Sally. Why the appetite for poetry in many modern cultures has dwindled into antiquity, poetry remains at the core of Iranian life and governments.
The people of Iran encounter poetry every day in newspapers, classrooms, religious sermons,
political protest advertising, billboards, television and radio, as well as in the home.
Poetry is so embedded within Iran's ruling structures and political thought that it has
become almost impossible to separate from the rhetoric of power over the past four decades.
Both leaders of the Islamic Republic will allow for many an idea how many are poets in their own right.
Much is yet to be written about the influence of poetry in the romanticisation of political thought in Iran, it has been explored in other culture.
In Soviet Russia, Franco's Spain, Castro's Cuba or Italy.
Under Mussolini, the role of the poet tyrant has been so critically investigated.
Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk. The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East.
These are some of the books written by members of our community or the books our community are talking about.
My name is is Angela.
Chef Scott and I teach the social anthropology of the Middle East, particularly Iran, with a particular interest in literary production.
My guest is far too, Machans, assistant professor of modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,
Fotomat and her defo in Oriental studies at Oxford under the supervision of Hamar, Cocteau's Yang and Edmond Hurtig and 2016.
She then taught Persian language and literature at the University of Oxford.
So US and the Cato Institute of Art before joining the University of Pennsylvania.
She is herself an award winning poet who has published three collections of poetry in Persian and English from
May 20 21 until July 20 22 for TOMIE will be a Humboldt fellow and an EU Emmi affiliate residing in Berlin.
Embarking on her second book, Project on Imprisonment, Exile and Precarious Modes of writing in Persian tradition, her much anticipated book,
A Revolution in Rhyme Poetic Cooption under the Islamic Republic,
was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Oriental Monograph series.
Its unique and highly original in addressing the output of the postrevolutionary Iranian poets,
whom she calls official poets because they've been supported in various ways by the state but who
until now have been dismissed as aesthetically unimportant and largely neglected outside of Iran.
Fotomat. Welcome to Book Talk. And welcome back to the Middle East and community.
Can you tell us about the role that the Oxford intellectual media played in the writing of this book?
Piousness, I'm on it, it's a pleasure and I'm honoured to be here in conversation with you, but also to be back to the centre.
But Antony's College, which was my first college when I first arrived in Oxford.
So those were the good old days. You know, if I want to start answering your question about how export merely mildew,
an intellectual community, shaped my scholarship and also who I am today as a scholar,
I should really start with the Clarendon Farm and the fact that it gave me the opportunity to pursue APHC in the first place.
But more methodically, if I want to highlight some of the most important takeaways from Oxford Time.
For me it was basically to rethink the relationship between the old and new ones.
Say that in order to make sense of the new,
you always have to look at the past and we don't have to completely break from the past in order to create something new.
I think that was something that was extremely important and inspiring to me.
You know, came out of many conversations. My mentors woke up to zero and everyone thought Zik and also my friends, including yourself.
Another thing that I think was very important was for me especially to come to
realise the importance of significance of history and historical knowledge.
I always had this is an old joke, and I always tell my friends that it's impossible to go to Oxford to study humanities and not become an historian.
At some point you realise that you are a historian before you are a literary critic or your and you are not apologist sociologists.
You really like any anything in humanities goes back to history and you have to go back to the past in order to shape your thoughts and your ideas.
And you know, the interpretation of this past also, I would say it was something that,
you know, that sort of the ways in which you look at this and try to make sense of it.
And, of course, that privilege of working with wonderful scholars, meeting people that you simply don't get to meet in other contexts.
Oxford is really unique in that sense. And the last thing I would say the beautiful libraries in which you could just hide
for hours every day and get inspired by the beautiful architecture and the old books,
you know, that always kept me thinking and rethinking and writing and rewriting.
So I would say that the physicality of the place itself was also very inspiring and special.
Well, it's absolutely wonderful to be able to welcome you back virtually.
And it's an honour to have this conversation with you. So we've just passed the 40 second anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran.
But as you make clear in the introduction of your book,
your book is the first to address this vast body of poetry that's been produced under various forms of state sponsorship in the Islamic Republic,
as well as the first to focus on the close relationship between poetry and power through these mechanisms.
