So what exactly does a contemporary relationship between a gay man and a straight man look like? I don’t know. This is a love affair and it looks like this. Every day we email and text back and forth about who we’re sleeping with, how we’re sleeping with them, and if we should continue to do so (in his case it’s just one girl in Paris who he’s in love with). We email poems to one another (this is less gay than it sounds since we’re both poets, which is more gay than it sounds), we have event nights, non-event nights, and date nights where we get together for really expensive drinks we can’t afford and remix Chrissie Hynde with Camus and (oh my god) our feelings.

It’s really worth reading the whole thing.

“Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and snow, must lead a very quite life,” he begins. “Seldom, I imagine does their poetry get them into difficulties.” Then he goes on:

Unfortunately, having been born poor–and also colored–in Missouri, I was stuck in the mud from the beginning. Try as I might to float off into the clouds, poverty and Jim Crow would grab me by the heels, and right on earth I would land. A third floor furnished room is the nearest thing I have ever had to an ivory tower.

This experience, he explains, left him little choice but to write “social” poems. Not to do so would have been to deny his own life experience. Admitting that his “adventures as a social poet are mild indeed compared to the body-breaking…experiences” of poets in other parts of the world, Hughes goes on to relate his own experiences in the US, which include being told by a Black minister in a Black church in Atlantic City not to read any blues from his pulpit, the loss of the patronage of the woman who sponsored his writing after he finished college, being threatened by the people of a southern university town because of one of his poems and more. These might sound relatively mild to us now, but it’s worth remember just how volatile an issue race was in Hughes’ day and how easily poems like this one, written in protest of Scottsboro case, might have caused an actual riot.

Christ in Alabama

Christ is a Nigger,
Beaten and black–
O, bare your back.

Mary is His Mother–
Mammy of the South.
Silence your mouth.

God’s His Father–
White Master above,
Grant us your love.

Most holy bastard
Of the bleeding mouth:
Nigger Christ
On the cross of the South.

The entire essay is really worth reading. It’s a reminder not just of a time in American history that is too easily forgotten these days, but of what it was like to try to live your life during that time. The entire essay is really worth reading. It’s a reminder not just of a time in American history that is too easily forgotten these days, but of what it was like to try to live your life during that time. Hughes was a remarkable poet, and for people who know him now only through the work of his that has been anthologized–where it is almost never presented in its full political context–should also know that the stakes for him in writing those poems were much higher than whether or not he would ever be anthologized.

I will end with the same passage that Mark Nowak quoted in the post I linked to above:

I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such. But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody [always] tells the police.

When a nonspecialist audience is responding well to a poem, its reaction is a kind of tentative pleasure, a puzzled interest that resembles the affection a traveler bears for a destination that both welcomes and confounds him. For such readers, then, it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone [referring to what Orr sees as the two dominant modes of response to modern poetry that one finds in books on the subject]. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium.

I did not laugh outloud when I read that–I was, after all, in a diner and there were people around me enjoying their meals–but I laughed inwardly, both because I knew where he was going and because I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to go there with him. I don’t know that I think Poetry: The Undiscovered Country is the best way to talk to “nonspecialist” readers about modern poetry, but I do know that I liked the ride Orr’s exploration of his metaphor took me on:

The comparison may seem ridiculous at first, but consider the way you’d be thinking about Belgium if you were planning a trip there. You might try to learn a few useful phrases, or read a little Belgian history, or thumb through a guidebook in search of museums, restaurants, flea markets, or promising-sounding bars. The important thing is that you’d know you were going to be confused, or at least occasionally at a loss, and you’d accept that confusion as part of the experience. What you wouldn’t do, however, is become paralyzed with anxiety because you don’t speak fluent Flemish, or convinced that to really “get” Belgium, you need to memorize the Brussels phone book. Nor would you decide in advance that you’d never understand Belgians because you couldn’t immediately determine why their most famous public statue is a depiction of a naked kid peeing in a fountain (which is true). You’d probably figure, hey, that’s what they like in Belgium; if I stick around long enough, maybe it’ll all make sense.

There is so much that is dead on about this, from the way people do treat poetry like a foreign language you can’t understand unless you’re already fluent to the assumption that not understanding a single image in a poem means you should just throw your hands up in resignation and never read another one; and I like the humor here; and there’s not really much else that I have to say, especially since I need to go teach in three minutes, except that I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book. Orr sounds like the kind of critic with whom it will be good to have the kind of conversation you can only have in the act of reading, and I miss reading poetry and reading good books about poetry just for the pleasire of it, just because I am a poet and this stuff feeds me.

Off to class.

Ghazal 10

Curls disheveled, sweating, laughing, and drunk,
shirt torn, singing ghazals, flask in hand,

his eyes seeing a quarrel, his lips saying, “Alas!”,
last night at midnight he came can sat by my pillow.

He bent his head to my ear and said, sadly,
“O my ancient lover, are you sleeping?”

The seeker to whom they give such a cup at dawn
is an infidel to love if he will not worship wine.

O ascetic, go, and don’t quibble with those who drink the dregs,
for on the eve of Creation this was all they gave us.

What he poured in our cup we drank,
whether the mead of heaven or the wine of drunkenness.

The wine cup’s smile and his knotted curl
have broken many vows of repentance, like that of Hafez.

1. The tradition is similar to what some people do with the Bible; they open the book to any page, pick a verse at random and then see what that verse has to say about their lives.

The poems are from The Silence of Men. Here they are:

Light

In the dream, my life was smoke: I couldn’t breathe.
So I ran, unwrapping myself down the beach
till your skin, the ocean, lapped at my knees.
I dove in. Your voice was a current,
a melody gathering words to itself
for us to sing, and we sang them,
and they swirled around us, iridescent fish
bringing light to the world you were for me;

and then I was water, a river
washing the night from your flesh,
and I cradled your body rising in me
till you were clean, glowing,
and when you surfaced, glistening,
there was not an inch of you I didn’t cling to.

Ethics Of The Fathers

Moses received the Torah from Sinai
and passed it on to Joshua, who gave
it in his turn to The Elders, and love
or duty, or maybe both, explain why
we still hand it down, even if we die
doing so. The Church burned us alive,
the Romans did worse…but you who give
yourselves to goyishe women, you lie
with their gods as well, and so we cast you out.
The rabbi paused, whispered Come back, and left
the stage. No applause. Behind me, a man laughed.
Beside me, a woman squirmed in her seat.

In love, my love, I’ve given myself to you,
neither god nor goddess, and not a Jew.

After Drought

Knees rooted in the bed on either side
of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat
bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot
rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud
swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed
white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot
beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat
lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside,
footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull
the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone
does see, what will they have seen? A couple
making love. No. More than that: They will
have seen the coming of the rain; they will
have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen.

