While the appetite for poetry in many modern cultures has dwindled into antiquity, poetry remains at the core of Iranian life and governance.
The people of Iran encounter poetry every day in newspapers, classrooms, religious sermons,
political broadcasts, 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, Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei 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,
as has been explored in other cultures such as Soviet Russia, Franco's Spain, Castro's Cuba or Italy,
under Mussolini, where 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 Zuzannah Olszewska and I teach the social anthropology of the Middle East,
particularly Iran, with a particular interest in literary production.
My guest is Fatemeh Shams, Assistant Professor of modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,
Fatemeh earned her DPhil in Oriental Studies at Oxford under the supervision of Homa Katouzian and Edmund Herzig and in 2016.
She then taught Persian language and literature at the University of Oxford.
SOAS and the Courtauld 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 2021 until July 2022 Fatemeh will be a Humboldt Fellow and an EU ME 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 Co-option 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.
Fatemeh, welcome to BookTalk and welcome back to the Middle East Centre community.
Can you tell us about the role that the Oxford intellectual milieu played in the writing of this book?
Hi, Zuzanna. It's a pleasure and honour to be here in conversation with you and also to be back to the Middle East Centre,
and St Anthony's College, which was my first college when I first arrived in Oxford.
So, those were the good, good old days. You know, I, if I want to start answering your question about how Oxford milieu,
and intellectual community, shaped my scholarship and also who I am today as a scholar,
I should really start with the Clarendon Fund and the fact that it gave me the opportunity to pursue a PhD in the first place.
But more methodically, if I want to highlight some of the most important thing, takeaways from Oxford
time, for me was basically to rethink the relationship between the old and new one I would
say, that in order to make sense of the new,
you always have to look back at the past and you 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 with my mentors,
Homa Katouzian and Edmund Herzig and, and also, you know, my friends, including yourself and you know.
One thing that also I think was very important was this
untouched. Going for the untouched and undiscovered and neglected.
And tried to look for the nuances instead of constantly repeating what is already, what has already been said.
Another thing that I think was very important was, for me especially, to come to
realise the importance and significance of history and historical knowledge.
I always had this, I don't know if it's a joke,
but I always used to 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 you are
an, you are an anthropologist or sociologist,
or 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 past and try to make sense of it.
And of course, that privilege of working with wonderful scholars,
meeting the people that you simply don't get to meet in other, you know, 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 42 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.
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 and wonderful question. I actually elaborate on this in the introduction of the book as well.
That one of the reasons for this gap, I think has been the lack of contact with the post revolutionary Iran by those
scholars who whose work actually has shaped and sort of defined fields outside,
Iran, you know, excessive purges and forceful involuntary integrations that happened right after,
especially the first decade after the revolution caused many of his followers to leave home.
And sort of lose contact with Iran and simply not being able to be physically present.
And this, you know, had a really important impact on the production of the scolarship 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, invaluable body of research on postrevolutionary prose and even poetry.
But, you know, they mostly have been, have been focussing on, or are focussed on
those authors and poets who held 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 and complicate it in the book by showing that even those who adhere to a certain ideology,
being the ideology of the state, questioned it at some point and it's not, it's not as sort of black and white that we imagine.
So this new generation of scholars who grew up in Iran and were educated under the Islamic Republic, including myself,
we have a different experience and view of how the system really works.
You know, we, I mean, I personally was exposed to exposed to poetry from 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 pre-revolutionary period.
And then, you know, the overground library that had different kinds of books.
So being exposed to all of these different, you know, dimensions of, of Persian poetry, I suppose was extremely important since very young age.
And soon I found myself in the poetry circles of Mashhad, which is one of the most thriving cities as far as poetry is concerned.
You know, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I started going to this poetry circle with a friend of mine at the high school, at high school.
And soon I realised that there is that there is definitely a divide where you can read certain poetry and you can't read certain poems.
And there was this constant, you know, tension. I would call it a tension, that I was trying to make sense of.
I was quite unable to do that. Not at that age.
And then later on, when I entered Tehran University,
I became more aware of this extensive purging that happened in the past and they were happening at that time.