And why do you think it's taken so long for someone to try to fill this gap?
Yeah, that's a that's a very important, wonderful question. I actually elaborates on this in the introduction of the book as well.
That's one of the reasons for this gap, I think has been the lack of contact with the postrevolutionary Iran by as others
whose work actually has shaped and sort of defined fields outside of Iran,
you know, excessive purges and forceful involuntary integrations that happen right after defeat, especially the first decade after the revolution,
caused many of these scholars to leave home and some tough noons contact with Iran and simply not being able to be physically present.
And this had a really important impact on the production of this other sheep outside Iran.
This is not to say that nobody has worked on postrevolutionary literature.
And I make it very clear in the book that we have, in fact, in malleable body of research on postrevolutionary prose and even poetry.
But, you know, they mostly have been focussing on or focussed on those authors and poets will have a
very critical approach against the state or have been simply neutral and independent.
And in other words, the emphasis has been always on the resistance and the defiance rather than conformity and ideology.
And I try to break this binary uncomplicated in the book by showing that even
those who adhere to a certain ideology being the ideology of the state question.
That's on point. It's not as sort of black and white, that being imagine.
So this new generation of scholars who grew up in Iran are educated under the Islamic Republic, including myself.
We have a different experience and view of how the system really works.
You know, we mean I personally was exposed to pull its roots in a very young age, both at home and at school.
And there was always this divide between the school textbooks and what I found in my
mother's underground library that had offset publications of the revolutionary period.
And then, you know, the underground library that had different kinds of books.
So being exposed to all of these different dimensions of Persian poetry, I suppose, was extremely important.
Since very young age and soon I find myself in the poetry circles of Mashhad, which is one of the most thriving cities as far as poetry is concerned.
And then later on, when I entered her own university,
I became more aware of this extensive project that happened in the past and they're happening at that time.
And also the state sponsored book industry, really, that constantly tried to weave a different literary history,
different cantonization and canonisation of poetry. And then I left Iran and I started working on this project.
One of the things that came to my attention was that this particular phenomenon,
this book making industry and sort of cantonization and we cantonization of
poetry has been completely dismissed and nobody has really picked up on it.
There were articles and book chapters here and there, but none of them really tried to contextualise this particular phenomenon,
especially in conversation with the past literary tradition.
That was also part of my interests here. Just to pick up on that.
I mean, what what do you think accounts for the not so much the neglect because you mentioned that,
but the fact that the aesthetic aspect of this official poetry seems to have been downright distasteful to so many critics outside Iran.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a very important question to address.
I tried to address this in the book as well, that, you know, there is this tendency amongst the critics, especially those outside Iran.
And also, you know, independent critics inside Iran, that there is this tendency for aesthetics that I would call high literature,
that simply ignoring the fact that poetry and literature has also other functions in the society.
I studied sociology at several university,
and I think that sociological batched background really helped me to rethink the relationship between poetry and society.
And for me, the fact that poetry could be also an art of persuasion,
dissemination of ideology, brainwashing, training, a new revolutionary generation.
All of these was also very important. And, you know, once you once you put those in priority, the aesthetic dimension finds a different meaning.
Why is it distasteful to many critics? I think as a result of that, anything that is ideologically charged and also considered as too political,
political and ideological for the taste of the scholars has been dismissed.
Think this will get sloganeering aspect of poetry, but, you know, poetry's share is short it or the poetry is a slogan or vice versa.
And as soon as it's becoming a tool for mass mobilisation, which literally became that during the war with Iraq,
then it's you know, it's not worth our time and our attention.
For me, in fact, this very aspect of revolutionary or what I call the Islamic Republic in origin was very interesting,
how rhythm and rhyme actually were used in the political sphere.
Another reason, I think, for their dismissal is their ties, their very close ties with the state.
I think he played a very important role in their othering. You know, there is a political divide, whether we like it or not.
Between the scholars outside Iran, those who work in the humanities and for the most part.
And, you know, the Islamic Republic.
So whoever works for the government with the government, especially if that religion people are just simply considered as bad poets fighting for.
