Fer­dowsi, the author of Shahnameh

I first called myself a poet, though only to myself and only in the pages of the jour­nal I was keep­ing at the time, when I was 22 years old, and it was one of the most fright­en­ing moments of my life. I knew I was mak­ing a com­mit­ment to some­thing much larger than myself, but also that I was mak­ing a com­mit­ment first and fore­most to myself, because no one else in the world really cared whether or not I lived my life with the mak­ing of poetry at its cen­ter. I sup­pose I had ideas that I might one day pub­lish books that would mat­ter to peo­ple and, indeed, had been given some intial encour­age­ment to think that way by June Jor­dan, my first poetry teacher, whose work­shop I took when I was a junior in col­lege, a year before I declared myself a poet. A poem that I wrote crit­i­ciz­ing what, in my opin­ion any­way, was the very cyn­i­cal and manip­u­la­tive approach to the Holo­caust taken by the Jew­ish cen­ter my fam­ily went to at the time and insist­ing that any approach to con­fronting oppres­sion had to make con­nec­tions between and among all oppres­sions, had been accepted by a lit­er­ary jour­nal pub­lished, I think, by the Uni­ver­sity of Alabama. I shared the good news with my class, of course, but it was not until later that semes­ter, at an awards cer­e­mony we were both attend­ing, that June pulled me aside and told me she’d thought I’d writ­ten an impor­tant poem and that it was impor­tant for me to keep writ­ing out of what­ever place that poem had come from. That kind of affir­ma­tion, of con­fir­ma­tion, is so impor­tant in a young writer’s life, and it is one rea­son why the poems that mean the most to me, both the ones that I write and the ones that I read, are what I call polit­i­cally engaged, not in the nar­row sense of the pol­i­tics of any given moment – though those poems are impor­tant too – but in the sense of con­sciously engag­ing the pol­i­tics of power that are inescapably part of how our lives are shaped, informed and motivated.

Still, it would be another year before I could bring myself to write the words I am a poet in my jour­nal and fully own them, and even then the com­mit­ment I was mak­ing was more about mak­ing than it was about pub­lish­ing or try­ing in any way to gar­ner any sort of rep­u­ta­tion for myself. Giv­ing myself to lan­guage, claim­ing lan­guage as mine to work, was a para­dox I did not even under­stand that I was enter­ing, and yet enter­ing that para­dox gave me back my voice, which is what I mean when I say — and I am not being melo­dra­matic — that being a poet gave me a rea­son to live. I think I might have become a writer even if I had not been sex­u­ally abused by two dif­fer­ent men, each at a dif­fer­ent time dur­ing my teens, but I don’t know that I would have become a poet, because it was through read­ing and writ­ing poems – not nov­els, not essays, not mem­oirs – that I dis­cov­ered lan­guage as a way of, and a lan­guage for, giv­ing voice to the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing had my voice taken away. One of my abusers, the first to decide that I was his to use sex­u­ally, silenced me, lit­er­ally stopped up my mouth, with his penis; the sec­ond used his lan­guage, his voice, to shape what he was doing to me, to con­struct the con­text in which he was doing it, such that no words I might utter would mean the no I only half under­stood that I could say, given how deeply the first man had stuffed back into me the no I’d wanted to say to him. In a sense, I sup­pose, every poem I’ve ever writ­ten has been an artic­u­la­tion and reartic­u­la­tion of those unut­tered no’s.

I stopped writ­ing poetry-as-therapy a long time ago, poems that resem­bled the self-indulgence of TV-talk-show rants more than any­thing else, but I remem­ber well how lib­er­at­ing it was to write them, to name my expe­ri­ence in them; and I remem­ber as well the very dif­fer­ent and deeply sat­is­fy­ing sense of accom­plish­ment I felt when I wrote the first poem about my expe­ri­ence of abuse that was not merely a cry for peo­ple to hear me, to see me, to acknowl­edge that what had been done to me was real, but was rather my own fully con­scious attempt to give that expe­ri­ence a mean­ing that was entirely mine, that had noth­ing to do with how the men who abused me had tried to make me theirs; and I remem­ber also the moment I real­ized that every poem I had writ­ten to that point was what had brought me to that point, even the ones that had noth­ing to do with sex­ual abuse. I under­stood then that every poem I would write from that moment on, if it was going to count, needed to come from the same place that those other poems came from; and I thought this too is polit­i­cal, is resis­tance, not just going to protests and writ­ing let­ters and orga­niz­ing – all of which are deeply impor­tant work – but liv­ing con­sciously, pur­pose­fully, in such a way that you bring to lan­guage, that you find lan­guage for, give lan­guage to, all the ways in which that no man­i­fests itself over and against acqui­es­cence to the sta­tus quo, how­ever that sta­tus quo is defined. I was begin­ning to see that this no, once it has a voice, will ulti­mately man­i­fest itself as a yes, an affir­ma­tion, a con­fir­ma­tion, that this is who you are, and that this is some­thing you will fight to keep free and whole until you can­not fight anymore.