More recently, to take another example, it could not have been an accident that the scenes of protestors carrying green banners through the streets in the weeks following Iran’s contested presidential elections in 2009 bore such a striking resemblance to the scene near the beginning of the Shahnameh in which the blacksmith Kaveh marches through the streets carrying a banner and calling the Persian people to rise up against the evil Arab king Zahhak. Kaveh is an unapologetic revolutionary, intent on overthrowing the despot who has killed all but one of his eighteen sons, but he is also a Persian calling for the overthrow of his people’s Arab monarch, which makes it very tempting to read Ferdowsi as more seditious than he really was, as if his purpose in writing the Shahnameh had been to foment a revolution against Islam. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Just as the protestors in Iran sought to have their votes counted in the context of the government they already had, not to overthrow that government, Ferdowsi, who was a practicing Muslim, wanted to preserve and transmit Iran’s cultural heritage within an Islamic context, not present that cultural heritage as a replacement for Islam.

In this purpose, Ferdowsi was not alone. He may have been a practicing Muslim, but he was also a proud dehqan, a member of Iran’s landed gentry, a group Shahbazi calls “the backbone” of Iranian society, powerful enough that Arab commanders sometimes felt it necessary to negotiate peace treaties with them, and a group that saw itself as duty bound to preserve the “memories of the golden days of [the Persian] empire and the heroic traditions and cultural heritage of [their nation]” (20–21). After three hundred years of Muslim Arab rule, the dehqan had reason to be concerned. Not only had Arabic replaced Persian as the language of law, literature, philosophy and science, but there was also a growing acceptance among Muslim Iranians that it might be possible to rebuild Iran’s imperial structure within an Islamic context. Indeed, revisionist histories of Iran, such as Tabari’s Tarikh, which is contemporaneous with the Shahnameh, were written in support of this idea. In Tarikh, Tabari incorporates Iran’s origins into the creation story as told in the Koran. His goal is to demonstrate that the reigns of the Persian monarchs fit into Koranic chronology, placing Iran’s legendary kings and heros into the world inhabited by, and ultimately subordinating those kings and heros to, characters like Adam and Nuh (Noah), who are far more important to Islam’s overall narrative than Iran could ever be.

In the eyes of the dehqan, this was an unacceptable diminution of Iran’s cultural heritage, and so when Ferdowsi wrote of the beginning of the world in the Shahnameh, he placed Iran squarely at the center of the narrative, and when he told the stories of Iran’s mythical monarchs, he told the stories in their own terms, without trying to justify their existence within the dominant cultural, political and spiritual context of Islam (Davis 14). Yet it would be a mistake to understand the Shahnameh purely as a historical or political text, of interest primarily not for its literary worth, but for its role as a repository of ancient Iranian legends. To do so would be to ignore not only Ferdowsi’s literary intent–he was, very self-consciously, writing a poem–but also the fact that, as any of the apocryphal stories told about him illustrate, both in their content and by the fact of their existence, it was as a poet, not a historian, that Ferdowsi made his reputation. In one tale, that reputation was preordained. Ferdowsi’s father, this story goes, had a vision of his recently-born son climbing a roof and calling out loudly towards each of the four corners of the earth. Each time the child called out, a strong voice answered him. Najm-al-Din, who was a dream-interperter, explained to the boy’s father that the vision foretold Ferdowsi’s achievements. “Your son will be a genius, a poet whose name will be known to the four quarters of the world and whose songs will be learned and revered everywhere” (Shahbazi 39, n. 1).

In another story, Ferdowsi travels from his home in Nishapour to Ghazna, the capital city of Sultan Mahmoud, who was a great patron of the arts and about whom I will have more to say later. Upon entering the city, Ferdowsi encounters three of Mahmoud’s court poets, Ansari, Asjadi and Farrukhi, who did not want to be disturbed by someone whose manner of dress so clearly marked him as provincial. Thinking to have some fun at Ferdowsi’s expense, and to make sure he did not bother them again, they issued him a challenge. “We are the king’s poets,” Ansari, who was the most senior, said, “and only a true poet can keep company with us. So, to test your ability, each of us will compose one line of a quatrain using a single rhyme. If you can provide the fourth, we will allow you to join us.” Ferdowsi, confident in his skill as a poet, agreed.

The rhyming word Ansari chose was roshan (bright) and, at least according to Edward G. Browne, in whose Literary History of Persia I first read this tale (129–30), he chose that word because he was sure there were only two other words in Persian that would rhyme with it: golshan (rose garden), with which Asjadi ended his line, and joshan (cuirass), with which Farrukhi ended his. The difficulty of reproducing Persian rhymes in English forces Browne to offer two translations. The first, in the main body of Browne’s text, preserves the rhyming challenge–though the rhyme he chooses is hardly challenging in English–while losing both the meaning and, because he has to change the images and metaphors, the Persian character of the lines. The second translation, which he gives in a footnote, preserves the meaning of the quatrain but loses the rhyming challenge entirely. In each translation, though, his rendering preserves the sense of Ferdowsi’s completing line. Here is Browne’s mono-rhymed quatrain:

Ansari:      Thine eyes are clear and blue as a sunlit ocean
Asjadi:       Their glance bewitches like a magic potion
Farrukhi:   The wounds they cause no balm can heal, nor lotion
Ferdowsi:  Deadly as those Giv’s spear dealt out to Poshan.

And here is the quatrain that more accurately renders the sense of the quatrain:

Ansari:       The moon is not so radiant as thy brow
Asjadi:       No garden-rose can match thy cheek, I trow
Farrukhi:   Thy lashes through the hardest breastplate pierce
Ferdowsi:   Like spear of Giv in Poshan’s duel fierce.

The court poets were deeply impressed. Not only had Ferdowsi survived their poetic challenge; he had done so by referring to an obscure story from Persian lore, demonstrating not only that he was a fine poet, but also a man of some learning. Realizing that they had underestimated him, Ansari, Asjadi and Farrukhi decide to present Ferdowsi to Sultan Mahmoud as a poet worthy of completing the versification of the national epic begun two or three decades earlier by another poet, Daqiqi, whose murder had left the court with only a thousand or so completed verses. This the poets did and the rest, as the saying goes, except that the story I have just told you is almost entirely apocryphal, is history.

Works Cited

Davis, Dick. Epic & Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers 2006.

Mackey, Sandra. The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Dutton 1996

Shahbazi, A. Shapur. Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1991.

The greatest, and also the most disappointing, of these four is Jamshid, for it is Jamshid who establishes social classes, brings the science of medicine to humanity, teaches his people to make clothing and perfume, and in general orders the society if his time such that it is recognizable to us as the kind of social world in which we live. Jamshid, also, however is the first king to allow his pride to get the better of him, declaring himself a deity and losing the farr, which people often translate into English as aura, but is more accurately described as the visible quality in a king that signifies for his subjects the fact that God favors his rule. If you imagine the halos that were drawn around Christ’s head in medieval paintings, but picture them around the heads of kings and understand them to be visible proof of what the Europeans used to believe was the divine right of kings, you have something close to what the farr is.

Once Jamshid loses the farr, there is room for evil to enter the world, which it does in the form of Zahhak, part of whose story you can read in my translation on Ekleksographia. In addition to the word farr, you need to know that peris are supernatural creatures upon which are based the faeries of Victorian England; and you need to know as well that “Demon Binder” was the name given to Jamshid’s father, Tahmures, because he bound Ahriman–the source of evil–and rode him, more or less like a horse, around the world.

