Tag: Iran

Hairan – Daoid Sarhandi-Williams, Ali Sobati and others (Ed)

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This book was inspired by the killing of Mahsa Amini by the Morality Police in Iran apparently for not having her hair properly covered by her hijab. This murder in 2022 added further outrage to a movement that was already existing in the country known as Woman Life Freedom which opposes the oppression of women not only in Iran but neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan. I have featured works both from and about Iran several times in the past and when I spotted this book in a shop last month I was inevitably drawn to it, I especially like the title combining the provocative word hair, which for women must at all times be hidden in public, with the name of the country.

The book is much more than simply a collection of poems, most of which were especially written for this collection, as there is also a very informative introduction which covers the history of female poets in Iran going back to the days of the Persian empire. This introduction also includes brief remarks about several of the poems in the collection, setting them in context. There are also thirteen black and white photographs of Iranian women from the back showing their hair, with clearly no identifying information in order to protect them from the regime and several political posters supporting the Woman Life Freedom movement. One thing the editors were surprised by was the refusal by any of the poets included to use a pseudonym or be credited anonymously especially bearing in mind the topics covered.

The poems are powerful in their imagery and in sorrow and outrage at the treatment of women and sometimes men who support them. If a poem needs more explanation for those of us that don’t live in Iran and therefore haven’t been exposed to names, places or events referred to there are useful notes after the poem. Several poems refer to Ferdosi’s epic Shahnameh, which I briefly covered in 2018 as the story is a classic in Persian culture and familiar to most Iranians. Whilst reading I was noting any poems that I thought I could pick out in this review as I particularly enjoyed them and ended up with twelve of the seventy six which is clearly too many to list but emphasises how strong this collection is. However I particularly want to mention “This Place” written by Atefeh Chararmahalian during her 71 days incarcerated in the infamous Evin prison in Tehran along with “You’d Said” by Fanous Bahadorvand and “freedominance” by Leila Sadeghi which are both explicit tributes to Mahsa Amini as is the poem I have chosen to represent all the others:

The three young women included in the dedication are Mahsa Amini (aged 22 when killed in police custody), Nika Shakarami (aged just 16 when abducted by the security forces and killed sometime during the next ten days, who know what happened to her during that time) and Hananeh Kia (aged 23 when shot by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard near a protest whilst walking back from the dentist, she was due to get married just two weeks later). Nika’s body was never returned to her family and she was instead secretly buried by the security forces forty kilometres away presumably to avoid her funeral becoming a flash point for more protests.

The book is published by Scotland Street Press, who I must admit I hadn’t heard of before purchasing this collection, but looking at their online catalogue they seem to have quite a few titles that are very interesting, so I don’t think this will be the last book of theirs to make it to my library. I’ll finish with a couple of the images of Iranian women’s hair from the book including one very bravely out in the street without a hijab.

Zulaikha – Niloufar-Lily Soltani

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Canadian author Soltani’s first novel takes us to her Iranian heritage with a powerful story exploring the life of the fictional Zulaikha (pronounced Zuli-ka), born in 1945 and therefore exposed to the various changes that have overtaken Iran in the last seventy plus years including the suppression of female rights since the Islamic Revolution at the end of the 1970’s. Not that Zulaikha’s life had been particularly rosy even before the revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s. From being pulled out of school in 1958 at the age of thirteen because as her mother, Madineh, saw it “no man would marry a girl with an education”, her role was to get married and her wishes were seen as unimportant. The book however starts in December 2007 and in Amsterdam rather than Iran. Sixty two year old Zulaikha has been visiting her son, who now lives in The Netherlands and at Schiphol airport on the way back to Tehran she meets Kia, a man she hasn’t seen since the 1960’s. There is no hint as to the relationship between them other than he used to know her missing brother Hessam, in this opening chapter, we slowly find out more as the book progresses but the two of them meeting triggers a postponement of their flight and security take Zulaikha away for questioning. Who is this man and why should their chance meeting be seen as a cause of concern? We find out the who eventually but we are left in suspense as to what will happen to Zulaikha when she returns to Iran the next day as the book leaps backward to 1958 and begins a chronological narrative until we eventually get back to the plane landing.

