Classical Iranian Poetry: A Very Personal Introduction to Ferdowsi's Shahnameh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.