Here is my translation of Jamshid’s story, which is also the story of the first Norouz:

Filled with his father’s wisdom, when the world
was done mourning the Demon Binder,
Jamshid joined the line of men
to ascend the throne and wear the crown.
Peace spread across his kingdom,
and the birds and peris bowed to him too.
“I will,” he said, “keep evil from evil-doers’
hands, and I will guide souls to light.
The royal farr rests with me. I rule
as shah and priest.”

He turned first
to making weapons, paving for his warriors
a road to glory and renown. Iron,
beneath his farr, softened, became swords
and helmets, chain mail and horse armor,
and he gave fifty years to training
the men he charged with building his armory.

The next five decades, Jamshid devoted
to clothing, contriving different fabrics—
linen and silk, brocades and satin—
teaching people to spin and to weave,
to dye what they’d woven, and then sew a garment
for feasting or fighting. When he finished, he divided
men by their profession, sending
first to the mountains, to worship their Master
and live lives of devotion, the Katuzi.
Second, he summoned the Neysari,
lion-hearted fighters whose luster
lit the entire land, whose leadership
and courage kept the king secure,
and whose valor ensured the nation’s reputation.
Those who farmed the fields came next,
the Basudi, who sow and reap,
who receive no thanks, but whom none reproach
when there’s food to eat. Free people
who kneel to no one and seek no quarrel,
despite the rags they wear, their care
makes the earth flourish and nourishes peace.
A wise elder once said,
“If a free man finds himself a slave,
he has only his own laziness to blame.”

Jamshid gathered the craftsmen last,
the anxious and stubborn Ahtukhoshi.
Haughty and contrary, they work with their hands
to make the goods sold in the market,
and they are always anxious. Fifty years
marched by while Jamshid showed
each person breathing earth’s air
his proper place and path, teaching
the scope of the life he’d been given to live.

He ordered the demons to pour water
over earth, stirring it into clay
they filled molds with to form bricks.
With mortar and stone, they laid foundations
for public baths and beautiful palaces,
and castles to protect against attack.
From rocks, Jamshid’s magic extracted
the lustrous gems and precious metals
he found hidden there, filling his hands
with gold and silver, amber and jacinth.
He distilled perfumes for his people’s pleasure:
balsam and ambergris, rose water and camphor,
musk and aloe. He made medicines
to bring the sick back to health
and to help the healthy stay that way.

Jamshid revealed these secret things
as none before him had done. No one
discovered and ordered the world as he did.

Yet another fifty years
saw Jamshid building ships
he could sail quickly across the sea,
making port in each realm he reached;
and then, although he was already great,
Jamshid stepped past greatness.
He used his farr to fashion a jeweled
throne, decreeing the demons should raise it
high in the sky, where he sat shining
like the sun, and the world’s creatures gathered
around him, standing in awe, scattering
gems at his feet. It was the first of Farvadin,
and Jamshid set that day aside,
naming it Norooz, “new day,”
the day he rested, the first of the year.
His nobles declared a feast, a festival
of wine and song we still celebrate
in Jamshid’s memory.

For three centuries,
Jamshid ruled in peace. His people
knew neither death nor hardship; the demons
stood ready to serve; and all who heard
the king’s command obeyed it. The land,
filled with music, flourished. Jamshid,
however, gave himself to vanity.
Seeing he had no peer in the world,
he forgot the gratitude that is God’s due
and called the nobles of his court before him
to make this fateful proclamation:
“From this day forward, I know no lord
but me: my word brought beauty
and skilled men to adorn the earth!
My word! Sunshine and sleep, security
and comfort, the clothes you wear, your food—
all came to you through me!
Who else ended death’s desolation
and with medicine vanished illness from your lives?
Without me, neither mind nor soul
would inhabit your bodies. So who besides me
can claim, unchallenged, the crown and its power?
You understand this now. So now,
who else can you call Creator but me?!”

The elders bowed their heads and held
their tongues, silenced by what he’d said,
but when the last sound left his mouth,
the farr left him, and his realm fell
into discord. A sensible, pious man
once said, “A king must make himself
God’s slave. Ingratitude towards God
will fill your heart with innumerable fears.”
Jamshid’s men deserted; his destiny
darkened, and his light disappeared from the world.

What caught my interest about the conversation Julie’s post started was that it concerned literature, the role of literature in political movements, the stance political movements should take towards individual works of literature, what it means to write politically engaged literature and what it means to engage literature politically. The first part of the conversation is about the play Seven Jewish Children, written in 2009 by Caryl Churchill in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The play consists of a series of simple imperative sentences, each beginning with “Tell her” or “Don’t tell her”–her being a female of indeterminate age, though she is probably pretty young. Collectively, these imperatives represent some of the positions that Jews, as groups and as individuals, Israeli and not, have taken in response to both the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Israel’s existence. In my own opinion, the play, which I have not read as carefully as I might, and so I am willing to be convinced otherwise, walks a fine line between exposing and critiquing, but also humanizing, the denial and hypocrisy of many who support Israel’s policies out of fear for their own and the Jewish community’s survival, and propagandizing that position as a tool to demonize both Jews and Israel. Ultimately, I don’t think the play crosses the line into propaganda, though I can see how others might reasonably say that it does. Moreover, since it is a play, I suppose that what really matters in terms of this question is how the play is produced, not simply how it reads on the page.

The first comment on Julie’s post is by Sebastian, who says:

I do not remember seeing any discussion of J Street [on Alas]. Before you rush and support them, check at least the Wiki entry… and maybe look into how mainstream Israel supporters feel about them. Maybe also read Seven Jewish Children and remember that J Street endorses the play.

Chingona then points out that J Street did not “endorse” the play. Rather, the organization asserted that the play is not necessarily antisemitic and they defended the theater company that put the play on. Sebastian then admits not that he’d misread J Street’s position on the play, but that he hadn’t even bothered to read the original statement; he also explains that he thinks “it’s worth reading and discussing [Seven Jewish Children], but staging it according to the terms of the author is taking a stance with which I most certainly do not agree.” Presumably, since he does not specify, the part of the terms of performance that Sebastian objects to is the text in boldface below:

The play can be read or performed anywhere, by any number of people. Anyone who wishes to do it should contact the author’s agent (details below), who will license performances free of charge provided that no admission fee is charged and that a collection is taken at each performance for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), 33a Islington Park Street, London N1 1QB, tel +44 (0)20 7226 4114, e-mail info@map-uk.org, web www.map-uk.org.