What they just think is not true and, you know, I tried in the book, too,
and to complicate this approach, that many of them, in fact, knew the point tradition pretty well.
We might not like the way they might and might not agree with their ideology.
But that doesn't mean that they are completely illiterate or unaware of all this tradition.
In fact, they are deeply aware of it. And that's why they are capable of coopting so well.
Which is something that I think the contribution of this book to the field is really to show that how this auction has taken place.
Another thing I think there is this e-mail again,
which has to do with what I already said is demoralising approach to not just the revolution of the Islamic Republic, but also Islam to some extent.
I tried to, you know, in the book show that Islam really means different things to all of these poets.
I start the book with an ode by a poet who was then later on after the revolution, Exhort persecuted an exile by the Islamic Republic.
This poet is one of the first pioneering voices of these very trend that later on was promoted to official them after the revolution.
Now Matthau's up. And I think complicating this winery, it was which was really something that I was hoping to do.
The book we challenged if pigeonholing your approach of conning these people, Islamised people.
Well, you know, if you look at what has been already produced, these poets have been constantly called Islamists poets.
I think there is a difference between Islamist and Islamic Republic. And I think that's what I was trying to do in the book.
And the fact that many of these poets, their allies,
beat the censors and beat the Islamic Republic itself and played a role in the system and their poetry.
And for this reason, doesn't deserve attention. I think I think this is something that had to be addressed and challenged.
And I tried to do that in the book. Yeah, I think I mean,
that was one of the things I really appreciated about your book and that I found so
striking that you demonstrated so carefully that contrary to what we might assume,
there was such incredible diversity, both in aesthetic and in ideological terms amongst this state sponsored poets,
the Islamic Republic and our official poets that you describe.
And so in this way, you refute earlier episodic approaches to Persian literary history, which tended to group poets according to their time period.
And you argue very pointedly that poetry neither started nor stopped in 1979.
So what lessons do you think that literary critics and historians should take away from your book regarding the most useful ways to classify poets?
And one thing I forgot to mention in response to your previous question,
which I think is also relevant to what you just asked, is that one thing I really learnt in during my time in office,
I this was thanks to my supervisor at my sick,
was that he really pushed me to go for a reading texts and sources about Bolshevik Russia, and that will cheer that revolution.
And although this work is not in any way comparative study, I think there is you know,
I have used different examples of mostly the example of Russia which show that Iran
is really not the first and is not willing to be the last country that poetry was in.
This country was tied to the revolution and courts for type revolution and also the complicated process
of becoming parts of the revolutionary sort of movement and then later on becoming disillusioned by it.
This is something that happened in the case of Bolshevik Russia, and I tried to address this in the book.
I'm hoping that this opens the field really for further enquiries and research by other scholars also that to look for
the parallels and try to put Iran on the map rather than just looking at Iran as the as this isolated place that,
you know, just falls into the area of studies.
And there is nothing really in common between this and other examples of as far as poetry and evolution on ideologies.
Another thing that I was hoping to, you know, going back to a question about the epizootics approach is that I try to to show that basically
the relationship with the poetic tradition is something that we should also look at,
that each poet hanzi his or her own way of connecting with the past.
You know, in today's Iran, even the government has its own take on this politic tradition.
And we have after the revolution,
we have this new wave of InTech protesters and critics who are aligned by the state and they are giving their own interpretation of office.
For example, what is you a book on Hasselhoff is his interpretation of profit is one of them.
And I chose the term cooption for this particular reason to show that there are
ways there are always ways of connecting between the past and the present.
Even then, there isn't revolutionary ideology on governments in place, even if they try to cut this relationship with the past.
They're unable to do that because they're constantly themselves. They're constantly going back to this path.
I'm trying to have a selective approach to this past. And also in terms of the episodic approach, as I mentioned in response to one of your questions,
the fact that no matter what ideology these poets adhere to, they are always in conversation with other competing trends, including the last piece.
What with your job from the 1970s? I showed this in detail in one of the chapters of the book.
