abandoning high school, Shamlou began working in a bookstore. Soon after, his first volume of poetry, Forgotten Songs (1947), was published, what he later considered a workbook of his classically influenced poems. Reading one of Nima’s poems, “Knell”—on the first day of spring, no less—transformed Shamlou’s vision of the potential of poetry. Shamlou would track down Nima’s address and knock on his door, where appeared a man who resembled drawings Shamlou had seen of Nima. Shamlou introduces himself and expresses his intentions to apprentice under the poet. Nima found in the serious young poet an ally in his vision. In his zeal, Shamlou visited Nima almost every day, never taking into account that he might be imposing on Nima’s time.
Shamlou became Nima’s champion, publishing Nima’s seminal poem, “Afsaneh” (“Myth” ) in 1950. In the same year, Shamlou published his pivotal poem, “To the Red Blossom of a Shirt,” in which metric language was disregarded, the poem heralding the free verse revolution—known as She’re Sepid, meaning white verse—that Shamlou would engineer.
Shamlou later recalled, In the beginning, when we young poets were composing non-metrical, non-rhyming poetry, many of the elders, who were terrified of innovation, disinclined to accept these new forms, used our work against us, called us inexperienced, repudiated our work of not being poetry. But why? we would ask, and they would mock us: You are so uneducated and foolish that you don’t even realize what you’ve written is prose!
But Shamlou pressed on experimenting with language. He harnessed the healing powers of poetry as his weapon against tyranny, his tool for connecting with a larger public. Shamlou’s worldview matured. He educated himself on a robust regimen of international literatures, gaining independence of thought. He imagined himself in a lineage of writers he considered friends across time and language, a collective that created the blueprints for our humanity.
No one in my family remembers how we came to host Shamlou in our home. During the literary gatherings, which in my mind were wild artists’ salons, Shamlou was the centerpiece everyone deferred to, his mastery of language and history and culture so superseded everyone else’s that there was no questioning him. Only sitting at the feet of the titan. Other literary heavyweights joining us included Gholam-Hossein Saedi, in whose apartment I would later see a large poster of Beethoven above the entrance staircase, and who would disappear from time to time and when let out of prison, where he was beaten with electrical cables and his mouth pried open to take his torturer’s piss—which he told us about while howling and as casually as, Where is your bathroom—would resume spirited socializing as before. These people were not new to torture for literature, I thought, my mind already racing with fuzzy torture scenarios I had no business imagining at such a young age, gleaned from our guests and the books I was handed to read about the torture of political prisoners in South America. Torture of female body parts I could not comprehend. Having to witness unspeakable torture of my parents was a nightmare that haunts me still.
We were not allowed to tell anyone about our visitors. The threat of surveillance loomed in those uncertain years. Every one of our loud and musical salons was susceptible to a sudden raid, a knocking down of the door and barging in of half a dozen armed brothers to loot, arrest. But so far as I know, Shamlou turned out to be too big to touch, even if he was critical of the new regime, which he considered to be nothing short of a handoff of despotic power from one group to another. In the summer of 1979, he wrote in the weekly journal, Tehran in Images:
The regular programming, sunrise, has been canceled without further notice. Ravens are approaching to occupy this entire realm. Terrible news is impending, but the ravens will not bear good tidings.
Shamlou was one of the most visible and written-about artist-activists of his time, rising to the charge of his time. Some have argued that had Shamlou not been possessed by charisma, he might not otherwise have achieved his icon-like status with a cult-like following. He was a storyteller with the skills of an orator, enlisting his cutting wit, charm, masterful turns of phrase, and a vast syntax that went from low to high as he held court wherever he was. While he valued conversations at the highest levels, he viewed himself as an element from and for the people, and preferred the company of the working man.
Fortunately, the other guests who gathered around Shamlou at our house, all politically minded, came from all walks of life, some of which I had not socialized with. I remember Mansour, a railroad worker, a true proletariat activist fighting for the cause. I remember him handsome, charming, kind, compassionate, committed. He had one of the most beautiful smiles I have ever seen. But did any of these qualities render him immune to his wife being thrown from the window in front of their teenage daughter when the brothers of the Revolutionary Guard went looking for him? We later found him and his daughter living in Canada, where I first met his daughter when we were in our twenties. She was sad and sweet. There was always something unsaid between us. How do you say, I’m so sorry about…your…MOTHER. To pretend to understand the horror.
In the mornings, dressed in school uniform, which had only just begun to include a headscarf, even at our new, gender-segregated schools, I tiptoed past bodies collapsed in our living room. This might have occurred once, or something I heard our guests did at other people’s homes, yet that is how those late nights have been mythologized in the history of my coming of age. The soirées may have been tame, restrained even, but they were clandestine and spirited times colliding with my own internal efflorescence. My body, too, was growing and I was wearing my father’s old funky shirts that belonged to a man in his exuberant youth, perhaps before children, or perhaps when we were still children and their whole lives lay ahead.
All the while entertaining as a social centerpiece, a heavy drinker and smoker, Shamlou worked diligently, often late nights to dawn, to author more than seventy books, including seventeen books of poetry, dozens of translations, children’s books, essays, the Book of the Alley, a living encyclopedia of folklore, and his edition of the classical tome, the Divan of Hafez, a daring act that was met with much criticism upon publication—skeptics wondered how dare Shamlou edit the work of the great bard, a prophet of sorts in Iranian society, but Shamlou brought Hafez to the twentieth century by editing punctuation to allow for more possibilities in meaning.
Shamlou was also editor-in-chief of dozens of literary magazines, both inside and outside of Iran, including Sokhan-e No, Ashna, Khoosheh, Iranshahr, Ketab-e Hafte. After the revolution, he began editing the famous Ketab-e Jom’e. Some joked that one of Shamlou’s gifts was that he could resurrect a closed-down journal, and close down a circulating one. Shamlou was also one of the leading members of the Iranian Writers’ Association, a member of PEN International.
Writing was a kind of salve for Shamlou. Terrifying as it was to be a lone vanguard in the face of prejudice, he buried himself in seventy-two-hour writing sessions. Shamlou’s favorite poems by other poets meant so much to him. He connected to them so closely that it seemed to him he had recited them. When he recited poetry, he believed he was merely transcribing what had already been composed in his mind, his poems apparitions that came to him fully formed. He felt he was in a trance, not on the planet, as if someone else were speaking on his behalf. When he woke up in the morning, he said, he did not remember awaking in the middle of the night to scribe a poem. When there were silences, pauses in his poetic output, he believed poetry had abandoned him.
Shamlou said in a 1979 interview with Bamdad newspaper: A poem is an incident crafted in time and space, but it is composed in language, so all of the capabilities and possibilities of language could and should be utilized to create a poem.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1947 essays on engagement, or commitment, spawned a global movement in the literary discourse of ensuring that literature would serve the struggle for liberation. Sartre believed that words were actions, and that a writer could influence history through writing. Sartre dismissed autonomous writing—“art for art’s sake”—as an invention of nineteenth century bourgeois authors. Engagement was writing in the service of liberation.
Similarly, Shamlou developed his own call to arms, a brand of socially engaged commitment, ta’ahhod in Persian, which peaked