Certainly, Sebastian is within his right to disagree with these terms, and he is within his right not to attend any performance of the play and to try to convince others not to attend; he also would be within his rights to organize a boycott of the play in his community were someone trying to put it on there. What I am interested in, however, is that the disagreement he expresses is not with the text of the play itself, which he thinks is worth reading and discussing, but with people putting the play to political use, to serve a practical purpose in the world, one that involves human being, human bodies and the relationships between and among them. Some might argue that medical aid is not political, or at least that it ought to be beyond politicization. In principle, I agree, if by politicization you mean the kind of partisanship that is more about who wins and who loses than about finding solutions; but it’s not just that there is nothing about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that is not already, always, political and politicized; it’s that medicine is itself, wherever and however it is practiced, is already, always, political simply because it is about human being and human bodies; and to suggest that literature ought not to be used to make medical care available to people who need it, regardless of the politics of the organizations involved, is to suggest that literature needs to be controlled, hemmed in, fenced in, to be kept safe from those who would corrupt it, to protect its purity, so that it can be read and discussed, for example, without the taint of an overt political agenda. Or maybe it is to suggest that it’s us who need to be kept safe from literature, because literature has the power to move people to act, not just to think and to feel.

However one understands the impulse to keep literature out of the material reality of people’s lives, that impulse at its core is the impulse to censor, to control meaning and thereby to control people’s imaginations. Let me be clear, though: I am not accusing Sebastian of censorship or of wanting to censor anyone. He is neither making nor advocating policy in his comments on Alas; and let me be clear about something else as well: I am talking in this post about literature, works that aspire to the level of art, the purpose of which is to explore human being and feeling, not–as propaganda attempts, and is designed, to do–dictate it. I can imagine, for example, a production of Seven Jewish Children that might qualify as propaganda, one in which, say, the characters were all wearing Nazi uniforms and in which there was no irony to make that costuming decision anything other than a simple equating of Israel with Nazi Germany. I would not argue that such a production should be censored, but it is unambiguously a production neither I nor anyone I know would support, no matter how worthy the goal of fund raising for Medical Aid for Palestinians might be–and from what I can tell that is a worthy goal. What if, though, the director of the play, the one who made the choice to put Nazi uniforms on the actors, was Jewish, and let’s say he or she was making in this production a serious attempt to use that costuming in an ironic way, as a reference to the fact that the Jews–and I am assuming that the characters in Seven Jewish Children are Jewish–who were the victims in the Holocaust, are now, in Israel, in the position of being an occupying oppressor, of victimizing the Palestinians.[1. I wish I didn’t feel the need to add this footnote, but I do: To make this reference is, of course, not to deny that the Palestinians have also been guilty of victimizing Israelis.] The point of the comparison, in other words, is not to say that Israel–and, by extension, the Jews–are no different from the Nazis, that the Israelis are committing what is tantamount to genocide against the Palestinians, but rather to illuminate the dynamic by which violence begets violence, all too often turning those who were victims of violence into perpetrators of the kinds of violence they suffered. Further, imagine that the program notes for this imaginary production make clear that it is intended to explore what it means that the violence done by the Israelis to the Palestinians has become part of Jewish identity, in the sense that if one is Jewish, one must be accountable in some way for one’s responses to that violence. Moreover, let’s even say that there is a note in the program explaining that the choice of Nazi uniforms was because the Holocaust, more than any other persecution the Jews have suffered, can stand for all the persecutions through which the Jews have lived. The comparison to the Holocaust per se, in other words, is not even the point.

It is not hard to imagine the kinds of vitriol that the Jewish community would direct at the people involved with this production. More to the point, it is hard not to imagine that this vitriol would be well-deserved. Asserting an ironic frame for the production I have imagined in the way that I have imagined the director asserting it would be an empty gesture, a cop out, because even if it were possible to put the characters in Seven Jewish Children into Nazi uniforms and have it not be antisemitic–and I don’t think it is possible–the play’s text is too simple to support the ironic reading such a costuming decision would require. Nonetheless, I’d like for the moment to assume that the director’s intention to be ironic was genuine, not because her or his intent would make the production less problematic, or excuse his or her profoundly poor artistic judgment, but because I think the impulse to that irony is an important one to examine, especially because I think it is often characterized within the Jewish community as self-hatred, accusations of which are often used to dismiss from legitimacy people who make certain kinds of criticisms of the Jewish community and/or Israel. I have written at length about Jewish self-hatred elsewhere, so I am not going to go into that here. Rather, I want to consider the difficulty Jews have accepting the validity, the potential value, of understanding the institutional and military violence that Israel does to the Palestinians in the context of the violence that the Nazis did to the Jews, and I want to go beyond the easy and patronizing, and I think subtly antisemitic, violence-begets-violence logic that makes of Israel a wounded child, man or woman who has learned the primary lesson of abuse: that the only way to make sure you are never abused again is to be ready to kill anyone who even smells like they are going to try to abuse you; and I am not interested in the obvious and somewhat tired cliche that, you know, we all have the potential for evil within us, and so Israel is only showing that it too and, by extension, the Jews have the capacity to do evil in the world. Because I think the fundamental difficulty people have with what I am talking about is that putting the violence Israel does to the Palestinians in the context of the violence the Nazis did to the Jews–and I am not suggesting anything even remotely resembling equivalence here–ultimately humanizes the Nazis, suggesting that the violence they did, as horrible as it was, can also be understood in human terms, and so if the Nazis too are human, then the possibility of forgiveness and understanding has to exist for them, as it exists for every other human being on the face of the earth.[1. This paragraph was edited January 19 to correct mistakes that resulted from careless cutting and pasting.]

Let me say first what I do not mean by this: I am not talking about forgiveness in anything resembling what I understand to be the Christian turn-the-other-cheek sense (which I do not trivialize, even though it is not a value that I hold). So I do not mean that any Jew, especially any Jew who survived the Holocaust, is obligated to forgive anyone for being or having been a Nazi or for sympathizing or complicity with the Nazis. I am not suggesting that there is some predefined formula through which the forgiveness I am talking about can be earned; and I believe firmly that forgiveness for some deeds cannot be earned by the people who committed them from the people against whom they were committed. Nonetheless, to see people who commit the most horrible crimes, even crimes against humanity, not as monsters whose incomprehensible deeds have forever exiled them from the human community, but as people who have committed inhuman acts, is to insist on the comprehensibility of those acts, on the possibility of understanding those people and on the possibility that they might somehow find a way to take responsibility, to hold themselves–and to allow themselves to be held–accountable for what they have done.

To put it another way, and using for the moment an example that is not specifically Jewish, it is one thing for someone who has never raped to acknowledge that he or she nonetheless has within themselves whatever it is that can motivate rape, but it is quite something else for someone who has survived rape to continue to see in her or his rapist the same humanity–which means the same potential for vulnerability–that he or she possesses and that the rapist demonstrated so unambiguously and inescapably in the act of rape. Now, let’s suppose this rape survivor commits an act that is not rape, that nonetheless bears on its surface characteristics that are similar to rape and that is clearly and unambiguously victimizing within a power structure that could very easily become rape, if the will and desire to rape were there. Let’s also say–just to make my analogy, which I am assuming is already more than obvious, even more blatant–that the rape survivor experiences what he or she has done as an act, a necessary act, of self-preservation, and let’s say there is incontrovertible evidence to support if not the precise method of self-preservation the rape survivor has chosen, then certainly the validity of taking some form of action. Finally, let’s imagine that central to this rape survivor’s identity is a political commitment to stand in solidarity with all people who are violated, sexually or otherwise, and to fight such violations wherever they occur.