When I talk about how this mystic, poetic militant approach was co-opted, in fact,
partly by going back to the mystical tradition of mystical poetry and partly by going back
to the guerrilla poetry of the 70s and by putting these two different jargons together,
these poets came up with their own way out,
sort of sanctification of the war making do the whole the defence or the very notion of literary commitment with Adibi,
which was something that you look at the works of the leftist secular poets of the prerevolutionary period,
you see that they are the pioneering voices, in fact, in formulating this concept.
And then we have Mohammad the Zohar Keamy, who comes a year before the revolution and also after the revolution.
This book called Literature and Commitment in Islam.
So suddenly everything is co-opted and, you know, Islam is itself is co-opted and we have a new phenomenon.
But this new phenomenon didn't come out of nowhere, had its roots in the past.
So I tried to show these connexions with the hope of not stopping by the revolution or as a point of as the only points of reference.
Thank you. So early in the book, you set out to create an objective canon of revolutionary and post revolutionary poets, official poets.
Can you tell us what objective criteria you use to make the selection the most important official poets of this period?
Yes, I would say that was really the most challenging part of the book to come up with,
you know, a number of poets and then to say that these very pioneering voices for that,
I had to go back to what has been produced by the Islamic Republic itself and what has been said and argued and as well as,
you know, the school textbooks and use my own lived experience in Iran, you know,
the collective memory of many interviews that actually I had formal and informal conversations with the postrevolutionary generations.
What did they remember? What was part of the collective memory?
So all of this really brought me to those names in the first place.
And I really use one word,
if I want to say that really helped me to identify these poets was the work of Mohammad Kosen because of me, who you know well,
he's on us on immigrant poets in Iran has become actually one of the most important voices of, you know, state sponsor narrative of literature.
But at the same time, in fact, because I think his immigrant background helped him to be more objective about these
poets rather than just promoting them or praising them just because this is them.
Wanted to hear these names.
In terms of the objective criteria, it was really important to me, the role these poets played so I could come up with two different generations.
The generation that wrote before the revolution, and they were already part of the literary value before the revolution happened.
Well, it's such a starter. Staffers of the set began on the anti-war sites and money and so forth.
And then the second generation whose poetic output and career really starts, why the revolution?
And they've become known as poets after the revolution. And, you know, they went through different processes as poets.
The way that Tahara staffers are there or must I began on the approached poetry or their relationship with the leftist poets.
What extremely intriguing to me. And then the way that they really shifted ideologically when the revolution happened.
And then they slowly became part of the official draught.
How did that take place and what was their role? They started taking up positions in the new government.
There very close ties and sometimes organising role in some of the most important institutional cultural institutions of the government,
such as ones a formality, you know, the vendor day meeting where and what was happening in those meetings.
And then the way that their work was canonised in the school textbooks was also very important to me.
The way that their work was published. How did they published it?
Who published their work? And then also over time, what kind of relationship they had with the seat of power in particular.
As you know, Harmony has been with the current leader of the Islamic Republic, has been holding this annual poetry ceremonies.
Many of these poets, in fact, became the poet laureates medical shadows of these nights.
Perhaps the worry upon, too, is that people sitting with one chair distance from harmony.
All these years, he was one of the major poets watch news notes,
many revolutionary songs that even the opposition today remember those songs and they sing them.
So you alluded earlier in one of the responses to an earlier question, but also just now to your own personal experiences living in Iran,
whether it was studying literature, moving to sociology and also reading from your mother's library and so on.
But you yourself were also a practising poet to practise the craft under these same institutions and in these same conditions.
So how did that influence your perspective in writing this book?
I think being a it really helped me to sometimes read these poetry beyond ideology, even when it was ideological.
So, for example, I have two chapters in the book on the war. One of them is about the other face of war.
It's called in English. I tried to show that some of these poets where it's been writing, you know,
in service of ideology, but you see that sometimes they break away from the fore, for example.
And once that this break happens, the content also shifts and you see a different kind of reality of war coming out of these poems.
Being a poet sometimes, you know, helped to understand this shift between the content and the form because it happens to my stuff all the time.
So I think being a poet really helped me, too. Well, beyond the ideological disagreements and divides.
Thank you. I wanted to ask you about female poets as well.
So it's very striking that in your in the official canon and also in the canon that you construct yourself of the official poets.
