Poets as Prophets of Revolution
by Farhang Jahanpour
In Iran, poets and writers have often been regarded by the public – and by themselves – as seers, guides or even prophets who lead and enlighten the masses. The ‘committed’ or ‘engaged’ writers are the eyes, the ears and the conscience of the society and, for better or worse, exert a profound influence upon the minds of the reading public.
One great difference between classical and modern literature is that while in the past poets acted as spiritual guides, revealing divine secrets and engaging in metaphysical speculation and elucidating Sufi mysticism, modern writers are more concerned about the here and now and about political and social issues. With the dawn of the Constitutional Movement – a movement which itself owed a great deal to Iranian writers and intellectuals – a new literary climate was created. With the introduction of printing, the spreading of education and with greater access to books and newspapers, Iranian writers and poets found a much larger audience to communicate with and many new political and social issues to write about.
Throughout the 20th century, the dominant political feeling in Iran was inclined towards the left. The Tudeh Party, and later on the Mojahedin-e Khalq, the Feda’iyan-e Khalq, the Maoist Komeleh and other Marxist groups and even moderate opposition groups such as the National Front Party or the Iran Party, opposed the Pahlavi regime and the ‘imperialist’ and ‘colonialist’ order from a leftist vantage-point. There were many non-political writers, but they were dismissed as uncommitted, and consequently, they exerted little influence upon society.
The first Congress of Iranian Writers, which was attended by most leading literary figures of the time, was held in 1946. Professor Parviz Natel-Khanlari, a notable writer, poet and scholar, addressing the assembled literati, stated: “Your primary duty is the preservation of freedom, freedom which is the vital essence of artistic thought and talent.” Fatemeh Sayyah, a leading female writer, raised the question of the ‘goal of our literature’, and Bozorg Alavi, a leading member of the Tudeh Party and famous novelist, advocated a revolutionary position for writers who “must know the purpose of art and the duty of the artists,” and who must “move in front of the people to guide them” in their struggle.
Ahmad Shamlu, the most influential Iranian poet during the decades leading to the revolution, persistently saw himself as a prophet. In a famous poem called “Ba Chashmha” (O ye with eyes), he yearns:
Oh, I wish I could,
For one moment, I wish I could
Set upon my shoulders
This innumerable mass of people,
To carry them around the bubble of the earth
That they may see with their own eyes where their sun is
Oh, I wish I could![1]
Reza Baraheni, a prominent critic, in his introduction to his book on literary criticism, Tala dar Mes (Gold in Copper), wrote that the “duty of intellectuals … was to show and alert” the people to social ills. In one of the chapters, the author enumerated four missions (resalat) for the poets:
1- Historical and temporal: The poet “must understand in what period of human history and in what era of ethnic history he lives…”
2- Geographical and spatial: “The poet must know what makes up his environment … He must understand the ground upon which he stands and in what region he makes contact with the globe.”
3- Social cognitive: “The poet … must profess the path of freedom, oppose authoritarian tyranny and charlatanism, and also avoid restricting human beings to socially or philosophically limiting schools and principles.”
4- Literary: The literary commitment of the poet consists of “knowing in what period of literary history of his people he lives…”
In his second work, Qessehnevisi (Writing Fiction, 1968), Baraheni once again devoted many pages to the issue of the “writers’ social commitment”. Considering the writer as the “true historian of his age”, which he called “the era of the night” (asr-e shab) or the era of socio-political oppression, he wrote: “The writer’s duty is to record the true history of this ‘era of the night’ and even to fight at the side of the people in their struggle.”
Most Iranian poets and writers took those words to heart. Ahmad Shamlu, in a poem published in 1954 – a year after the Anglo-American coup – called She’ri ke zendegist (Poetry which is Life), wrote:
Today
Poetry is the weapon of the people
because poets
are themselves a branch from the forest of the people
not jasmines, hyacinths in someone’s flower garden.
Today’s poet
is not a stranger
to the pains of the people.
He smiles
with the lips of the people.
He grafts people’s pains and hopes
to his own bones.
He writes poetry,
that is
He touches the wounds of the old city
that is
at night
he tells a story
of the pleasant morning…
This theme of awakening the sleeping masses and the feeling of expectancy for a great happening, a renaissance, a revolution or the appearance of a saviour was common to many poets. Another prominent poet, Nima Yushij, in his poem entitled “Naqus” (the Church Bell) wrote:
Rain shall pour from this drawn-out cloud
(made of our sighs)
Rain as clear as hail
And the heart-rending stories of sorrow
Shall change to stories of anger
And a time shall come when in this house of terror
Fire shall be set and spread
An iron hand shall embrace
This injured one on the scene.
Trembling with kindness
The burnt harvest that day
Shall awaken as a flower garden
And the path to the destination
Sought by the caravan of the yearning generation
Shall be within sight
And a fire from which
A frost-bitten body seeks warmth
Shall be hidden in
the eye.
[1] I have mainly used the translations of poems given in Mohammad Reza Ghanourparvar, Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1984. In connection with the topics discussed here, also see his In a Persian Mirror: Images of the West and Westerners in Contemporary Iranian Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
F Jahanpour 