So I have been think­ing about this because I have been think­ing about Shah­nameh, Book of Kings, the Iran­ian national epic, which was writ­ten by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi in the 10^th cen­tury CE. As I have just explained, I know what it’s like to be invaded, to have my voice taken away from me, and I know what it’s like to write in resis­tance to that inva­sion, but it is hard for me to imag­ine what it would mean to live through the mil­i­tary con­quest of my coun­try, to have my country’s lan­guage sup­planted by the lan­guage of  my con­querors, my nation’s reli­gion replaced by theirs, my culture’s sto­ries and tra­di­tions sup­planted by those of the con­quer­ing cul­ture. Indeed, I think that unless you are Native Amer­i­can, if you were born and raised in the United States, it’s hard to imag­ine what that would be like. You might be a mem­ber of a group whose cul­ture and his­tory, and even lan­guage, are erased, denied, ridiculed or oth­er­wise dero­gated by the dom­i­nant cul­ture, but that is not the same thing as watch­ing an army march onto the land that is your home­land and take it over. I am, of course, paint­ing here with a very broad brush – and I do not mean to imply a hier­ar­chy, i.e., that mil­i­tary inva­sion is some­how essen­tially worse than any other form of oppres­sion – but I want the dis­tinc­tion I am mak­ing to serve as an intro­duc­tion of sorts to the cir­cum­stances in which Fer­dowsi com­posed Shah­nameh, because his writ­ing of that text con­sti­tuted a kind of lit­er­ary resis­tance at the level of national con­scious­ness that we don’t have in the US and that, because we have not been invaded and occu­pied, we have never had to have.

Any­way, the Iran­ian Empire was con­quered by Mus­lim Arabs in the 7^th cen­tury CE, and over the 300 years that sep­a­rate that con­quest from Ferdowsi’s life and times, Ara­bic became the offi­cial lan­guage of the empire, replac­ing Pahlavi, or Mid­dle Per­sian; and Islam became the dom­i­nant reli­gion, replac­ing Zoroas­tri­an­ism. Indeed, what we know about Pahlavi comes from about a hun­dred or so sur­viv­ing Zoroas­trian texts, though evi­dence sug­gests that they were part of a con­sid­er­able lit­er­a­ture. The Shah who ruled Iran before the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in 1978 – 79 took Pahlavi as the name of his dynasty in a very con­scious attempt to reclaim Iran’s pre-Islamic past, which is pre­cisely what Fer­dowsi did when he wrote Shah­nameh. First, and per­haps most impor­tantly, he wrote his poem – and it is a very long poem, about 50,000 cou­plets, longer than the Faerie Queen–using almost no Ara­bic loan words. The con­se­quences of this lin­guis­tic accom­plish­ment con­tinue to be felt to this day, because if Fer­dowsi had not writ­ten Shah­nameh almost exclu­sively in Per­sian, nei­ther Rumi nor Hafez–to name the two clas­si­cal Iran­ian poets best known in the United States – would have writ­ten the way that they did. Omar Khayyam, whom many peo­ple know through Edward Fitzgerald’s trans­la­tion, The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, would not have pro­duced the work he pro­duced; nei­ther would Sa’di nor Attar, two of the other poets whose work I have trans­lated. Indeed, it is pos­si­ble to draw a direct line from the fact of a con­tem­po­rary lit­er­a­ture writ­ten in Per­sian all the way back to the reemer­gence of Per­sian as a lit­er­ary lan­guage that Ferdowsi’s Shah­nameh cat­alyzed. (An anal­ogy to our own lit­er­ary time, though it is an imper­fect one, might be to the African Amer­i­can writ­ers who wrote, and con­tinue to write, in what, when June Jor­dan wrote His Own Where and when Alice Walker wrote The Color Pur­ple, was called Black Eng­lish. There have been at least three other names attached to this dialect since then: African Amer­i­can Eng­lish, African Amer­i­can Ver­nac­u­lar Eng­lish and Ebon­ics. I don’t know what the proper name of this dialect of Eng­lish is now under­stood to be.)

Another way in which Shah­nameh con­sti­tutes lit­er­ary resis­tance is the fact that Fer­dowsi ended the poem at the moment of the Mus­lim con­quest. All of the kings whose reigns the poem explores and in many ways cel­e­brates, in other words, the mythopo­etic ones in the first half of the epic and the ones in the sec­ond half that are at least rooted in his­tor­i­cal fact, are pre-Islamic. More to the point, the val­ues held by those kings and their sub­jects and the val­ues explored through­out are pre-Islamic as well. Even Ferdowsi’s account of the cre­ation of the world in the poet’s pref­ace, where one would expect him to lay out his “cre­den­tials” as a good Mus­lim and a loyal sub­ject, so to speak, draws quite explic­itly on Zoroas­trian texts. Not that Fer­dowsi was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary, at least not in the sense that we mean it today. He was a Mus­lim, and his pref­ace to the poem does con­tain praise of Mohammed and of the king who was his patron, but in recov­er­ing for pos­ter­ity the pre-Islamic sto­ries, val­ues and tra­di­tions of Iran, Fer­dowsi pro­duced a poem that is a prime exam­ple of lit­er­ary resis­tance to occu­pa­tion, not just because it is a suc­cess­ful poem in and of itself, but because it has sur­vived all these cen­turies as a means of cul­tural trans­mis­sion. That alone makes it a poem worth pay­ing atten­tion to.

The next posts on Shah­nameh may be a lit­tle slow in com­ing, but in them I will go into more detail about the poem itself and the parts of it I am work­ing on.