There's only one female poet, Taras Sapphire's out there, who you mentioned earlier as well.
And yet amongst the younger generations, in my experience of Iran, in the early 2000s, at least, there were almost as many female poets as men.
And in some circles there were more. So how might we understand this shift?
Yes. First of all, I have to mention that this the cannon that I shape for the sake of, you know,
the space I am to limit the walk for the first two generations of this poetic cannon.
The ones who are already established, the ones whose work already being circulated and canonised in the textbooks
on their name is is already established as the poet in this official jargon.
Now, in this circle, that is, as you mention, and very rightly so, it's a very highly masculine turnon.
Right. And there is only this one woman who stands out and really stands out in her poetics, especially in a certain way.
Tell her it's our fault, as I did.
Now, I mentioned in the book, in fact, in the first chapter of the book, that there were other poets, women, poets at this period.
So if you did quash our need, for example, toward the mineral key, these are the poets who are writing.
They're active at the time, but none of them made their way to, for example, the school textbook.
Their name was not as emphasised upon and highlighted as softhearted.
And I think the reason for that stemmed from the fact that it has to do with the cartoons
of this persona of history in the Korea revolutionary period and also her politics.
You're absolutely right.
There are, in fact, many women, poets who do not belong to this particular circle, and they're pretty well read and widely known.
And, you know, the subject of this book was those poets whose work has been endured and patronised by the government.
That said, also, I have to add that in the past few years, especially these poets unites with harmony.
We see that there is increasing number of women bullets who are sitting in the back,
you know, and reading about in praise of motherhood, in praise of life.
I love that. You know, he's also very much connected to this idea of being a devout woman.
And I think their presence and some of them are wonderful poets, feel not as canonised important, this virus that forms a dark horse.
But I think we might have in the future some of these female poets standing out,
depending on whether or not this invented tradition of poetry knights continue,
then I think that's very much bound to the life of the Islamic Republic itself.
You know, whether or not it lasts in power.
I think one reason that Tara staffers are dead became so important after the revolution was the fact that the system was trying to fight desperately,
so trying to find an exemplary replacement for influential women poets such as Google Fadal,
whose work then was censored and banned after the revolution, although her work is circulated.
But some of her poems, especially during the first decade after the revolution,
I think was an important period for the Paris agenda and censorship and our results.
Poetry was one of them then.
I think she was a perfect replacement for Rockefeller also because she wrote in modern forms that politics was interesting and avant garde.
In fact, in the book I argued that she is the most avant garde poet.
She might be only one woman, but her voice really stands out and she has really interesting poetic phrases and that evolves over time.
And her very close relationship with her arm, you know, she was the translator off or on.
And I think that was extremely important in shaping her persona, not only as a woman poet,
but as someone who is extremely well-dressed and deeply engaged with the Islamic tradition.
What very interesting need doesn't write in rhyme, know, doesn't practise classical forms,
which is something that is also very unique about her promotion and other poets such as Rocket n Roll, I need.
And if you want to think about the aesthetics of poetry, according to the current leader of the Islamic Republic,
he actually very open the audience mentions this, that his preference and he likes classical poetry more than modern poems.
You said it very clearly. Yeah. So I think that desperate need to replace a little out of sorts.
Influential and popular poetry pushed the system.
Who you choose to pick? A woman who could speak to that sort of poetic persona that Froogle Fattal's Lockhardt.
Thank you. So, I mean, for me, your book is full of insights that I think tell us things about the Iranian revolution
and the revolutionary state and society that other historians have missed until now.
But for you, which do you think is the most important? Which are you most proud of making a contribution with?
Thank you for saying that. I think the most important thing for me was to show how poetic legitimacy and political legitimacy for hand in hand.
And I think that's really something unique about Iran and also to show how poetry is still very much relevant to society and to the power.
And I really want to at you know, this is in a way a foundational book in the sense that, as you mentioned,
because of that much gap that existed in the field, I really was challenged by how to write this one book.
That veteran is not going to answer all questions and probably creates more questions
how to write a book that opens up the field to further enquiry and research.
