranian relations beyond the facts of what we called the hostage crisis and the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, you might not realize just how significant the simple fact of sending such a message is – but also because of how he said what he said. First, the message:
I am going to assume that most of what I have to say about this has already been said elsewhere on the web, but since it sets a context for talking about the poetry that President Obama quoted, I want to say it anyway. First, note that he says he wants to speak directly to the leaders and people of the Islamic Republic of Iran, signaling that he considers the country’s current leadership legitimate and they are the people with whom he needs to talk about resolving the differences between our two nations. Note as well, however, that he has chosen to send this message on the occasion of Nowruz (also here and here), the Iranian New Year, a holiday that is distinctly not Muslim – it is Zoroastrian and therefore rooted in the traditions of pre-Islamic Iran – and that the Islamic Republic has on occasion suggested it would like to replace with an Islamic holiday. Indeed, the Islamic Republic actively pursues the delegitimizing of Iran’s pre-Islamic past on a number of fronts, one of which was an attempt after the 1979 revolution to discredit Ferdowsi, the author of Shahnameh and Shahnameh itself.
When I was in Iran this past summer, to give you an example I saw with my own eyes, we visited the ruins of Persepolis (also spelled Perspolis, which is closer to how the word is pronounced in Persian), which was built by Darius I in 518 CE and was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. One of the most remarkable things I learned when we were there was that documents found in the treasury indicated that the ancient Iranian kings not only had something like what we would call workers compensation for their employees, but also policies that permitted men to have paid leave from work when their wives were pregnant so they could help out at home. On the wall of the building that was probably the harem, however, and which is now a museum displaying artifacts found on the site, there is a proclamation issued by the government of Iran asserting that, while it is of course wonderful that people can come to see the great works God made it possible for the ancient Iranian kings to produce, we should not forget that they were tyrannical despots who exploited their people, the clear implication being and that it has only been through the Islamic Republic that Iranians have found true freedom. (Other evidence of the essentially humane nature of the ancient Iranian kings also exists, but since that is not the point of this post, I will allow the irony in what I have just written to speak for itself.)
Whether or not Persident Obama was aware of the irony of sending his message to the Islamic Republic on Nowruz, I don’t know, but like most well-constructed ironies this one can be read two ways, either as evidence that he didn’t know what he was doing and that his message will therefore fall on deaf ears, or that he knew precisely what he was doing and was sending the Islamic Republic the message that while he intends to do business with them as the legitimate political leaders of Iran, that does not mean he will kowtow to the world view they would like to impose on the people of their nation. My own sense, though, is that it doesn’t matter whether or not Obama and his people knew anything about what I have just written; the practical effect of his message, specifically his appeal to the common humanty that binds us as the context within which to talk about the differences between us, puts the Islamic Republic on notice that they cannot depend on the US being an easy enemy anymore – by which I mean an enemy they can easily avoid talking to because we fit very neatly into the “enemy” slot in their rhetoric, which is where the Bush administration kept us firmly ensconced for the eight years they were in power.
More to the point, Obama’s message, including his brief quote from the poet Sa’di, had to have spoken very powerfully to the Iranian people, first because the message of shared humanity is one they have heard all too rarely from the US not only in the last eight years, but ever. From long before the US and British sponsored coup in 1953 that unseated Mohammad Mossadeq, the duly elected prime minister of Iran, so that they could reinstate Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the NY Times report is here; and an allegedly unedited version of the CIA report is here) – all pretty clearly in the interest of retaining access to and control over Iran’s oil – Iranians have seen their aspirations for democracy thwarted time and time again by outside influences. To the degree that President Obama is seriously commnitted to engaging Iran on equal terms – by which I mean in a way that respects and honors the integrty of their much-much-older-than-ours culture, history and even their politics (a subject that is far more complicated than almost any reporting I have ever seen done on the subject here in the States – and I am certainly no expert) – and to the degree that he can demonstrate that commitment with concrete action, he is committing the United States to a radical change not only in the way we deal with Iran politically, but also in how we see Iran more broadly – since, after all, the way our media covers Iran will absolutely follow the stance our political leaders take towards Iran. (As an aside: I was very surprised by how many of the Iranians I met when I was there this past summer think that the average American thinks they are all some version of what is meant by the phrase “anti-American terrorist.” They see how they and their country are portrayed here; and they – not the government, but everyday people – despair of ever being seen by us on their own terms.)
