Iranian of the Day

زنده باد فروغ

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Such an Angel...

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The Magic Of Poetry ...

transcends any and all!

Unlike good prose, which indeed could be very engaging, good poetry acts as a rifle-shot targeted for the very heart and mind of the reader - If it succeeds, it's indeed a blissful accomplishment!

One doesn't need hundreds of pages, and/or thousands of words - A few choice words would indeed suffice! - Totally, completely, and unequivocally :) !

A Poet Too smart for her Time

I met her when I was only 19 or 20 and she was Fourugh.

Her voice brought tears to my eyes tonight. I was writng these paragraphs for a new chapter of my book. I thought what I write here is highly relevent to the Iran that Forough has left behind for us, the Iran that the new generation in Tehran is upholding. Salam ba Forough and Salam ba the young generation.

Here are the paragraphs that I am working on.  

In the academic discursive universe where one finds a “post-” for almost every phenomenon or discourse, “post-Islamism” is sometimes used to characterize the period after Khomeini’s death. It is an attractive historiographical scheme. Nevertheless, it can be said that Iran after Khomeini has begun to return to its adoptive modernity that had been interrupted by the Islamic revolution. As such, “return” would be more accurately reflective of the tempo of the history of the era. In a strict sense, however, Iran’s modernity never went away for it to return. The history of modernity has hardly been amnesic. Even in politics, Iranian modernity preserved the memories of progressiveness standing against repressions and retroactions. Those memories are invoked and reexamined by the young generations.

As discussed in this book, the Shah’s state reasserted itself in its essentials and requirements after less than a decade. It took another decade for the pragmatic secular habits of modern upper and middle classes to resurface, openly revealing how little they have been impressed by the Islamization drive. The “other” Iran has not just begun in its “post-Islamism” to create an ideological fusion between Islam and political modernity. The trends of cultural makeovers began a century ago. Today, the young Iranians respond to the exigencies of life whose fundamentals and contours have been formed years before the Islamic revolution. The young Iranians (the “third generation”) have been conformist towards the modernist norms of their forebears. Yet, they have also been pushing forward and charting their own new pathways. Altogether, they have remained committed to Shiite Islam – their hearts still throbbing by its general precepts and promises – without an abiding sense of loyalty to velayat-e faqih, or a literal expectation of the reappearance of the Occult Imam. Like their parents, they have been rearranging the religiously-charged language of their ancestors in such a way that it has significantly loosened its ontological hold over truth – or the truths of the everyday life, particularly in politics. If they have never been Islamized, à la Khomeini, then what is “post-Islamism” in this dialectics? There is no reconciliation at a higher level between the truths contained in the thesis and antithesis. Failure cannot be an antithesis. As such, it reveals no truth matching the one inherent in the thesis. Islamism has never been internalized by these significant segments of the population. I am struck by a remarkable continuity, particularly in their approaches to Islam and the ways in which they seek spirituality and solace in it, assigned particular spaces to it in their daily lives and invite the Shiite mullahs to enter these spaces for specific, meaningful functions.

