I’ve been feeling guilty that I haven’t posted about the recent goings on in Iran. People were out in the streets protesting again, and the basij were there to try to beat them back, and it’s important – especially because of the negotiations happening now about Iran’s nuclear program – that we in the United States know that the opposition movement in Iran has not simply retreated. I just have not had the time to gather the pictures I have seen, the articles and witness accounts that I have read, and write about them in a way that will make sense. So – and even this is late – I am reposting here something I wrote on my other blog during the protests in June.
Protesters in Ferdowsi Square after the June 09 elections in Iran
The connection between literature and politics is always a difficult one. Treating politics as if it were literature, politicizing literary texts, are strategies that people use to advance agendas that are fundamentally political, and often not progressive in nature. Especially in connection with what is going on in Iran right now, when people are really dying and when the Iranian government is doing everything it can to isolate the entire nation of Iran so that it (the government) can restore what it believes should be the (clearly repressive) order of things, to talk about life imitating art, to read what is going on in Iran through the lens of Iran’s own literature, has felt to me like a self-indulgent and gratuitous intellectual exercise. Yet literature, and in this case specifically poetry, also helps people give meaning to their lives; it can inspire, and it can connect us to something larger than ourselves in ways that political feelings, no matter how strongly felt and/or acted upon, often cannot. And so, precisely because people are really dying in Iran – because I really do believe, along with William Carlos Williams, that people die every day for lack of what is found in poetry – and precisely because there is so much at stake over there, and because Iran is a culture that loves and reveres its poets, I have decided to write this. Perhaps connecting the unrest in Iran not only to the specific history of the Islamic Republic and the revolution out of which that republic was born – which most analysts, reasonably, are focusing on – but also to the Iranian culture that is larger and older than both the Republic and Islam, will make a difference. What that difference might be, and to whom, I have no way of knowing, but I just don’t think it is mere coincidence that the current unrest finds echoes in a story Iran has been telling itself about itself for centuries: the tale of Kaveh and Zahhak from the poem commonly referred to as Iran’s national epic, Shahnameh (Book, or Epic, of the Kings), part of which I am in the process of translating. I will include my translation at the end of this post.
Written by Abolqasem Ferdowsi in the 10th century, Shahnameh tells the story of the Iranian nation by telling the story of its kings, from the nation’s mythical beginnings right up to the moment of the Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE. One of the themes that runs through the poem is the question of how to respond to an unjust ruler. The tale of Zahhak and Kaveh, which you will read below, is one of the narratives that explores this theme. First, though, you need some backstory: Zahhak is Shahnameh’s first evil king. Son of an Arab monarch named Merdas, Zahhak is seduced by Eblis (the devil in these stories) into killing his father to assume the throne, and he is eventually cursed by Eblis with a serpent growing out of each shoulder, to which he must feed one human brain per night. In other words, he must kill two people a day in order to keep the serpents fed. As you might imagine, then, Zahhak does not turn out to be a benevolent ruler, and when he conquers Iran – whose previous king, Jamshid, made himself vulnerable when he declared himself a god and so lost the true god’s favor – Zahhak’s cruelty kicks into high gear.
The statue of Ferdowsi in Ferdowsi Square, bedecked in green, during a rally, June 18
One night, Zahhak has a dream that disturbs him. When he asks his advisors to interpret it, they say that the dream foretells his destruction by a man named Feraydoun, who will kill him and assume the throne. Zahhak goes on a killing rampage trying to hunt Feraydoun down, and though he is unsuccessful, he does manage to kill Feraydoun’s father. Finally, out of a kind of desperation – and here is where, if you have not seen parallels to what is going on in Iran until now, the parallels start to get obvious – Zahhak summons the prince of each province in his kingdom and asks them to sign their names to a proclamation asserting that he, as their leader, has only ever been concerned with justice, righteousness and spoken only the truth. He wants this public acknowledgment so that he can raise an army with which to defeat the nemesis who is coming to challenge him. The heads of the provinces, knowing that their leader will kill them if they refuse to sign the proclamation, sign. It is at this point that Kaveh walks in, and from here I am going to let the poem speak for itself, because I think the parallels to today’s situation – a ruler afraid he will lose power, a rigged statement of approval, a (failed) attempt to appease the citizenry and opposition marches – while not exact, need no further explanation. (This selection from my translations of parts of the Shahnameh, I should add, has just been published in the really fine-looking journal The Dirty Goat Magazine.)
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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.