HERE’S the question:

When the majority of the population of a country are of a certain opinion, and their preference forms the rule of law, should you ever go against it? And if it is not your own country, what right do you have to offer an opinion anyway?

Populism is its own reward: victory comes with widespread ignorance because democracy requires education. Without sufficient education to know what you’re choosing between, you don’t really know what you’re choosing at all. In effect, you have no choice, just blind faith.

And that’s what increasingly rules in the world: blind faith in a convicted criminal; in a “Conservative” Party whose mere existence endorses class hierarchy, inherited wealth, a sense of entitlement, racism, colonialism, institutionalised theft; or blind faith in a “Labour” Party whose practices are not so far removed. Or in an SNP leadership posing for selfies beside representatives of English regions and cities. Is such self-abasement completely beyond recall?

But there is a deeper question.

Supposing for a moment there are a few independent minds at work who see such things happening and maybe have a chance to point out the hypocrisies and duplicities, the lying. Is it arrogance to try to be reasonable in the face of genocide? Can I present a calm front while talking about horrifying violence and the targeted destruction of non-combatants – men, women, children, old folk, babies?

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Supposing I believe in certain universal principles. To quote the Palestinian literary critic and historian Edward Said, supposing I believe that “all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards needs to be testified and fought against courageously”.

To however modest an extent, one is hopefully committed to “advance the cause of freedom and justice”.

As Said puts it, an intellectual “is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public”.

Those statements come from Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures, Representations of the Intellectual, but that last description I think might apply equally well to poets and artists of all kinds, as well as professional intellectuals employed in various capacities, either working for or publicly criticising corporate bodies, governments, social states and conditions – and the poets represented in a new anthology I’ve just been reading are all of this kind.

It is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve seen in recent months. This is from the preface to Hairan: Poems Of Hair And Freedom, by Daoud Sarhandi-Williams, co-editor along with Ali Sobati: “I was sitting at my desk in September 2022 … when I heard the shocking news about a young Kurdish-Iranian woman called Mahsa Amini. She had been arrested in Tehran and killed in police custody for not covering her hair in the decreed way.

(Image: Martini)

“Throughout Iran, women and girls of all ages rose in fury against the regime. The mandatory hijab head covering, and hair itself, became a powerful symbol in a struggle for women’s liberation, personal freedom and choice. In the autumn of 2022, I didn’t know much about Iranian poetry. However, I decided to find out how contemporary female Iranian poets were responding to their oppression.”

The resulting book is both a compendium of poems in protest against the killing of Mahsa Amini, to whom it is dedicated, and also an introduction to Iranian poetry from the perspective of writing by women.

The preface describes how Daoud contacted the Polish Iranologist Anna Krasnowolska, who suggested getting in touch with an Iranian publisher, Abbas Shokri. Then, after gathering more than 200 pages of poems, contact was made with Ali Sobati, an Iranian Farsi-English translator and contemporary poetry critic living in Canada, and the book began to come together.

The story of the international editorial team, comrades in collaboration with different, complementary specialisms, and the beautiful product itself, published by Scotland Street Press, is one essential context in which to read the poems. See: www.scotlandstreetpress.com/product/hairan-poems-of-hair-and-freedom

There is a larger context. More from the preface:

“As this book goes to press, well over 200 Iranian protesters have died, thousands have been arrested, and unknown numbers have been tortured.

“Several male demonstrators have been executed, often after being convicted on trumped-up charges under a catch-all crime that translates into English as ‘corruption on Earth’. Furthermore, many Iranians have been forced to flee into exile, joining a diaspora that now numbers between four and eight million people.

“Despite ongoing protests, however, the Iranian regime seems to be doubling down on its efforts to restrict women’s rights. Shops will be penalised if they serve a woman who enters their premises with her head uncovered, smart cameras that can spot women who aren’t covering their hair ‘correctly’ are being installed in urban spaces, and the ‘crime’ of not wearing a hijab outdoors is being considered for a mandatory 10-year prison term – up from a maximum of two months. In all these ways, public spaces that are safe for dissenting women in Iran are shrinking and becoming more dangerous.

“The objectives of this book are twofold: to share with the general reader an extraordinary collection of contemporary Iranian women’s poetry that has rarely, if ever, been translated on this scale.

“The verse is passionate, inspiring, and hallucinatory in its mix of beauty and horror, courage and fear, despair and hope. Collectively, it powerfully expresses the sentiment words – and poetic words – can still play a vital role in bringing about social and political change. It shows us poetry matters.

“The second objective … is to promote women’s civil and human rights in Iran, as well as in other countries that adhere to similar or even more extreme doctrines regarding the role and place of women and girls.

“As this book goes to press, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan … has not only banned secondary and higher education for girls, but is also bringing back the public stoning of women judged ‘guilty’ of some reported moral failing or petty misconduct. Meanwhile, arresting and then sexually abusing Afghan women for ‘bad hijab’ is routine.”

Shouldn’t we in Scotland also be hoping “that Muslim women will have the freedom to cover or not cover their hair, and that both choices will be treated equally. And that such basic liberties will extend to all aspects of their lives”?

(Image: Martini)

That’s the immediate context. And it should take us back to the first principles I began with: Said’s belief that “all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards needs to be testified and fought against courageously”.

And that, in however modest a way, and to whatever extent we can, we are hopefully committed to “advance the cause of freedom and justice”.

Let me add another voice from a different continent, at a time when it’s worth reminding ourselves of the truly great values and aspirations America has at times embodied, the fiercest political poet of that country, Edward Dorn. He puts it very simply: “Either we define our allegiances to certain honorific aspects of human nature or we don’t.

“Most of us know all the time that politics in poetry really amounts to enunciation. Politics in politics amounts to subterfuge, obscurantism and hiding all you can.”