And also the State-sponsored book industry, really, that constantly tried to weave a different literary history,
different canonization and re-canonization of poetry. And then I left Iran and I, you know, started working on this project.
One of the things that came to my attention was that this particular phenomenon,
this you know, book-making industry and sort of canonization and recanonization of poetry has been completely dismissed and nobody has really picked up on it.
There were, you know, 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. So, yeah.
Yes, 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 did, you know, I studied sociology
at Tehran University after a year off being at the Department of Literature and being disillusioned by the whole way of,
you know, the way that literature was addressed and taught.
And I think that sociological 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 this work was also very important.
And, you know, once you, once you put those in priority, the aesthetic dimension finds a different, different meanings, different meaning.
Why is it is distasteful to many critics?
I think, as you know, as a result of that, anything that is ideologically charged and also considered as too political,
a political and ideological for the taste of the scholars, has been dismissed.
And then there is the sloganeering aspect of poetry that, you know, poetry is shared or the poetry is a slogan or vice versa.
And as soon as it's mass, you know, 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 Islamic Republican poetry 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 it played a very important role in their othering. You know, there is a political divide, whether it we, we like it or not,
between the scholars outside Iran, those who work in the humanities for the most part,
and, and, you know, the Islamic Republic.
So whoever works for the government, with the government, especially literary people, they are just simply considered as bad poets by default.
But this is simply not true.
And, you know, I tried in the book and to complicate this approach, and that many of them, in fact, knew the poetic tradition pretty well.
We might not like the way they write and we might not agree with their ideology,
but that doesn't mean that they are completely illiterate or unaware of, you know, this tradition.
In fact, they are deeply aware of it. And that's why they were capable of co-opting so well, which is something that, you know,
I think the contribution of this book to the field is really to show that, how this co-option has
taken place. Another thing, I think there is this, again, which has to do with what I already said,
this demoralising approach to, not just the revolution of the Islamic Republic, but also Islam to some extent I would say.
I tried to, you know, in the book to 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, exiled, persecuted and exiled by the Islamic Republic.
This poet is one of the first pioneering voices of this very trend that later on was promoted to officialdom after the revolution,
Nemat Azarm. And I think, you know, complicating this binary, which was really something that I was hoping to do in the book,
we challenged the pigeonholing approach, of calling these people Islamists.
People who, you know, if you look at what has been already produced, these poets have been constantly called Islamist poets.
I think there is a difference between Islamist and Islamic Republican. And I think that's what I was trying to do in the book.
And, you know, the fact that many of these poets, they're allies with the censors and with 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. Yes, 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 among the State-sponsored poets, the Islamic Republican or 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?
Yes, thank you for that question again.
These are all very important observations and thank you for reading the book and also for these wonderful questions.
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 during my time in Oxford,
and this was thanks to my supervisor Edmund Herzig,
was that he really pushed me to go for reading texts and sources about Bolshevik Russia, and the Bolshevik revolution.
And I, you know, although this work is not in any way a comparative study, I think,
there is you know, I have used different different examples,
but mostly the example of Russia to show that Iran is really not the first, and is not willing to be the last country that,
you know, poetry was in this country was tied to the Revolution and poets were tied to the Revolution.
And also, you know, 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 and
I'm hoping that this opens the field really for further enquiries and research by other scholars
also, to look for the parallels and try to put Iran on the map,
rather than just looking at Iran as, as this isolated place that, you know, just falls into the area of studies
and there's nothing really in common between this and other examples, as far as poetry is concerned, and relationship, sorry, revolution and ideologies.
Another thing that I was hoping to, you know, going back to your question about the episodic approach is that
I tried to show that basically the relationship with the poetic tradition is something that we should also look at,
that each poet has his or her own way of connecting with the past
and, you know, in today's Iran, even the government has its own take on this politic tradition.
We have after the revolution, we have this, you know,
new wave of interpreters and critics who are aligned by the State and they are giving their own interpretation of Hafez
for example, Morteza Motahhari's book on Tafsir-e Hafez and his interpretation of Hafez is one of them.
And I chose the term co-option for this particular reason, to show that there are
ways, there are always ways of connecting between the past and the present.
Even, you know, even then there is, there is a revolutionary ideology on government in place.