However, the global contexts of the lives of the “third generation” have drastically changed. The pragmatic norms that guide their lives – including human rights for the individual – are today’s global currencies that would have inevitably influenced Iran. Even when it is called “indigenous modernization” within the perimeters of a theocracy, “yearning for the latest instrumentalities of the modern world,” it is still rooted in the enduring, adoptive modernity and the result-oriented (secular) mores that have had a long tradition of indigenizing modernity since the early 20th century – visions that predated the “theocracy.” “Post-Islamism” may create an image that freezes the Iranian society on an historical stage at the moment of the monarchy’s fall and grant an almost-exclusive human agency to those who became the loudest historical players after that fall. How would the generation who came of age in the 1960s, or the earlier one who attended schools set up by Reza Shah, have characterized their life experiences? Were they thinking of themselves as alien-struck robots? Was their self-definition in modernity exogenous to their beings? Only the nativist intellectuals in the political wilderness of their own imaginations thought so and sold them short. They were engaged in “indigenizing modernity” long before the term became popular among the Western-educated theorists. They willfully allowed the Western-style amenities to enter their lives, rendering them more efficient and comfortable; they took Western norms and redefined them to suit their own needs and desires. They did so without too much agonizing over the process or over particular geographical origins of the values and norms, or too much self-awareness about the contradictions all around them. As they looked forward, they also reached back to their own Iranian cultural landscape – pre-Islamic and Islamic – to retrieve, redefine, and rescue different elements of their humanistic heritage. The twentieth-century passions for individual expressions and worldly experiences have deep roots in that heritage. Both their modernity and their Persian heritage guided what they would adopt from the West and what they retrieve from their past. As mentioned earlier, by the late 1970s, the Western-originated norms and values have lost their original geographical significations, as the middle class Iranians begun to grasp the modernity’s progressive impulses as mediated through the works of Latin American, African and Asian intellectuals and artists, all occupying similar historical terrains. Of course they fumbled and blundered, as all pioneers in paving new historical tracks do. Their endeavors, however, set the course for the dazzling creativities in the contemporary Iranian poetry, novels, music and cinema. I do not see the Islamic Republic as a pivotal platform in the history of modern Iran, around which its major historical themes, including modernity, have to be re-articulated and re-conceptualized. Significant, costly, and painful as Islamism has been, history may prove its republic more an aberration – a heap of historical-cultural debris dredged out and piled up to block the modern pathways that have already been laid in their foundations – than a momentous historical determinant in Iran’s modernity. In the light of this amazing normative transmission across generations, the time has perhaps come for Iranian intellectuals to free their discourses from the soul-searching theoretical interrogations of the nature their “fragmented selves” in Iranian modernity.

Thank you Kourosh.

Olny the good die young.

Thank you Kourosh

It is transporting .. and what a voice ..

Only the voice remains

Integrity and Truth

Thank you for sharing such a rare gem.  Forough's unique ability is using brutal honesty to express her feelings was truly unmatched.....as if rearranging words provided a new perspective....not a new meaning, but one all the rest of us had neglected.  People have often said she had a tortured soul while in reality it is the rest of humanity who has been exposed to so much brutality we can no longer see the tenderness.  I feel as though she is the white dove flying ..still....above us all and trying to show us integrity and truth.

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Thank you for sharing! It is sad that such a talented lady died at age of 32!

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Life

by Forough

translated by Maryam Dilmaghani

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• O life,  life!
• O naught, O all, the intoxicating nil
• I am filled with thy thrill still
•  
• I am not able to betray thee
• If thou estrange me, I won’t estrange thee.
•  
• O life,  life!
• I hunted thou in thee, in all, in thee
• Ever looking to capture thee,O life, capture thee in me
• running off my haunted tower of dream
• my shimmery palace of fantasies
•  
• The journey’s harsh
• The quest’s unsure
• Nonetheless I went for thee
• None could defeat me, defeat my will
• O life! in my pursuit of thee, pursuit of beauty.
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• And I learned thee, life, I learned love!
• In the nearness of Venus
• I loved the morning star
• In the abode of lights
• I loved the mourning clouds
• And in the land of moon
• I loved the raining noon
•  
• O life, I learned thee
• I learned love
• I learned to love thee
• The mother of beauty!

True Gem

Fabulous post Kourosh, thanks.

A Poet Too smart for her Time to

Comprehend! Peace be with her soul!

Payandeh True IRANIANS & IRAN

Bravo!

I sincerely hope that this trend of featuring such beautiful and quality blogs, both from our beloved poets of the past, and also from our younger generation poets, would continue, and not be a one time event!

There is indeed a treasure trove of such quality blogs in 'Blog Central', unfortunately, getting frequently overlooked - Thank You :)