Soltani gives her protagonist a difficult time, from being a child bride as the second wife of a merchant in Bahrain whom she only meets just before the wedding, to becoming a widow whilst still only seventeen and returning to Iran where she ends up having an abortion after a doomed illicit relationship. Zulaikha grows up in Abadan, home to what was at one time the largest oil refinery in the world and crucially close to the border with Iraq which made it a prime target in the 1980’s Iran-Iraq war, so much so that the population plummeted from around 300,000 in 1980 to just 6 in 1985 and Zulaikha along with her family and most of the population of the city became refugees in Tehran and it is in 1985 that Hessam vanishes, presumed killed on the front line. She also spends time in the notorious Evin prison but despite the hardships piled onto Zulaikha the narrative drive of the story keeps you reading, indeed it’s a difficult book to put down you just want to know more of her story. It is also a book that is clearly well researched with many real events explored, such as the Abadan Cinema Rex fire in 1978 which killed over four hundred people and became one of the turning points in the overthrow of the Shah with rumours blaming his secret police force despite the barring of the doors and subsequent arson actually being perpetrated by Islamic militants. I learnt so much more Iranian history through reading this novel.

The book first came out at the end of 2023 in Canada although it is now available more widely and it is definitely worth seeking out, it is beautifully written and the story of the ups and downs of Zulaikha’s life is engrossing with the various threads largely tied up by the end but you still want to know more about Zulaikha which is a good place to leave her story. This blog is being published on Tuesday 19th March and the Iranian new year is marked on the first day of Spring, this Thursday 21st March so Happy New Year to any of my readers whom are celebrating this, or in Farsi Nowruz Mobarak.

Black on Black: Iran Revisited – Ana M Briongos

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Ana Maria Briongos is a Catalan writer from Barcelona who first went to Iran for the academic year of 1973-74 to study Persian but this book is mainly about a month long return journey she made in April 1994 where she catches up with old friends from twenty years ago. The book is interesting because of the contrast she is able to provide between life in the last days of the Shah against post revolutionary Iran and importantly it also gives a female perspective of the restrictions and some benefits of the strict Islamic life that she encounters on this revisiting. I chose to read the book as a modern follow up to ‘The Road to Oxiana‘ which I enjoyed so much last month and it gives a view that is much more familiar to me as it is set just four years before I was to visit Iran.

A woman travelling on her own has to know how to look after herself and be respected, which means dressing appropriately and using common sense. Travelling on her own a woman has access to places where a man could never go.

This is particularly true in the Middle East, especially Iran, and Briongos takes us to some of those places but particularly we visit friends and their families especially Bahman who hosted Briongos in Tehran and drove her to various places outside the capital during the thirteen day festival that coincided with her arrival, so getting to know Iranian family life, the jealously guarded recipes for specific foods which each Iranian housewife puts out to impress visitors and the tight knitted relationships across generations. In particular we are introduced to Rave and her grand-daughter with Down’s Syndrome Bubu, these two would be constant characters whenever Briongos was in Tehran during April 1994. Rave was one of the wives of Bahman’s father and had become a sort of mother hen for lots of his children regardless of which wife was actually their mother. She was very unwell and trying to get treatment in Europe which at the end of the book we find that she does succeed in doing before ultimately emigrating to Australia with Babu and Babu’s mother, whom we never actually meet because she was living in Hamburg. It is good that things worked out for Rave and Babu you really feel for both of them as the narrative progresses.

Interspersed with the account of the trip in 1994 are lots of memories of her first visit to the country both retelling of stories from then and also trips such as going back to the university where she studied two decades earlier only to find that she couldn’t go to the building where she lived then as it was now male only whereas before it was strictly a female domain, wanting to at least go somewhere familiar from that time she ventures into the library only to encounter a professor who had taught her all those years ago and who promptly whisks her off to the park over the road where they can chat and catch up more freely. It’s the personal touches that really make this book so enjoyable to read, you really feel as though you are with her on this trip back into her past.

