How Poetry & Music Brought One Family Together

At the Guardian, Cyrus Shahrad shares the story of how a creative collaboration with his Iranian father, Bahram, brought them closer together. Cyrus, a musician, invited his father to read Persian poetry over his latest composition, and in the process learned more about both his father and his family's cultural heritage. "It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of poetry in Iranian culture. As a child, my father was made to commit the ancient poets to heart, and their words continue to provide a moral template for his life, just as they do for much of Iranian society," he explains. Let's pick up with the story from there:

I’ve seen many a Tehran dinner party end with my father and his friends seated around the table, bouncing lines of Hafez, Saadi or Rumi between each other – one man reciting, another picking up where his friend left off. There are minor humiliations for those who fumble or forget lines, and the whole thing is wrapped in an air of male bravado, but it’s also an experience shot through with emotional openness, and I’ve seen painful verses reduce grown men to tears.

And Dad is never short of a pithy poetic phrase to draw attention to the profound tragedy or comedy in a situation. The most memorable came after the funeral of my maternal grandfather in 2010. I’d read the eulogy at the Dorchester crematorium, the hall filled with stony-faced farmers looking on as I sweated and stumbled over my words like a schoolboy at his first debate. Later, I slipped out of the community hall wake and found my father sunning himself against a brick wall. I’m not sure how long he’d been there – events like that have never been Dad’s thing – but his car keys were in his hand, and I was grateful when he suggested we go for a drive.

We parked at West Bay and walked the length of the pier, pausing at the far end to look out to sea. It was there that my father turned and told me the lines – in Persian, then in English – that would resonate so loudly in years to come. “Life is like a tangled ball of wool,” he said, his face unreadable against the glare of the sun. “At the beginning is nothing, and at the end is nothing.”

Read on at the Guardian.