For this rape survivor not to see as self-evident the parallels between the violence he or she has committed and the rape he or she experienced is understandable. We are often blind to aspects of our own actions until they are pointed out to us. Assuming the parallels are really there, however, once someone does point them out, the survivor would be derelict not to explore them, not to see if there were connections to be made that might not only illuminate her or his experience, identity and commitment as a rape survivor, but also change her or his understanding of her or his own victimizing acts and the people who survived them.The survivor, in other words, would have to humanize the person by whom he or she was raped in order fully to grasp whether and to what degree having been raped led to the violence that he or she (the survivor) committed. If you’ve ever been raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted, then you know how difficult it can be just to contemplate what I have been talking about. In my own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse, it took many years before I could entertain, without feeling like I was betraying myself, the possibility that the men who abused me were, simply, people who’d made the choice to abuse me, not inherently evil monsters who happened to look like men.

I think the Jewish community’s difficulty with Jews who want to explore parallels between the policies and actions of the State of Israel regarding the Palestinians and the policies and actions of Nazi Germany regarding the Jews is similar. What the people who have this difficulty forget, however, is that parallelism is not the same thing as equivalence. To say that some of Israel’s policies and actions resemble policies enacted and actions taken by the Nazis during the Holocaust is not by definition to suggest that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians, though there are antisemites who do make that suggestion. More to the point, a Jew who sees those parallels and remains silent–leaving aside for the moment the question of whether and to what degree the parallels he or she sees are accurate–has a lot more in common with the people of Germany whose silence was their complicity in the Final Solution than with the image of the Jew that I was taught to make part of my identity: someone who, precisely because the Jews have experienced and survived centuries of oppression and persecution, speaks out for social justice even when it is difficult to do so.

I am not arguing that any assertion of a parallel between Israel’s behavior in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust is valid simply by virtue of its having been put forward by a Jew. Rather, I am arguing that we need to take seriously the irony out of which such assertions are made and to understand them also as responses to that irony, perhaps especially when the assertions are made in works of art, like the production I imagined of Seven Jewish Children in which the director makes ironic use of Nazi uniforms as costumes, or like the poem “Chosen,” which helped get its author, Josh Healey, and two other poets, Kevin Coval, and Tracy Soren, uninvited from J Street’s conference last year. The three poets were supposed to run a session on poetry in the conference track called “Culture as a Tool for Change,” but when right-wing bloggers, among them Michael Goldfarb at TheWeeklyStandard.com, pointed out that two of Healey’s poems, “Chosen” and “Queer Intifada,” draw comparisons between the Holocaust and current events in Israel and the United States, J Street decided to cancel the session and issued this statement to explain why:

As a matter of principle, J Street respects the dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics. We acknowledge that expression and language are used differently in the arts and artistic expression when compared to their use in political argumentation.

Nevertheless, as J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants.

We are sorry for any distraction that this issue may cause for those interested in working with us to advance the cause of peace and security for Israel and the Middle East.

The politics of the cancellation are unsurprising. The battle that would have ensued had J Street allowed the poets to read at the conference was one in which the organization was not willing to get mired, something that–according to Healey and Coval–J Street’s executive director admitted to them when he explained his decision. “I know what I’m doing is wrong,” they quote him as saying, “but there are some battles we choose not to fight.” While I personally agree with the poets that J Street would have done better to fight, because “giv[ing] in […] only emboldens the right and legitimizes their attacks,” I am also aware of how easy it is to second guess decisions like the one J Street made from a distance, and so I don’t want to do that here. Nonetheless, the organization’s statement does reveal something about the politics of “Holocaust imagery and metaphor” within the Jewish community that would be worth talking about even if the poetry session hadn’t been canceled, though it will probably be useful first to take a closer look at poems by Healey and Coval that J Street, Michael Goldfarb and others on the right found so problematic. Here are the offending lines from “Chosen:”

we call ourselves the chosen people
but I’m asking chosen for what?
chosen to recreate our own history
merely reversing the roles
with the script now reading that
we’re the ones writing numbers
on the wrists of babies born in
the ghetto called Gaza?

As I read it, “Chosen” is Healey’s attempt to explore his own difficulty in defining for himself a stable Jewish identity in an era where assimilation, commercialization, consumerism and the Israeli occupation have corrupted (in Healey’s opinion) the social justice tradition within Judaism and Jewish culture and also made it increasingly difficult to see the Jews as the archetype of the oppressed nation, which is how, at least in my Jewish education, we were taught to see ourselves. Here is the poem’s conclusion:

I wish there was a chosen people
and that I could claim them as my own

but when it comes to my people
we’ve chosen to assimilate into
the world of Six Day Wars and Chanukah Harry’s
leading me to see that all people are
going to be just that — people
no matter how many points
we put on our stars or how hard
we pray that they’re different

When I finished reading “Chosen,” it was hard not to think of the joke–I think the writers of Fiddler on the Roof actually put it in Tevye’s mouth–in which the long suffering Jewish man, whose heart is filled with the long suffering of the Jewish people, says to God something like, “I know we are your chosen people, and it’s a blessing; but couldn’t you, maybe, choose someone else for a change?” In Healey’s poem, though, it’s not God who chooses someone else, it’s the Jewish people who have chosen to be something else, and, like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Healey wants his words to be a clarion call to the Jews to back away from that choice and return, as my rebbes would have put it, to their yiddishe neshama, their Jewish souls, and the essential truth of what it means to be a Jew. Unfortunately, Healey’s prophetic ambitions don’t amount to much more than a list of tired cliches:

last week I saw Moses crying in the suburbs of Chicago
wandering through the strip malls and fancy temples
wondering why we ignored his last lesson that until all peoples
are free, we might as well still be slaves in Egypt

yesterday I saw Rabbi Hillel begging on the streets of Jerusalem
asking for spare shekels but all the passers-by already gave their money
to false campus idols erected in his honor, pay no attention when he pleas
if you are only for yourself, son, then what are you really for?

Indeed, pretty much the only move in the poem with the potential to yield something that is not cliche, that might do some real justice to the large ambitions Healey has for the piece, is the one that got him in trouble in the first place, comparing the Palestinians in Gaza to the Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps of Nazi Germany. That Healey does not want this comparison to be a facile one is indicated first by the fact that he makes it in the form of a question and, second, by the way he puts his question in the context of the Jews’ image of themselves as the chosen people, an idea fraught with conflict both within the Jewish community and between the Jewish community and the rest of the world. At stake in Healey’s question, in other words, are issues of identity, morality and community; of responsibility and accountability; of how one gives meaning not only to one’s own suffering, but the suffering of others; not only to the oppressive actions of others, but to oppressive actions performed in one’s name. More to the point, these issues are not just relevant, they are central to any discussion of how to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because the concessions and compromises that peace will require of Israel–and, therefore, by proxy, of world Jewry as well–go by definition to the heart of what it has meant to be Jewish since Israel’s independence was declared in 1948. Unfortunately, though, through an inexcusably shallow and factually inaccurate use of Holocaust imagery–Israel is not tattooing numbers onto the wrists of babies born in Gaza–Healey does not merely avoid those crucial issues. He renders them invisible, setting aside the irony he might have so usefully explored in comparing Gaza to a ghetto and going instead for the easy and sentimentalized guilt trip on which rendering Israel Nazi-like is supposed to send those of us who don’t “get it.”

