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A Mantra for Auschwitz
19-Sep-2012
The beauty of irrelevance
of me with shaved head
and wearing a Kippah
making my passage as a Jew
through “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
The beauty of the erased
years from 1939 to 1945, in a poster
at the entrance where we line up to be grouped,
marked in red with the same brilliance
as my nail polish.
The beauty of the broken
handle of a suitcase belonging
to a survivor, that stays back
in the camp which still overflows
with new arrivals like me every day.
The beauty of the distended
white skirt of our guide
who stuffs our sad hunger with statistics,
leaning against the bluster of a brick building
with Goebbels’ words at its entrance.
The beauty of fading
stripes on the shirts of prisoners in the photographs lined along
the hall way, similar to the strips on my shirt,
which feels as long and stretched as the prayer
shawls hung in the first room we cram into.
The beauty of the dark
inside of a large glass container
in the second building,
holding dense human ash like mud,
against which a boy rubs his little white face.
The beauty of the smudged
words on a letter in the third building,
never sent, but read numerous times
by strangers like me, who try so hard
to decipher “love” scribbled in Yiddish.
The beauty of an absent
stare, pinned on a pile
of eyeglasses in the fourth building,
which resembles a woman with lush black hair
and piercing eyes.
The beauty of a toothless
comb, holding to brown bent teeth
of other combs around it on which has fallen
the shadow of a woman’s hair.
The beauty of a few fallen
crutches, which together,
make a track that leads my steps
to a mound of worn-out shoes
as tall as me.
The beauty of the threadbare
fabric of a little girl clothing in the fifth building,
which recalls the barbed wire fabric of the camp,
with small roses and a butterfly
that still resist being snipped and unwinged.
The beauty of the ruthlessness
of a smooth and blazing blue sky
gnawing my eyes as we exit
the building and head towards the courtyard
to visit the grainy and grey “Wall of Death.”
The beauty of emptiness
hidden within cement walls
of solitary cells in the basement where we go next,
and where we are not allowed to capture
in snapshots to take home with us.
The beauty of abrasive
ovens in the last building, now cold
as the bulging blue eyes of a doll
with broken torso, whom I say goodbye to
before heading to Birkenau.
The beauty of dryness
of the still-green blades
of July’s grass under our stump
in the vastness of Birkenau, advancing
along the incessant rail tracks.
The beauty of the startled
sunlight which scurries in
like mice towards the bunk beds
where hay is lying today,
as we enter the barracks.
The beauty of a cluttered
pit of concrete, rubble, and dust
with deep and twisted iron roots,
going down to the heart of the earth
in the place of sky-high columns of smoke.
The beauty of my brittle
nails under the red polish scratching barbed wire,
that matches the brittleness
of a heart made by stones
on a symbolic grave for grave-less folks.
The beauty of me, an Iranian atheist,
who, following an Islamic tradition,
while reading the Koranic verse,
knocks on the grave with one of the stones
to present Jewish souls as witnesses before Allah.
The beauty of my irrelevancy—
my shaved head, my Kippah,
my stripped shirt, my brittle nails,
my brilliantly red nail polish;
the beauty of irrelevance
of a so called Muslim’s Exodus .
Nilofar Shidmehr
Auschwitz-Birkenau
July 22, 2012
| Recently by nilofar-shidmehr | Comments | Date |
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مفهوم حجاب و ارتباط حقوقی آن - ۲ | - | Oct 29, 2012 |
مفهوم حجاب و ارتباط حقوقی آن - ۱ | 6 | Oct 26, 2012 |
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Care and Love /Relevancy and Dis-functionality
by nilofar on Sun Sep 23, 2012 06:20 PM PDTDear Mehrban,
Thanks for directing me to another of your
insightful writings. I loved the last one: your personal story of relating to
Siavoosh Kasrai's Vatan. And I love this one.
Something about "Baroon Baroone" has also
strikes me as odd. But I could not exactly put my finger on it until this very
moment. I completely agree with you on the relative absence of expressions of
care coexisting with profuse examples of expression of love. One can describe
this as ironic or paradoxical, but I think you have chosen the right adjective
for this situation: dis-functional. I have also wondered how a person can love
someone who he does not deeply care about. This seems so unreal to me!
I still continue wishing that Persian men would
care about Persian women more than they say they love them! Of course care
comes with responsibility and much more that "love" does not
necessarily aspires to. Here, by saying Persian men and Persian women, I do not
mean to generalize or do injustice to men. I am mainly talking about a culture
rather than individuals who carry out that culture via their performances. And
by care, I mean being responsive so as to respect women and give them real social
status as being more than mothers, sisters, and wives, and to allow them be as
present and active in cultural and political scene as men are. Treating someone
with care means acknowledging that she is real, alive, and relevant--that she
exists or can exist independently. So again, the discussion on care in the
context of gender relationship in Iranian society somehow relates to the
relevancy of women in the community.
May our wishes for our culture come true. wishing
that it becomes less dysfunctional so more real, our wishes, yours and mine and
those of others who do not completely fit into the box of Persian culture.
Nilofar
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Care!!! Funny you should mention care!
by Mehrban on Sun Sep 23, 2012 04:00 PM PDT//iranian.com/main/blog/mehrban/baroon-ba...
Relevancy
by nilofar on Sun Sep 23, 2012 02:48 PM PDTFirst, Dear Vildmose,
Thanks for you comment. The saying of Simone De Beauvoir as a subtext of your comment is definitely very powerful. Its power is in its relevancy to our human predicament or condition, also indicated by another of my favorite female thinkers Hannah Ardent.
Many Regards.
And, Dear Mehrban,
Thanks for giving my poetry revlevancy through your insigtful and caring reading. If not care and insight combine together as "Mehrbani", what else can creates sense and relevancy to our existence as openness towards the other?
I am always inspired by your words and what is beyond them.
Many Regards,
Nilofar Shidmehr
The beauty of the relevance of your poem
by Mehrban on Sat Sep 22, 2012 06:41 PM PDTDear Nilofar, so many thoughts rush into mind that I may sound fragmentory or incomplete but here I go....
Orhaan Pamuk often talks about a certain provenciality that he felt living in Istanbul, a feeling that what was important was taking place elsewher namely in the West. I only bring this up as a phenomenon with no value judgement. In your work there is a pressing desire to be relevant, you have read well and learned a lot your work shows it.
Some of the passages here are brilliant (poetically)
"of a smooth and blazing blue sky
gnawing (at) my eyes as we exit"
Also the use of the imagery of knocking with a stone at a grave site (which to me is one of our most moving and powerful traditions), in this context is brilliant to take the Jewish victims witness to an "irrelevant" but very real Iranian "exodus" which was the topic of one of your past blogs. Iran of IR as a prison and ergo the idea of escape and exodus.
I could go on about color and texture too but I stop here.
Thank you Nilofar, your work is relevant and in many ways makes us relevant. I wish there could be an intelligent and lively discourse about contemporary Iranian poetry and literature, your poems certainly provide potent material for such a dialogue.
I am always impressed by a certain intellectual gusto implied in your work.
Powerful.
by vildemose on Wed Sep 19, 2012 07:40 PM PDTPowerful. Thanks.
All Oppression Creates a State of War--Simone De Beauvoir