Even if they try to cut this relationship with the past, they're unable to do that because they are constantly, themselves
they are constantly going back to this path and try to have a selective approach to this past.
And so, and also, you know, in, 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 leftist poetic jargon of the 1970s.
I show this in details, in detail, details
in one of the chapters of the book when I talk about how this mystique, poetic militant approach was co-opted, in fact.
Partly by going back to the mystical tradition and mystical poetry and partly by going back to the guerrilla poetry of the Seventies.
And, you know, by putting these two different jargons together, these poets came up with their own way out, you know,
sort of sanctification of the war, making it a holy defense or the very notion of literary commitment Ta'ahhod-e Adabi,
which was something that if you look at the works of the leftist secular poets of the pre-revolutionary period,
you see that they are the pioneering voices, in fact, in formulating this concept.
And then we have Mohammad Reza Hakimi,
who comes a year before the revolution and also after the revolution with this book called Literature and Commitment in Islam.
So suddenly everything is co-opted. And, you know, Islam is also itself co-opted and we have a new phenomenon.
But this new phenomenon didn't come out of nowhere, you know, it had its roots in, its roots in the past.
So I try to show these connections with the hope of not stopping by the Revolution or as a point of,
as the only point of reference when you're talking about literature. Poetry has its own life.
In fact, it was one of the reasons, I would say, one of the important reasons to trigger the Revolution itself.
The poets contributed to that as well. 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 used 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 were the pioneering voices. For that, I have to go back to, I had to go back
to what has been produced by the Islamic Republic itself and what has been said and argued. 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 used one word, if I want to say that really helped me to identify these poets was, the work of Mohammad Kazem Kazemi,
who you know well,
He is an Afghan immigrant poet 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 the system wanted to hear these names.
He has a very wonderful book called Dah shā'er-e enqelāb or Poets of the Revolution.
I used that work. But, you know, that anthology in particular doesn't exactly go into depth.
No ontology really tries to do that but really, that was an eye opener for me. In terms of the objective criteria,
it was really important to me, the role these poets played.
So I come up with two different generations: The generation that wrote before the Revolution
and they were already part of the literary milieu before the Revolution happened.
Poets such as Tahereh Saffarzadeh, Ali Mousavi-Garmaroudi, Ali Mo'allem, Hamid Sabzevari and so forth.
And then the second generation whose poetic output and career really starts, by the Revolution
and they become known as poets after the Revolution. And, you know, they went through different processes as poets.
The way that Tahereh Saffarzadeh or Moussavi-Garmaroudi approached poetry
or their relationships with the leftist poets were extremely intriguing to me.
And then the way that they really shifted ideologically when the Revolution happened.
And then they became, you know, they slowly became part of the official jargon.
How did that take place and what was their role? They started taking up positions in the new government.
Their very close ties and sometimes organising role in some of the most important institutional cultural institutions of the government,
such as Howzeh-ye Honari you know, when were they meeting,
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.
For example, after the Revolution, one of the things that the government really tried to
emphasise at Qom was that, you know, Ahmad Shamlou is considered as one of the, if not the founder, the father of
Blank Verse or She'r-e Sepid. After the revolution was one of the voices that was marginalised or censored.
Although he never left Iran. But, you know, he really was pushed to the margins.
And instead, Mousavi-Garmaroudi was introduced as the father of Blank Verse, She'r-e Sepid.
You know, I had to understand how this, how this happened.
And as much as you know, one agrees or disagrees with these kind of dichotomies,
I think the fact that they took over the official platform was important and had to be understood and addressed. The way that their work was published.
How did they published their work? 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, Khomenei has been, he's the current leader of the Islamic Republic, has been held, holding these annual poetry ceremonies.
Many of these poets, in fact, became the poet laureates or malek-al-Shoʿarāʾ of these nights.
Hamid Sabzevari up until his death, he was sitting with one chair distance from Khomenei all these years.
He was one of the major poets who actually
wrote many revolutionary songs that even the opposition today
remember those songs and, you know, they sing them. So these were all very important and interesting to me
and I wanted to, you know, make sense of them.
And yes, these were the criteria that I used.