On the whole, “Queer Intifada” is more successful than “Chosen.” The poem’s entirely authentic energy comes from the juxtaposition of a Palestinian Solidarity March and Gay Pride Parade that are taking place on the same day in more or less the same place, and when Healey gets to the Holocaust comparisons that made this poem also problematic for Michael Goldfarb and company, the impulse to make the comparisons, if not the comparisons themselves, arise out of the poem’s energy and movement:

my friends,
Anne Frank is Matthew Shepard
Guantanamo is Auschwitz
Gay Marriage is Palestine
and we are all walking on occupied land

Unfortunately, here too, Healey reaches for what is easy rather than looking for complexity. Equating Guantanamo with Auschwitz is insultingly gratuitous, not only because Guantanamo–whatever else might be wrong with it–is most decidedly not a death camp, but also because it has nothing to with the rest of the poem; and while there certainly are those in the US who would like to hunt down queer people in the same way that the Nazis hunted both Jews and queers, what happened to Matthew Shepard, horrible thought it was and worthy of being memorialized in many different kinds of poems though it is, was not the result of a government sponsored Final Solution. My point is not that that it is wrong to compare either the experiences of or the oppressions suffered by Matthew Shepherd and Anne Frank; especially because the Nazis also sought to exterminate gay people, there is a lot that can probably be learned from exploring the depths of that comparison. However, to elide, as Healey does, the specific characteristics of the different oppressions under which they lived, to reduce each of their lives to what their names can stand for–Anne Frank=Jewish girl hunted and killed by Nazis; Matthew Shepard=gay man hunted and killed by homophobes–is to flatten the truth of each of their experiences to a single truth that does justice to neither of them and, frankly, trivializes what happened to both of them. (Even the comparison between gay marriage and Palestine, in my opinion, ought to give people pause for the same reasons.)

Clearly, I don’t think either of these poems is entirely successful, but their failure stems not from Healey’s impulse as a Jewish poet to use the Holocaust as a lens for examining his place as a Jew in today’s world or to see echoes of the Final Solution in the oppressions that plague our time. Rather, their failure is a failure of language. Healey’s Holocaust comparisons are embodied not in the kind of language that J Street talks about in the first paragraph of its explanation for canceling the poetry event, language that is “used differently in […] artistic expression [than] in political argumentation.” Instead, they are expressed precisely as they would be were political argumentation–albeit a score-cheap-points species of such argument–the kind of discourse in which Healey was involved, which is what made them such perfect fodder for the right-wing bloggers who attacked him. Yet I also want to acknowledge the courage it took for Healey to write what he wrote, to risk putting himself forward as–again, in J Street’s words–“the [kind of] dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics.” That was the role played by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, whose voices Healey seems to me to have wanted to invoke in these two poems, and that is a role that poets can and should play today, which is why it is a shame that J Street felt it necessary to cut the poets out of its conference, instead of finding a way to make the substance, the failure and the courage of Healey’s poems part of the discussion. One way to do this might have been to ask the poets to explore the poet-prophet connection at which I have just hinted. Certainly there is an argument to be made that Israel has “lost its way” in trying to deal with the Palestinian issue, though how much it is lost may be up for debate and I know there are people who will say that Israel is not lost at all; and while the politicians and activists, the negotiators and academics, hammer out the practical aspects of finding a way to peace, maybe it is the Jewish poet’s job–or at least the job of those Jewish poets who feel themselves compelled to do it–to call Israel back to its better self (and I mean here not only the current State of Israel, but Israel as it is often used in the Hebrew Bible to signify the Jewish people). To practice what Josh Healey and his fellow poet Kevin Coval call in Searching for a Minyan: Our Response to Being Censored by J Street “the Jewish maxim of the refusal to be silent in the face of oppression, anyone’s oppression.”

By way of example, here is a video of Kevin Coval performing the poem–of which I have been unable to find either the title or a transcript–for which he was taken to task because he accuses Israel of whoring itself “to sleep in the hands of men who [will?] beat you after morning coffee.”

Coval’s poem–whatever you might think of its politics–is more successful than either “Chosen” or “Queer Intifada” for a number of reasons, among them the fact that when Coval conjures the Holocaust, he does so with a far more developed sense of Jewish collective, and his own personal, vulnerability. The suggestion that Israel ought to examine its actions–that Jews ought to examine Israel’s actions–in light of what the Nazis did to the Jews is still there, but there is none of Healey’s cynical, propagandistic rant. Instead, Coval’s assertion of his own awareness that he, that the Jews could very easily become victims of another Gestapo, thereby validating in the context of the poem the emotional commitment most Jews have to the necessity of Israel as a safe haven, allows the full complexity with which Israel confronts the Jews–as an idea, an ideal and as a reality–to emerge. Moreover, when Coval calls Israel to task, he does so in terms of very specific events, giving details and taking responsibility for his own perspective–note the repetition of “I see you” and “I saw you”–in ways that make sure what he is saying does not descend into an ad hominem attack; as well, these criticisms of Israel are couched in metaphors that invite consideration not just of the specific deeds he is criticizing, but of the larger, universally human issues involved.

When he compares Israel to a pawn, for example, and the Middle East to a chessboard, he is not just characterizing Israel as a tool that the United States uses to fight its battles for it; he is also asking his audience to think about what it means to conceive of international relations in terms of battle and how that conception shapes the roles that the nations of the world then have little choice but to play. More to the point, he is asking a moral question: Given the realities of world politics and world antisemitism, given the moral history of the Jews and the moral imperative in Jewish culture to take a stand against oppression, what meaningful response can an individual Jew have to those actions Israel has taken against the Palestinians that are clearly immoral that does not also deny the realities of the world, betray the Jews or both?