One thing that, for example,
I'm a book that I have shown in the book is that we are dealing with a romantic form of romantic political thought in Iran,
in which poetry is so deeply embedded in the political jargon that is almost impossible to separate it from it.
Another thing that I hope I have done in the book that I sort of feel would be useful to the readers is that interdisciplinary approach.
This is a work that is not just literary criticism, is not just sociology of literature or social history of literature.
I really try to use different theories from different backgrounds, political science, for example, to show that, you know, think about poetry.
We can thinking between different disciplines. We don't have to just constantly go for a type of high literature and just stick to that other.
There are also other ways of looking at the revolution and the Iranian society.
Then just as much as I love the high literature myself.
Yeah,
I hope that that the book offers that sort of sociological insight into understanding the role of poetry in the society and in shaping the revolution.
Absolutely, that was one of the main takeaways for me and one of the things I appreciated
most about it was this showing how poetry is so pervasive in the society,
but also how this really rich millennium long heritage of Persian poetry can be reinvented sic almost completely and yet remain so
much the same in so many ways to reflect a completely new political reality and help birth it in a way to help bring it about,
bring it into being. So it's absolutely fascinating. It's a wonderful book.
I did want to ask you very briefly out of this official canon, which of these poets is your favourite personally and.
Well, that's one question.
Maybe a slightly separate question is which one do you think will stand the test of time and remain in the Persian poet at Canon?
You know, one hundred years from today, perhaps those two names will be different, but perhaps they'll be the same.
Yeah. I think if I want to choose one. What will be tolerance?
I was on the. Not just because she's the only woman pull it,
but because I think her politics is extremely fascinating and interesting and unique in many ways compared to other poets of this tradition.
She has a very interesting life and very interesting crown.
And, you know, her shift towards the Islamic revolutionary ideology is a mystery to many of her close friends.
She did an MFA in literature at the University of Iowa, travelled outside Iran, read literate work literature pretty widely.
She was a bilingual poet. She published in both Persian and English.
She, in fact, has a collection which I briefly address in the book, introduce in the first chapter of the book called Red Umbrella.
I have a couple of favourites, but I would say this is my most favourite collection of hers.
13 poems only. And they're published in English University of Still IVI 1969.
Extremely fascinating poetry.
Her relationship with the war on, I have to say, is also as a scholar who was direct and engaged with the texts of the text as a form of poetry.
Her relationship with the Koranic text is also very interesting to me.
She also taught in universities. So she was a poet, scholar very early on after the revolution.
In fact, her promotion to become a professor at the university during those extensive purges itself is an interesting dichotomy, I think.
So, yeah. For those reasons, I for the sake of her poetry.
I think poetry is very interesting in terms of the avant garde politics and language and imagery that she uses.
She doesn't exactly fit this category up a bit as much as I really dislike this word Islamist.
A female poet. She doesn't really fit that category.
If you read the variety of her works before and after the revolution, and I think she would be the one who would definitely remain.
Her name was on it. Milani has written about her, in fact, very beautifully.
And another poet, which I don't think that's as much as sort of a Sarposa there.
But I've been really popular amongst the mass.
You know, you see it being quoted quite often on Twitter on different occasions.
Some people don't even know whose poetry is this. But people, right?
Wrong name on their signature at this point, for example, belongs to such and such.
But it doesn't. But it shows that, you know, the ports you have.
Has its own journey after the poet writes it, no matter who wrote it.
If it speaks to people, it travels. Is Saddam important?
He's interesting in the sense that he really was one of the really maybe the only
point of this cannon that managed to write fresh and contemporary in a true sense,
allowance. He really revived that tradition after the revolution.
And, you know, he's he's shift on his disillusionment.
I think makes him a very interesting case, although he never really gave up on his ideology altogether.
He always remained loyal to his his beliefs.
But I think the fact that he experienced the different forms, including Vidal, makes him an interesting poet.
And, you know, poets such as seeming a bit of a Honi also praised his poetry.
But if I want to choose one between the two, the band definitely will be taught herself.
For Tim, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
I've been speaking with author for two missions about her book, A Revolution in Rhyme Poetic Cooption Under the Islamic Republic.
And this has been Middle East centre book talk. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.