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 who practised the craft under these same institutions and in these same conditions.
So how did that influence your perspective in writing this book?
Yes, I mean, the poetry circles in Mashhad definitely shaped me in many ways.
And also school and my literature teacher in high school. For the first time, I found out
when I was in the last year of high school,
one day my teacher came to the class and after everyone left, she called me and she gave me a book that was wrapped in the newspaper.
And, you know, I was struck by it and she said, read this and bring it back in the same shape newspaper.
And it was my, I think it was my entry to this world of forbidden books or the books that were not supposed to be circulated in schools.
And then, as I said, my, my mother's library had a really formative rule in understanding that some poets were more forbidden than others.
And. And then, you know, when I started reading more seriously, more committedly,
I got into literature and the history of poetry and tried to look at these patterns of continuity with the past,
one of the things that was, I think was very important to me was this relationship between the patronage and poets.
You know, if you are into Persian poetry,
it's impossible to not read and understand and acknowledge the importance of this relationship between the poet and the poet.
And you have some of the most fascinating and wonderful Persian poems that came out as a result of this patronage,
as, as an outcome of this relationship between the poets and the patronage.
Well, then also, it was very interesting to me that these poets not always had the same fate.
For example, you know, Masud Sa'd Salman is a good example
I think, as a poet who was not lucky enough to be endorsed and supported by his patrons, not always, at least not. Naser Khosrow is another one.
You know, we have stories, although not all of them are reliable.
But the story of Ferdowsi and Shāhnāmeh how, you know it, you know, how Sultun Mahmoud decide to dismiss it. Whether or not it's a true story
I think these are all important factors to kind of keep into account in terms of this precarious relationship between the poets and their patrons.
And then I was always, you know, curious to see how this relationship changed over time.
Of course, you know, we have the 1953 coup and, you know, the extensive detentions and imprisonment and persecution of intellectuals, poets included.
So there was this break
that happened after the constitutional revolution between the poets and the patrons.
And then we have a sort of a return to a you know, to a form that we see in the pre-modern,
that the government, the leaders, in fact, again, decide to endorse a certain group of poets.
So I couldn't just help but seeing that pattern coming back in a different format.
Now, many will argue that, you know, nothing aesthetically pleasing coming out of this relationship.
That's something for critics to decide. You know, and evaluate that,
why is this the case? I think one of the reasons for that is this sort of process of thought engineering,
which is very similar to a language engineering, also, very similar to a Stalin era in fact.
That said, I think being a poet really helped me, to sometimes
go read these poetry beyond ideology, even when it was ideological.
So, for example, in one of the chapters, I have two chapters in the book on the war.
One of them is about the other face of war.
It's called this in fact. I tried to show that some of these poets were still writing, you know,
in service of ideology, but you see that sometimes they break away from the form, for example.
And once this break happens, the content also shifts and you see a different kind of reality of war coming out of these poems.
Now, 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, you know, these poets, they're also just poets for the sake of poetry, not just poets for the sake of state.
And you can see this in their poetic output if you look closely.
And then also, like during the post war era, when Khomeini dies and then, you know, there is a shift in the ideology and the jargon, political jargon,
you see that some of poets start writing completely differently and sometimes against the ideology that they held for more than a decade.
A good example of this is Qaysar Aminpur, he was in fact awarded by the state as the poet of war, as the most important poet of war era.
And then in the postrevolutionary period, he has two collections in which he, he writes in praise of peace.
And in fact, criticises, in a way, himself as someone who promoted the sort of the ideology of war and violence during the war.
One of my friends was also a journalist. I actually interviewed her during the period I was writing that, that chapter.
And she told me that it was towards the end of Qaysar Aminpur's life.
when he was interviewed. When she interviewed him. And she asked him about his poetry that he wrote during the war.
And he completely paused and didn't want to answer the question.
And he said, well, I also wrote poetry after the war
and I would like you to also read those poems. Which, you know, I think is an interesting answer.
And also, many of these poets, some of them showed up in poetry nights with Khominei.