The poem, of course, is itself Coval’s answer to that question, though it is not as straightforward an answer as it might at first appear. When he implores Israel at the end to stop killing itself, he is, in essence, asking Israel to find a way to live within the contradictions and complexities its existence embodies. The poem, in other words, is most emphatically not anti-Israel; it is, rather, a plea for Israel’s continued existence.Yet Michael Goldfarb ignores that entirely when he links to Coval’s YouTube video with these words:

Or maybe it wasn’t Healey but his fellow panelist, Kevin Coval, seen here calling Israel a “whore,” that someone [at J Street] was worried about [when the organization canceled the poetry event]. (Emphasis mine)

It is not gratuitous intellectual nitpicking to point out that there is a meaningful difference between calling someone a whore and telling them that certain of their behaviors are whorish. More to the point, though, to reduce Coval’s line–“whoring yourself to sleep in the hands of men who [will?] beat you after morning coffee”–to name calling is willfully to misread the poem; it is to avoid hearing the voice of the poem, of its speaker bearing witness to the violence such men do, whose hope is that the woman they are so horribly exploiting will somehow find the strength, the support, the community to free herself and live her own life. Goldfarb does not merely to disparage Coval’s poem, however; he also implies what Jennifer Rubin states more explicitly on Commentary’s blog, that Coval (and Healey) are merely saying in their work what J Street really stands for, a “peace” that will actually result in Israel’s demise as a Jewish state. (This is why, according to Rubin, J Street’s “definition of what’s good for [Israel] in no way matches up with the views of even reliably liberal American Jews or Israelis themselves” and why it’s “positions invariably line up so neatly with the Palestinian propaganda machine.”) Regardless of how much you disagree with Coval’s and Healey’s politics, regardless of how offended you are by their metaphors (I find Healey’s Holocaust metaphors very offensive, for example, and I generally agree with his politics), to take the position argued by Goldfarb and Rubin is to deny that Coval and Healey are Jewish poets working in a Jewish literary tradition which was explicitly about trying to guarantee Israel’s survival–the people and the nation–not calling for its destruction. If you are offended by Coval’s  characterization of some of Israel’s behavior as whorish, for example, then you should find the poetry of the biblical prophets equally offensive. Here, for example, is the prophet Jeremiah calling Israel a whore, though this translation uses the word prostitute instead:

2:19 “Your own wickedness shall correct you, and your backsliding shall reprove you. Know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and a bitter, that you have forsaken Yahweh your God, and that my fear is not in you,” says the Lord, Yahweh of Armies. 2:20 “For of old time I have broken your yoke, and burst your bonds; and you said, ‘I will not serve;’ for on every high hill and under every green tree you bowed yourself, playing the prostitute. 2:21 Yet I had planted you a noble vine, wholly a right seed. How then have you turned into the degenerate branches of a foreign vine to me? 2:22 For though you wash yourself with lye, and use much soap, yet your iniquity is marked before me,” says the Lord Yahweh.

And here is Ezekiel doing the same thing:

16:15 But you trusted in your beauty, and played the prostitute because of your renown, and poured out your prostitution on everyone who passed by; his it was. 16:16 You took of your garments, and made for yourselves high places decked with various colors, and played the prostitute on them: the like things shall not come, neither shall it be so. 16:17 You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made for yourself images of men, and played the prostitute with them; 16:18 and you took your embroidered garments, and covered them, and set my oil and my incense before them. 16:19 My bread also which I gave you, fine flour, and oil, and honey, with which I fed you, you even set it before them for a pleasant aroma; and thus it was, says the Lord Yahweh. 16:20 Moreover you have taken your sons and your daughters, whom you have borne to me, and you have sacrificed these to them to be devoured. Was your prostitution a small matter, 16:21 that you have slain my children, and delivered them up, in causing them to pass through the fire to them? 16:22 In all your abominations and your prostitution you have not remembered the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, and were wallowing in your blood.

Had there been a Holocaust to which Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah and Hosea, could have referred in focusing the attention of Israel on its waywardness, I have no doubt the prophets would have done so; and I have no doubt as well that there were people like Michael Goldfarb and Jennfier Rubin who supported the status quo the prophets were speaking against by pointing out that in the verses prior to the ones I quoted just above, Ezekiel’s metaphor for the covenant with God that Israel has betrayed by prostituting herself is sex; and I am sure those people pointed out the even more morally questionable fact that, in this passage, the prophet shows God grooming Israel almost from the moment of her birth so that when her “time of love” arrived, He could claim her sexually.

16:1 Again the word of Yahweh came to me, saying, 16:2 Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations; 16:3 and say, Thus says the Lord Yahweh to Jerusalem: Your birth and your birth is of the land of the Canaanite; the Amorite was your father, and your mother was a Hittite. 16:4 As for your birth, in the day you were born your navel was not cut, neither were you washed in water to cleanse you; you weren’t salted at all, nor swaddled at all. 16:5 No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you, to have compassion on you; but you were cast out in the open field, for that your person was abhorred, in the day that you were born. 16:6 When I passed by you, and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you, Though you are in your blood, live; yes, I said to you, Though you are in your blood, live. 16:7 I caused you to multiply as that which grows in the field, and you increased and grew great, and you attained to excellent ornament; your breasts were fashioned, and your hair was grown; yet you were naked and bare. 16:8 Now when I passed by you, and looked at you, behold, your time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over you,[2. In the Bible, this is a metaphor for sexual intercourse, not the modesty we might see in it. When Boaz has sex with Ruth, for example, the expression used in the text has to do with his covering her with his blanket.] and covered your nakedness: yes, I swore to you, and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord Yahweh, and you became mine. (Emphasis mine.)

I am, of course, not arguing that Coval and Healey are prophets; but to refuse to recognize that they, as I read them, are working very self-consciously within the prophetic literary tradition is not merely to deny the fundamentally Jewish nature of what they are trying to accomplish in their poems; it is also to establish, at least by implication, an orthodoxy around whether and how Jewish writers can deal with difficult topics like Israel and the Holocaust–topics that are inescapably, irreducibly, unequivocally Jewish–in writing about Jewish identity, Jewish current events, the relationship between the Jewish community and the rest of the world or any other Jewish issue for that matter. It is, in other words, to prescribe an appropriate Jewish identity, to insist that the language of poetry should not move beyond the boundaries established by the language of political discourse. In fact, what disturbs me most about the statement J Street issued explaining its reasons for canceling the poetry event that was supposed to feature Healey and Coval is its clear endorsement of this kind of orthodoxy, something that the criticism leveled by both the left and the right at J Street’s realpolitik has not addressed. Here, for ease of reference, is the full text of J Street’s statement:

Over the weekend, J Street canceled the poetry session scheduled as part of the “Culture as a Tool for Change” track at its upcoming National Conference.

As a matter of principle, J Street respects the dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics. We acknowledge that expression and language are used differently in the arts and artistic expression when compared to their use in political argumentation.

Nevertheless, as J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants.

We are sorry for any distraction that this issue may cause for those interested in working with us to advance the cause of peace and security for Israel and the Middle East.

In terms of meaning, the first and last paragraphs are the most clear, and if you were to read only those two paragraphs–replacing the words “this issue” in the last paragraph with a more explicit reference to Healey and Coval–J Street’s reasoning for canceling the event would also be pretty clear. Taking on the controversy that was building over Healey and Coval’s work would have undermined the core purpose of the conference which was “to advance the cause of peace and prosperity for Israel and the Middle East.” It’s important to recognize that this assessment might have been accurate. More to the point, though, and assuming for the moment that it was an accurate assessment, J Street could have approached the cancellation of the poetry session very differently. The organization’s statement could have focused on the importance of the questions raised by the poets’ work and the fact that those questions will still be relevant no matter how the issue of peace between Israel and the Palestinians is resolved. J Street could have offered to create another forum where those questions could be addressed more fruitfully, not by walling poetry away from the politics of Middle East peace, but by making sure there would be enough time and space to address the very complicated literary-political issues to which writing poetry about the Middle East gives rise.