This was Briongos’s first book, published in 1996, although she has written ten more since then about her times in Afghanistan, India and further trips to Iran. My copy is the first English translation published in 2000 as part of the Lonely Planet Journeys series, a now defunct series of travel books which I really enjoyed whilst they existed due to their eclectic range and focus on personal stories. When I discovered the series was being killed off I bought as many of the titles I didn’t already have as I could find and this book was one of them. Twenty years later I have finally opened it after it sat on the shelves waiting for me to get to it and I know there are still a couple of that batch of books I bought all in one go that are still waiting. I enjoyed this book so much that I suspect they will not have much longer before I finally get to read them.

Persian Poets

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In 1997 I was in Iran and in the Tehran museum saw fabulous hand painted pages from the great classics of Persian literature some of which were 1000 years old, so were contemporary with the great early medieval illuminated manuscripts produced by the monks in Western Europe that I was already familiar with. However these pages were on a different level being more miniature paintings surrounded by text rather than marginal images, a complete book would be a wonder of any age but few have survived intact.

The great epic poem Shahnameh by Ferdosi (also Ferdowsi, Firdusi etc. Persian to English isn’t a precise transliteration) was one of the stars of the exhibition with several wonderful pages on display and at over 100,000 lines it is the longest poem ever written by one author. Written and revised between 997 and 1010AD the 1000 year old poem tells the tale of Persia from a mythological start and the creation of the world, through a time of legendary heroes to historical accounts up to around 750AD and the fall of the Sassanid rulers of Persia. Despite the age of the text it is still perfectly readable to modern Iranians whereas Geoffrey Chaucer (who lived roughly 400 years later) is about as far back in English that you can go and  have a reasonable chance of being able to understand the meaning. Regrettably I don’t read Persian so the text is beyond me but the illustrations made me yearn for a copy for myself. So along with a couple of rugs my souvenirs of Iran included a book in tribute to this great work and the ancient illustrations that so fascinated me on first seeing them.

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The book was printed in 1991 and describes itself as a commemoration of the millennium of composing Shahnameh by Ferdosi. It was a few years early but the 1000 years have now passed and I’m glad it was early or I may not have been able to obtain this lovely, if somewhat large (42cm x 30cm), volume. The basic premise of the book is that 22 paintings by Mahmoud Farshchian done in the old style of Persian miniature art that I so admired would be used to illustrate sections from the heroic phase of the poem, it is written mainly in Persian with some English to explain the paintings.  The introductory pages are truly beautiful

and then we get into the main work which is the 22 modern interpretations of pages from the ancient works, I love the way that the pictures reach out beyond the frame. Click on the pictures to access full screen versions.

I have chosen 5 pages from the book to illustrate it and these are:

  • In his third labour, Rostam slays the dragon
  • Sohrab launches an offensive against Persia
  • Siavosh undergoes the ordeal by fire which Keykavus has arranged
  • Rostam sets Bijan free from the well where he has been imprisoned by order of the Turanian ruler
  • View of the Hunting Ground, with Bahram Gur talking to the harpist maiden

Ferdosi is not by any means the most famous of the Persian poets, that honour probably goes to Hafez and the annual Hafez festival was on when I arrived in his birthplace of Shiraz. He lived from 1315 to 1390 and like Ferdosi his name is more of an honorific, the difference is that we don’t know the real name of Ferdosi but Hafez was Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad. Being called Hafez indicates somebody who has memorised the Koran, which apparently he did at a remarkably early age and that is the name with which he has gone down in posterity. Also on my bookshelves is the programme for the event.

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and I took several photographs at his mausoleum which is where recitals and singing of his poems were taking place. He is a much loved poet in Iran which is odd when you consider that most of his poems involve wine, love or the beauty of women; hardly the subjects that are approved of in conservative Iran.

There are fortunately several good English translations including Penguin paperbacks of Hafez’s works, and now Ferdosi has also been included in Penguin Classics so let us leave this blog post with some words by Hafez from The Penguin Little Black Classic “The nightingales are drunk”

With wine beside a gently flowing brook – this is best;

Withdrawn from sorrow in some quiet nook – this is best;

Our life is like a flower’s that blooms for ten short days

Bright laughing lips, a friendly fresh-faced look – this is best.