Some of them decided not to. And you also have some of these poets who leave the institution that themselves
founded during the first decade of the Revolution. In the second decade
there is a divide also. So I think being a poet really helped me to go beyond
the ideological disagreements and divides and then also the way I came about work on this, that I decided to work on this topic
in fact. The 2009 election turmoil played an extremely important role, not just in my personal life, but also in my professional life.
It was really a turning point.
I remember two months almost, I think, some two months after the elections when this started, the protests were still happening.
You know, I was following Khominei's poetry nights for more than a decade.
Quite, rather obsessively. It was interesting how poetry was staged
in fact. Televised, live streamed.
And then, you know, there was this huge outpouring of reports and books.
Exactly in the form of the courtiers who were writing the events that was happening in the court in such vivid details.
How many times he praised the poet. They were all footnoted in
these books. So I was following those.
And then when the election happened and the protests happened, he held,
he didn't actually disrupt that event. The event took place.
And the very fact that there was no disruption in the poetry reading in the middle of the most important uprising after the Revolution,
when the streets were filled with the people and like everybody was, you know,
protesting, we had this extremely calm and well-engineered and moderated poetry events in the TV as if nothing is going on.
And these poets were reading poetry and the poetry was very poignantly related to what was happening in the streets.
I end the book, with an ode, with a sort of
qasideh. I start the book with a qasideh and I end the book with a
qasideh to show how this most, this most ancient, oldest poetic form is still used in moments of
crisis to bring poetic legitimacy
at a time that the political legitimacy of the government is under scrutiny, questioned, alleged.
And that was it and it is a wonderful poem by Amiri-Esfandaqeh.
It's very interesting. It's written in the Khorasani style.
And you see how over time then from Azarm's qasideh you know, you still have one individual for many in the centre of the poem.
Very much in, in the style of the court poets. It moves
and it shifts from Iran, you know, as a nation state.
Now, Iran in the poem I show at the end, that in the poem, Iran and Khomenei are constantly fading into each other.
Merging. And those
were also very interesting elements for me as a poet to see how this poetic form is still very much capable and flexible and elastic
after, you know, centuries. And very relevant, in fact, to today's, Iran's politics.
Thank you. I wanted to ask you about female poets as well.
So it's very striking that in your, in the, in the official canon and also in the canon that you construct yourself of the official poets,
there's only one female poet, Tahereh Saffarzadeh, whom you mentioned earlier as well.
And yet among 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 had to limit the work to the first two generations of this poetic cannon.
The ones who are already established, the ones whose work already being circulated and in the textbooks, canonised in the
textbooks and, you know, their name is already established as a poet in this official jargon.
So. Now, in this circle that is, as you mention, and very, and very rightly so,
is a very highly masculine cannon.
Right. And there is only this one woman who stands out and really stands out, in her poetics especially.
Is certainly Tahereh Saffarzadeh. Now, I mention in the book.
And in fact, in the first chapter of the book that there were other poets, women poets at this period.
Such as Sepideh Kashani, Fatimah Rake'i, for example, these are the poets who are writing.
They're active at the time, but none of them made their way to, for example, school textbook.
Their name was not as emphasised upon and highlighted as Tahereh Saffarzadeh.
And I think the reason for that stemmed from the fact that it has to do with the Saffarzadeh's of the persona.
Her history in the pre-revolutionary period. And also her poetics.
You're absolutely right. There are in fact many women who do not belong to this particular circle.
And they're pretty well read and widely known.
And what, you know, the subject of this book was those poets whose work has been endured and cannonised by the government.
That said, also, I have to add that, in the past few years especially, these poetry nights with Khomenei
we see that there is an increasing number of women poets who are sitting in the back, you know, and reading about in praise of motherhood,
in praise of like, pure love, that, you know, is 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 and important as Tahereh Saffarzadeh of course,
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 nights continue.
And 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 Tahereh Saffarzadeh became so important after the Revolution was the fact that the system
was trying to, desperately so, trying to find an exemplary replacement for influential women poets such as Forugh Farrokhzad,
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 purge and the censorship.
And Forugh Farrokhzad's poetry was one of them.
I think she was a perfect replacement for Forugh Farrokhzad because she wrote in modern forms, her poetics was interesting and avant garde.
In fact, in the book, I argue that she's the most avant garde, pull it off.