So there you are: “certain honorific aspects” of being human. Nobody, whatever their cultural history, should stone women to death or kill them for showing their hair. Nowhere on Earth should these things be legitimate. And that’s the clear enunciation of every poem in this book, and another reason why it’s such a remarkable collection.

And there’s more. The introduction, by Ali Sobati with Anahita Rezaei, Sepideh Jodeyri and Sepideh Kouti, traces out the whole story of “the silenced trajectory” in the story of a feminine voice in “the extra-millennial past of Iranian poetry”.

In the 1990s, Reza Barahani (1935-2022), a life-long radical (male) literary critic and theorist, called for an “alternative womanly narrative” and suggested that the 1937 novel The Blind Owl, by the (male) writer Sadegh Hedayat (1903-51), as a founding modernist work in Farsi literature, has been “doubly problematic” because “in this novel female characters are denied the right to bear a name or the right to name – they are simply not allowed to speak for themselves”.

The novel presents a surrealist/ expressionist account (drawing on the early silent movies of Luis Buñuel and FW Murnau) of characters “decalcomaniacally copy and pasted one into another.” But its attractiveness as surrealist modernism is undermined by its exclusive patriarchal priorities. “This situation, however, is by no means confined to The Blind Owl … it is ascribable to almost the entire Iranian literary tradition and history.”

So, here’s the drive: “Now it is time for the woman to become the narrator of her world and to do the naming herself,” wrote Barahani. “In literature, a woman’s freedom means that she can define both herself and her surroundings.”

The introduction builds from there. This book comes as a work of redress, and effectively of defiance, and celebration. “Most of these poems were composed (in Farsi) in response to unique social and political events in contemporary Iran: often, they are a tacit or direct response to the Woman Life Freedom (or WLF) movement, which grew out of Mahsa Amini’s death ...

“The poems either elegiacally mourn Iran’s fallen heroes – lost during an ultra-violent crackdown by the regime – or they celebrate the phenomenal bravery of women and girls, as well as the courage of many fearlessly supportive men. And even if not connected to WLF events, the poems still speak to other contemporary sociopolitical events and tragedies in Iran, and almost always from a feminist standpoint.”

The introduction takes us through three periods (the classical, transitional, and modern-contemporary), to give “an overarching historical context for the poems in the anthology”. These three periods are worth noting before I quote a couple of the poems. To begin with, there is –

THE AGE OF ORIGINS: THE POST-ISLAMIC, CLASSICAL PERIOD “The originary points of Iranian women’s poetry are rather blurred. This is due to the imposed ‘silenced trajectory’, that leaves us with little to no evidence and often with centuries-long holes in what evidence is available.”

Then follows THE TRANSITIONAL AGE: QAJAR AND CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION but it’s taken an awfully long time before we begin to get anywhere near those “honorific aspects” of being human that Dorn speaks of, or the principle that Said makes explicit, that “human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards needs to be testified and fought against courageously.”

And yet, progress is possible, change does happen. We come to THE AGE OF FEMINIST WRITING: PRE- AND

POST-1979 REVOLUTION and we’re informed: “It is not far-fetched to consider this period to be that in which the ‘silenced trajectory’ is finally broken – giving way to the birth of womanly poetry with an inherent femininity.”

And this brings us to THE AGE OF WOMAN LIFE FREEDOM: THIS ANTHOLOGY’S CONTEMPORARIES, and here, we read: “The concrete plurality of such distinguished literary voices profoundly resonates with the momentum of the Woman Life Freedom feminist uprising – not only in Iran but in the entire region. This highly consequential, but largely unanticipated, uprising occurred most forcefully between 2022-23.

“The crackdown against it, even by the standards of the brutal theocratic regime that rules Iran, has been extreme: more than 22,000 arrested; more than 500 reported deaths, including of 71 children; various types of child abuse – with all this accompanied by a glut of torture, execution and injury.”

And yet, to come to the poems themselves, we should understand as a governing principle for the whole anthology the fact that “Woman Life Freedom’s ability to surpass all national boundaries lies in its high degree of translatability into a basic condition of de-subjugation”.

Translation has a universal application, here in Scotland as much as anywhere in the world. Consider that as you let the poems sink in. No more commentary now, just two poems to sample.

First, “YOU’D SAID …” by Fanuous Bahadorvand:

You’d said

Don’t write poems

Be a woman

Then life itself becomes poetic

Becomes spring

Becomes plain yet vivid

On the flow of wine in

Mahsa’s hair

Or the nightly hair of Leily

Free of whatever metaphor

Yet, I was the last resort

To words in ashes

In the hearty texts in flames

Or marble dead souls

Growing ever colder

Ice-ageing the world

And the landscape of my imagination

As if a gloomy sunset,

Expired on seven

In the morgues of paradise

The words in ashes

Were about to show

Death for life

And life for a persistent conspiracy

With ups and downs in a foe’s synecdoche

Or certain self-decided deaths

But I was forced

To become a choice

For the heart

Poetry

“Woman

Life

Freedom…”

The references there are worth noting: “Mahsa Amini, the young woman whose death inspired the Woman Life Freedom movement. She was killed in Tehran by the so-called morality police, on September 16, 2022, for showing too much hair.”

And Leily, we’re told, is “A common female name in Iran, but also a possible allusion to Leili in Nezami Ganjavi’s epic romance, Leili and Majnoon (Leyla and Majnun in English). This book is often referred to as the Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet, but Nezami’s masterpiece was written in 1192, around 400 years before Shakespeare wrote his play with a similar plot.”

And here’s “TO LEARN” by Rouhangiz Karachi (composed in Tehran in 2021):

I have learned

To cry my dreams, slowly

And imprison love

In the white of papers

As stormy gusts advance

And be a woman

In a room with no window

Other than imagination.