The other reason that Obama’s use of lines by Sa’di would have resonated very powerfully with the Iranian people is the degree to which Sa’di and his work is loved and revered in Iranian culture to this day. I will write more about Sa’di in a future post. For now, suffice it to say that his position in the Iranian literary canon is not unlike Shakespeare’s place in our own. More to the point, Iran is a culture that loves its poets and its poetry; it is hard for people in the US, where poetry is so little appreciated unless it is couched in the melodies of popular song, to imagine the degree to which poetry is a living part of the culture in Iran. One very rough analogy might be to think about someone like the early Bob Dylan and how popular his songs were – and maybe still are – in progressive circles and then expand that popularity to include pretty much the entire population of the United States, and not just because people liked his tunes, but because they identified with the way he spoke truth to power; and then imagine Bob Dylan’s words not just as part of every child’s schooling, but as the primary text used to teach people how to read English.
As I said in my introductory post, I am not an expert on Iranian literature, and so I make no claim that what I have just told you about Sa’di is 100% accurate and up-to-date – indeed, it’s fascinating to learn the degree to which Sa’di’s reputation has risen and fallen depending on the political climate in Iran – but I think my analogy is generally true. Moreover, it is indisputably true that there is a long tradition in Iran, and other countries in that region, such as Pakistan, of poets being the people who speak truth to power. In fact, the lines from Sa’di that Obama quoted, wonderfully liberal and humanistic as they are, come from a story in Gulistan that is far more radical, certainly for the time it was written, than those two lines would suggest. Here is the full story, though I am now going to switch to my own translation. It’s the tenth story in the first chapter, “Padeshahan” (“Kings”), in Gulistan. First, though, some vocabulary:
A darvish (dervish in English) was a kind of wandering mendicant, and they were usually Sufiand considered holy men.
The Propeht Yahia is John the Baptist.
Story 10
An Arab king who was notorious for his cruelty came on a pilgrimage to the cathedral mosque of Damascus, where he offered the following prayer, clearly seeking God’s assistance in a matter of some urgency:
“The darvish, poor, owning nothing, the man
whose money buys him anything he wants,
here, on this floor, enslaved, we are equals.
Nonetheless, the man who has the most
comes before You bearing the greater need.”
When the king was done praying, he noticed me immersed in my own prayers at the head of the prophet Yahia’s tomb. The monarch turned to me, “I know that God favors you darvishes because you are passionate in your worship and honest in the way you live your lives. I fear a powerful enemy, but if you add your prayers to mine, I am sure that God will protect me for your sake.”
“Have mercy on the weak among your own people,” I replied, “and no one will be able to defeat you.”
To break each of a poor man’s ten fingers
just because you have the strength offends God.
Show compassion to those who fall before you,
and others will extend their hands when you are down.
The man who plants bad seed hallucinates
if he expects sweet fruit at harvest time.
Take the cotton from your ears! Give
your people justice before justice finds you.
All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you forfeit the right to be called human.
Because I plan to write more about Sa’di in a future post, I am going to let this story speak for itself, except for two things: First, given that Sa’di lived in a monarchy, consider how much courage it would take to say such things to a king who had the power of live and death over you. Second, consider how radical it would be in a monarchy to suggest to the king that he should rule as if he and the weakest of his subjects were actually part of the same body – the metaphor is a good deal more complext than you might think on a first reading – and then consider the ways in which that metaphor resonates today, not only in countries like Iran, with governments that are in many ways hostile to their own people, but even in our own nation, where our government is supposed to be “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
My next post, unless something else happens to distract me, will be about
In November of last year, I was interviewed by Marina Yoffe, founder and director of Jackson Heights Poetry Festival, an organization whose advisory board I sit on, and I never got around to posting a link to the excerpts from the interview that JHPF put up on its website. There were, I think, better moments from the interview that they could have used, but I like this nonetheless. Anyway, better late than never. So here ’tis:
Here is the text of the two poems I read. (If I had a transcript of the interview itself, I would post that too, but I don’t.)
Melissa’s Story
The doctor gave instructions like a spy: Be there, seven pm, on the dot.
If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about
another appointment. Got it? That day,
of course, there was traffic, and the money
had to be in small, old bills. You will get
in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,
you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.
Make a mistake and I leave. Understood?
I did. Somehow it went without a snag,
and there I was, legs open on a bed,
with a man crouched between them like a dog.
He reached into me and scraped away the life
I’d almost made, not yet mine to give.
///
The Silence Of Men
A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apartment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writing. He carries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phallus begins to waltz to music
I cannot hear, its scrotum a skirt;
its testicles, legs cut off at the knees.
I want to know why this disfigured
manhood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflating
in short spasms like an old man coughing,
spreads itself in a pool of shallow blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.
If you want to know more about my work, my website is www.richardjnewman.com; and if you’d like to buy my book, you can find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but I would ask that you either buy it directly from the distributor, UPNE, which directly helps my publisher, CavanKerry Press, which is a fine small press that can use the help, or find an independent bookstore on indiebound