She might be only one woman, but her voice really stands out.
And, you know, she has really interesting poetic phrases, and, that evolves over time.
So, and her very close relationship with Quran.
You know, she was the translator of Quran. And I think that was extremely important in shaping her persona, not only as a woman poet,
but as someone who is extremely well read and deeply engaged with the Islamic tradition.
What is very interesting to me, she doesn't write in rhyming, you know, doesn't practise classical forms,
which is something that is also very unique about her promotion.
And, you know, other poets such as Rake'i and Kashani did.
And if you want to think about the aesthetics of poetry, according to the current leader of the Islamic Republic,
he actually very openly always mentions this, that his preference is, you know, he, he likes classical poetry more than modern poems.
He said it very clearly. Yes.
So I think that desperate need to replace Forugh Farrokhzad's influential sort of popular poetry pushed the system to you to choose, to pick,
a woman who could speak to that, that sort of, you know,
that poetic persona that Forugh Farrokhazad had. Yes.
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 postrevolutionary state and society that other historians have missed until now.
But for you, which, 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, to show how poetic legitimacy and political legitimacy go hand in hand.
And I think that's really something unique about Iran. And, and also to show how poetry is still very much relevant to the society and to the power.
And I really wanted, 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 doesn't, 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, I hope that I have shown in the book,
is that, there are, we are,
we are, 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.
And this is something that, you know, we have to address. We have to think about that.
How this poetry and why this poetry is so embedded in this ideology.
Another thing that I hope I have done in the book, that sort of 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, poetry, to think about poetry, we can thinking in between different disciplines.
We don't have to just constantly go for a type of high literature and just stick to that.
There are also other ways of looking at the Revolution and the Iranian society
than just, as much as I love the high literature myself.
Yes, I hope that the book offers that sort of sociological insight into understanding the role of poetry in this society.
And in shaping the Revolution also. 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 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, out of 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 canon?
You know, one hundred years from today. Perhaps, those, the two names will be different, but perhaps they'll be the same.
Yes. I think if I want to choose one poet, that would be that would be Tahereh Saffarzadeh.
Not just because she's the only woman poet, but because I think her poetics is extremely fascinating and interesting and unique in many ways.
Between, you know, compared to other poets of this tradition. She has a very interesting life and very interesting background.
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 literature, war 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,
introduced in the first chapter of the book called Red Umbrella, which is really my,
you know, 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 by University of Iowa in 1969. Extremely fascinating poetry.
And you know, her relationship with the Quran, I have to say, is also, you know, as a scholar who
closely read and engaged with the text, of the text as a form of poetry. Her relationship with the text,
with the Quranic 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, and for the sake of her poetry.
I think her poetry is very interesting in terms of the avant garde poetics and language and imagery that she uses.
She doesn't exactly fit this category, often, 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.
So I think, yeah, and I think she would be the one who would definitely remain,
her name. Farzaneh Milani has written about her, in fact, very beautifully.
And another poet, Qaysar Aminpur, which I don't think would last as much as Tahereh Saffarzadeh but be really popular among the mass,
you know, you see him being quoted quite often on Twitter on different occasions.
Some people don't even know whose poetry is this. But people write
you know, as wrong name on the signature, like poem for example belongs to such and such.
But it doesn't. But it shows that, you know, the poem has has its own journey after the poet writes it,
no matter who wrote it, if it speaks to people, it travels. Is Qaysar Aminpur.
He's interesting in the sense that he really was one of the,
really, maybe the only poet of this cannon that managed to
write fresh and contemporary in a true sense as Ghazals
He really revived that tradition after the revolution.
And I'm you know, he's he's shift on his disillusionment. I think he's very make him a very interesting case.
Although he never really gave up on his ideology altogether.
He always remained loyal to his, you know, his beliefs.
But I think the fact that he experienced the different.
All forms, including Ghazal makes him an interesting poet and, you know, poets such as Simin Behbahani, also praised his poetry.
But if I want to choose one between the two, then definitely it will be Tahereh Saffarzadeh.
Well Fatemeh, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
I've been speaking with author Fatemeh Shams about her book, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option Under the Islamic Republic.
And this has been Middle East Centre Booktalk. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.