Richard Jeffrey Newman

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 blog¹ 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 10^th 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 7^th 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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