The New Yorker Considers Poetry's Ties to Politics in Iran

How did the Iranian modernist Sohrab Sepehri find his voice? At The New Yorker, Neima Jahromi brings together both poetry and politics in his portrait of Sepehri to paint a picture of Iran after centuries of "bumpy foreign contact." More:

In 1965, after a trip through China and Japan, the Iranian modernist Sohrab Sepehri found his voice. It could be heard in a new poem he had written, called “The Sound of Water’s Footsteps.” Sepehri puzzles over his identity as a writer, as a Muslim, as a widely travelled painter, and as a man from Kashan, where, in the seventh century, according to legend, Arab invaders intent on spreading Islam subdued the poet’s home town by throwing scorpions over the walls. Sepehri muses on the space race and “the idea of smelling a flower on another planet,” and he writes in free verse, inspired by Nima Yushij, a kind of Ezra Pound figure in the history of modern Persian poetry, who was inspired by the poetic notions of French Symbolists. Reflecting on a country with centuries of bumpy foreign contact, he draws out figures of confusion and displacement:

I saw a book with words made of crystal.
I saw a sheet of paper made of spring.
I saw a museum far from grass,
A mosque far from water.

Above the bed of a scholar in despair, I saw a pitcher brimming with questions.
Sepehri’s poem spoke to the alienation that many Iranians felt in the nineteen-sixties, as technology, literature, film, and imperial encroachments brought ideas from distant cultures to bear on the country’s traditions. Alienation eventually gave way to resentment and distress. Many people—poets, mullahs, and political dissidents among them—lamented what they saw as Iran’s increasing economic and cultural dependence on foreign powers.

Three years before Sepehri published his poem, in 1962, a short-story writer and critic named Jalal Al-e Ahmad published an essay called “Occidentosis: A Plague from the West.” In it, he diagnoses Western thought and culture, those insidious products of modernity, as an infection to be purged. A little more than a decade later, in 1979, Muslim revolutionaries in Iran used the same kind of language to promote their ideals. The ascendency of the conservative clerics who now rule the Islamic Republic appeared to signal a retreat from the modern world. The contagion had spread everywhere, they said, and the body politic needed to regroup. At present, although the mullahs never really cast off modernity, the influence of Western culture still raises the hackles of the Iranian leadership. Last summer, a representative of Ayatollah Khamenei compared Westernized Iranians to terrorists, and lamented that “Western liberalism has taken many of our youth.” Earlier this month, Khamenei, who, like his predecessor, composes his own amateur verse, spoke before an annual gathering of Persian poets. Some had trickled in from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan to seek the Supreme Leader’s advisement. “Today, with the development of new media technologies, certain people are creating poetry that deviates from a straightforward epic and revolutionary ambiance for the purpose of leading our precious youth astray and toward an unbridled culture that praises oppression, departure from humane norms, and yielding to the impulses of sexual instincts,” he told them. [...]

Continue at The New Yorker.