The young man in charge is in the passenger seat addressing the windshield. My mother is standing outside probably with a gun pointing at her. Other guards are loitering around their own cars. The brother in charge has been to the front to fight in the Iran-Iraq war. My father, too, as a medical doctor serving for two months each year. The brother has had an injury that still looms. My father is able to give brother the medical advice he so needs. Brother lets us go with a warning.
Apparently a few wisps of my hair were hanging loose out of the new contraption in my life, my headscarf. This was Tehran in 1983.
AHMAD SHAMLOU WAS BORN on December 12, 1925, by his own account on a bleak and cold snowy day in a spiritless house at 134 Safi Alishah road in Tehran, Iran. What is believed to have been his birth home seems to be standing abandoned in a country that barely allows gatherings of fans making a pilgrimage to his graveside on the anniversary of his passing on Sunday, July 23, 2000.
I was awaited in a bleak house
by the sacred mirrored fountain
near the mystic’s temple.
(Perhaps why
I found the shadow of Satan
staking me out
from the outset).
At age five
I was still despondent from the unthinkable blow of my own birth
and grew up rootless
on salty sand
to the grunting of a drunk camel and the ghostly presence
of poisonous reptiles in a dust-bowl more remote
than the dusty memory of the last row of date palms
on the fringes of the last dry river. 4
Shamlou’s father was an itinerant military officer whose assignments took his family to far-flung corners of Iran—then still called Persia—exposing the young Shamlou to the peoples, tribes, languages, folklore and customs, and the harsh realities of a nation teetering at the edge of modernity and ravaged by feudalist class warfare at the hands of weak monarchs. First, of the Qajar dynasty who ruled from 1789 to 1925, and later, the Pahlavi dynasty who ruled from 1925–1979, gradually diminishing Iran in size and power as they gave away land and assets to foreign states.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the increasing exchange between the Persian intelligentsia and the rapidly shifting European states had resulted in cultural and political shifts. Persia underwent a Consti-tutional Revolution between 1905 and 1911, which led to the establishment of a parliament, Majles.
Shamlou’s birth year, 1925, was the pivotal year when Reza Khan, a military man, seized the throne and declared himself king, Shah, founding the Pahlavi dynasty. In his vision of modernization, Reza Shah enforced the unveiling of women, kashfe-hejab, and in 1935, changed the country’s name on the roster of nations from “Persia” to “Iran,” the name of the country in the Persian language itself (endonym), and a variant of “Aryan,” a self-designation by the Indo-Iranian people, later distorted during World War II toward atrocities in the name of racial ideology.
Shamlou spent an unhappy childhood in various provincial towns witnessing much misery and suffering around him. He recalled scenes of this desolate childhood, his external realities, in Keyhan-e Sal magazine: In the city of Kash, he saw a starving Baluchi boy on a mattress that he had soiled the previous night, likely from the terror of impending death in a filthy boardinghouse. He remembered the agonizing sight of a sickly teacher and his stomach-churning lash marks in the city of Mashhad. There were villages without trees for respite from the searing sun, fields without water. The tears of his mother washing with her own hands the dead body of her son, Shamlou’s brother.
When Shamlou was a young boy, he overheard a young neighbor play the piano, maybe Chopin. He experienced “the first undefinable sensations of puberty: a blend of pleasure and pain, death and rebirth, and who knows what else.” He decided there and then what he wanted to do with his life. But he was given no music lessons, even taunted. Shamlou mused later that his poetry arose from his stifled longing for music in the same way that the dance-like designs of Persian carpets (and calligraphy) harbored in them the indigenous Persian desire for dance and song, long suppressed under Islam, which swept through Persia in the seventh century.
There was a silence to Shamlou’s childhood. With no one to talk to, no one to stoke his imagination, he turned inward, into the well of his own self.
The itinerant life of Shamlou’s family meant an interrupted education, transferring schools, and being held back. In high school, Shamlou left for Tehran, but ultimately abandoned school altogether. The image of Cain beating Abel was the door to another world for him. He diverted his attention to reading and literature, his interests spanning politics to poetry.
Around this time, Iran was in the throes of the 1941 Anglo-Russian invasion of Iran, which was to force the opening of a supply route for Russian forces. Shamlou became briefly involved with Iran’s communist party, the Hezbeh Tudeh, or the Tudeh Party of Iran, literally, the party of the masses. His early political activities led to a momentary mix-up in a nationalist tendency in Iran that temporarily fell on the side of the Axis powers and against the Allies. He was arrested in Tehran and transferred to a Russian Red Army prison in Rasht, where he spent twenty-one months, and finally released in the fall of 1944.
Soon after, in 1945, Shamlou’s father was transferred to the northwestern state of Azerbaijan in Iran, and their home was raided by the guerrilla forces of the democratic faction. Shamlou and his father were held blindfolded before a firing squad for two hours before a last-minute reprieve.
Shamlou’s domiciles were raided throughout his life, his manuscripts burned and stolen, confiscated works he tried to recreate from memory while plotting new ones. Sometimes he went into hiding. He began to realize that his voice could not be expressed by aligning with any political ideologies or parties or stealthily pasting protest posters in the middle of the night. Writing would be his only work, nothing would be as potent as his pen, nothing large enough to contain him. Shamlou transforms from an outward activist to introspective witness.
When Shamlou launched into his literary career in the fertile period after World War II, Persian poetry had been remolded and given a new dynamism. His coming of age and evolution as a free spirit in an increasingly unfree Iranian society posed a challenge, but he managed to reflect his social and humanistic ideals in his work. The reformist spirit of the time was reflected in the works of socially motivated poets preceding him. Poets such as Bahar, Iraj, Dehkhoda, Farrokhi, Eshghi, and Lahuti played key roles in this process of freeing Persian poetry from the state of decline and stagnation it had fallen into. The florid language of the nineteenth century had alienated the masses and led to the gradual isolation of the ruling classes from the realities of life. Classical imagery with its metaphors wrapped in candles and moths and taverns and lady wine-bearers no longer reflected the concerns of the citizens of a bold, new century.
In their wake came the poet Nima Yushij, born Ali Esfandiari in 1897 in Yush in the northern province of Mazandaran, and largely referred to as Nima. In his rustic simplicity, Nima cloistered himself at home for twenty years as he single-handedly challenged traditionalist tendencies in Iranian poetry, namely its subjects and metrical forms, and began to update the language of poetry in the language of his time, all against a barrage of criticism for upsetting tradition. His work was denounced for not even being written in the Persian language. Progress was slow—with each new publication he took one step forward and two steps back. In 1945, Nima was a renegade star, but in only five years he would turn into a sun around which rotated a galaxy. He would be a vanguard,