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[1. I haven’t linked back to the other blog, because I have moved all posts over to this one.] 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.)

Con­tinue read­ing →