Whatever flaws you might find in such reasoning–and however wrong you might think it is politically, strategically or otherwise–it would be hard to call a cancellation framed in those terms outright censorship, especially if the statement had been written in consultation with the poets. J Street, however, chose instead to issue a statement that cannot be called anything but censorship, and that comes pretty close to censuring Healey and Coval as well, despite the gesture in the statement’s second paragraph acknowledging that poetry, while it can be politically engaged, is not political discourse. This is an important and useful distinction to make, especially since ignoring this distinction was part of the strategy employed by the right-wing bloggers who used Healey’s and Coval’s work to make J Street’s life so difficult. Remarkably, however, J Street ignores that distinction in the very next paragraph, equating the Holocaust imagery and metaphors in poems like Healey’s to the “use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right.” Even leaving aside the fact that the phrase “use and abuse” suggests that “politicians and pundits on the right” ought, in J Street’s opinion, never to use Holocaust imagery or metaphors, it’s hard to escape the implication in that third paragraph that J Street also believes, when it comes to the Holocaust, that there is no difference between politics and poetry; and since you cannot separate either the establishment of the State of Israel or the reason that most Jews not born in Israel believe Israel ought to exist from the historical reality of the Holocaust and the way the Holocaust has been made central to Jewish identity since the ending of World War II, it’s hard as well to escape the further implication that the distinction between poetic and political discourse disappears when it comes to Israel as well.

My guess it that the person who wrote J Street’s statement did not intend for it to mean any of what I have just said. Indeed, the statement as a whole strikes me as having been very quickly and carelessly written, but it is what it is, and it says what it says, and it now represents J Street’s official position–since, as far as I can tell, no further statement has been issued. My point, however, is not to use this statement to characterize J Street as a hypocritical organization. One carelessly written statement does not an organization’s overall agenda make. Rather, what I want to point out is that adhering to the orthodoxies and pieties that a community tries to impose on the discussion and rhetorical use of certain subject matter will inevitably mire you in the kinds of hypocrisy J Street’s statement so clearly embodies; and if there are any two subjects about which the Jewish community has tried to impose such orthodoxies and pieties, they are Israel and the Holocaust. I have written at length about this in terms of Israel in the series “What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitisn and Israel” (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; each link will open in a different window), and so I am not going to touch on that subject here; and I have already argued that I think it is a Jewish poet’s right and responsibility to use the Holocaust as a lens through which to understand her or his Jewish identity in a world where Jews have become oppressors. There is, however, more at stake in the question of how one should or shouldn’t make art dealing with the Holocaust than the questions raised by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, because the questions raised by the Holocaust are, among others, fundamental questions about the existence and nature of evil in the world and the place that evil occupies–that we give it–in the process of living that is human being.

Part 2 to follow soon.

In an essay called “Representations of Attar in the West and in the East,” Christopher Shackle criticizes Margaret Smith’s 1932 translation of Manteq al-Tayr for being written “in a prose whose archaisms, including biblical ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, cover Attar’s studiously clear style with a patina of reverence….” (187). Boyle’s Ilahi-Nama suffers from the same weakness. Here, for example, is his rendering of the passage in “The Tale of Marjuma” where the woman berates her brother-in-law for trying to have his way with her:

She said to him: “Art thou not ashamed before God? Dost thou thus show respect to thy brother?
Is this thy religion and thy probity? Dost thou thus keep trust for thy brother?
Go, repent, return to God, and eschew this wicked thought.”

That man said to the woman: “It is no use; thou must satisfy me at once,
Otherwise I will cease to concern myself about thee, I will expose thee to shame, I will slight thee.
Straightaway now I shall cast thee to destruction, I shall cast thee into a fearful plight.” (32)

As well, Boyle too often relies on a literalness that ends up being unintentionally comic and/or almost impossible to comprehend. The first line of the final section of the “Exordium,” in which Attar praises and meditates upon the greatness of God—“Come, musk of the soul, open thy musk-bladder, for thou art the deputy of the Vicar of God” (27)—is an example of the former. In “The Tale of Marjuma,” to give an example of the latter, when the female protagonist is on a ship at sea, about to be raped by the entire crew, she prays to God to save her. This is Boyle’s rendering of that scene:

When the woman learned of these wicked men’s feelings, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood.
She opened her mouth [and said]: “O Knower of Secrets, preserve me from the evil of these wicked men.” (38)

The phrase “the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood” clearly relates to the idea in Persian culture that the liver, not the heart, is the seat of emotion, but what the phrase means, except in the vaguest of senses, is far from clear. By way of comparison, here is my version of those lines:

When she learned
what the men intended, she turned
and saw in the sea surrounding her,
filled with her heart’s blood, a liver
wide enough to hold all she felt.
Her mouth fell open. She knelt,
prayed: “Protect me, Knower of Secrets!
Save me from this wickedness.”

I make no claim that this is great poetry, or that there is no better solution to the “heart’s-blood-liver” metaphor; and I am very aware that whether or not my translation will endure is a question that only time and readers will answer, but the value of bringing Ilahi-Nama into 21^st century American English poetry is not only, and not even primarily, that it might be successful in these terms. Rather, the value lies in the sustained engagement translation is—both in the writing and the reading—with another culture.

On the one hand, the value of such engagement is, or ought to be, self-evident, requiring no further justification. On the other hand, however, given the current national and international political moment, it is, or ought to be, impossible to talk about translating Persian literature without also talking about both the state of relations between Iran and the United States and the political unrest that has focused world attention on Iran since the contested presidential elections there in June 2009. Each of those dynamics demands that the people of the United States learn as much about the Iranian people, their culture and their history, as we possibly can, especially since our collective ignorance about Iran has been profound since diplomatic relations between our two countries ended after the Islamic Revolution in 1979–80. Boyle’s translation of Ilahi-Nama is not a text to which people are likely to go for that kind of learning, most immediately because it is out of print, but also because its archaic diction and biblical style is more likely than not to alienate them.

I am neither naïve nor arrogant enough to assume that my translation of Ilahi-Nama will by itself effect any change, large or small, in US-Iran relations or that it will alter even one reader’s notions about Iran and/or Islam. I do know, however, that each translated book made available to a reading public increases the likelihood of such change taking place. At the very least because it offers a radically different view of Islam from the version practiced and promulgated by the current Iranian government and can therefore help to combat the anti-Muslim stereotypes currently in fashion, but even more significantly because it is a great work of literature written by one of the world’s greatest poets, whom we in the United States deserve to know better than we do, a new literary translation of Ilahi-Nama should be among the books making such change possible.

Sources

ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. The Ilāhī-Nāma Or Book of God of Farīd Al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār. Trans. John Andrew Boyle. Persian Heritage Series, Vol. 29 Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976.

Shackle, Christopher. “Representations of Attar in the West and in the East: Translations of the Mantiq Al-Tayr and the Tale of Shaykh Ṣanʻān.” Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight. Eds. Leonard Lewisohn, and Christopher Shackle. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. 165–93.