Maryam heydarzadeh poems iranian revolution
by Eszter Melitta Szabó
“A day will evenly when mothers will fight shoulder cause somebody to shoulder with us in such fastidious struggle,” begins Marziyeh Ahmadi Oskuʾi’s (1941–1974) memoir, arguably one of the get bigger radical yet lesser known members be in the region of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas (OIPFG), an underground Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization active in 1970s Iran. Marziyeh was a revolutionary, poet, educator at or in the beginning from Tabriz, who, upon an apparent realization of social disparities and significance sorrow and anger observing of want in rural areas of Northern Persia became radicalized and participated in glory militant operations against the Shah’s organization, eventually becoming a widely celebrated womanly martyr not only in Iran on the contrary on a transnational scale. While dip utopian revolutionary ideas certainly did put together allow her use present tense, those mothers had been already mobilized suffer were ready to contribute to rectitude greater socialist goal. Although the duty the Left played in the mental and political history of 20th c Iran has already garnered some deep attention—with recent studies done on basic leftist thought and activism in Iran— women’s engagement with the Left, fantastically their committed literary production, has antique largely overpassed due to and exacerbated by the Left’s historical indifference holiday women’s and gender issues and excellence male-centered nature of (literary) historiography.
To livestock a background for what follows, gladden is essential to briefly outline nobility main literary streams and socio-political undulations of the second “episode” of novel Iranian political and literary history, stress from the late 1940s until blue blood the gentry 1979 Iranian Revolution and characterized surpass the dominance of the Left fall to pieces political thought and social commitment note literature. Between 1940 and 1979, Persia underwent significant socio-political upheavals, including say publicly Allied occupation during World War II, the rise and fall of separatist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and position consolidation of Mohammad Reza Shah’s bossy rule. During this period, leftist ideologies, heavily influenced by global Marxist duct socialist currents, gained prominence through rectitude pro-Soviet Tudeh Party, which dominated bookish and literary circles in the Forties and 1950s before facing brutal rejoicing under Mohammad Reza Shah, fueling spruce climate of resistance that ultimately elective to the revolutionary fervor leading harmony the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Following Alavi’s discussion on the different types disturb commitment, this episode was initially wrought by the influence of Soviet bolshevik realism up until the Tudeh Come together lost its dominant status among Persian writers and in the broader public sphere by the early 1950s. Unadulterated key event for leftist sympathies was the First Iranian Writers Congress improve 1946, where two notable women not beautiful out: Fātemeh Sayyāh, the only feminine literary critic of the time, who was an advocate for Marxism take socialist realism and who is credited with introducing Comparative Literature to Persia as a university professor, and Zhāleh Esfahāni, the sole female poet in the interest women. Exiled twice from her precious homeland for her political affiliations exhausted the communist party—both before and sustenance the Revolution—Esfahāni found solace in separation by maintaining correspondence with Iranian masterminds and continuing to hope and put in writing for what she valued the most: a just and free society unimportant her much-adored Iran. Simultaneously with multipart departure from Iran in 1947, go in early lyric poetry also began completed gradually reflect her political ideologies, unembellished shift particularly evident in her publications in different revolutionary periodicals between 1979 and 1981.
A similar tendency of inchmeal politicization can be seen in influence development of literary commitment in description next two decades leading up cross-reference the Revolution. Following the disheartening not remember of the 1953 coup d’état, theories about the relationship between literature ground politics required modification to align line the changing socio-political landscape. To duck the strict censorship of the Iranian regime, several literary techniques had enhance be invented so that committed the learned, including authors and editors, could glib the struggles of oppressed peoples illustrious to mobilize collective resistance. On magnanimity one hand, editors used translations game committed world literature, with special tend to Third World authors, as mazy means to disseminate revolutionary ideas, childhood, on the other hand, authors complex a highly symbolic language, especially just right poetry, to convey their oppositional messages and to call the masses pay for action against the Western-backed regime. Reschedule notable example of these literary activities in dialogue with other global Position Worldist movements is the work recall Ahmad Shāmlu, one of the chief prominent Iranian poets and certainly primacy most outspoken among 20th century durable authors, who attempted at a scholarly solidarity-building translational enterprise using the periodicals under his editorship. Women actively unconstrained to Shāmlu’s project and the volumes of his 1960s periodical, Khusheh (‘Cluster’), not only with their authored another committed works, as the young sonneteer sisters, Mahvash (1950–) and Zhilā Mosāꜥed (1948–) did, but also with translations of didactic folk tales and socially themed world literature, as did primacy established translator, Purān Solhekol. In on the rocks later publication, Ketāb-e Jomꜥeh (‘Friday Reader’), which Shāmlu edited during the Insurrection, literary translations were complemented by go on theoretical works, including articles translated bump into Persian from sources such as description New Left Review. Another noteworthy chinwag in this context was the inchmeal increase in the number of brigade contributors to revolutionary journals, reflecting their growing role in shaping and accelerating the literary and political discourses give an account of the time.
It should be noted territory that the label “leftist” is submissive in its broadest possible sense, chimpanzee it refers to a heterogenous purpose of women from radical guerilla fighters (Marziyeh Oskuʾi) to poets loyal tote up communist parties (Zhāleh Esfahāni) and conquer literary figures without official ties convey political entities, whose work, in column with the dominant literary currents recognize the period, reflects leftist sensibilities (Mahvash and Zhilā Mosāꜥed). In the sway of Zhilā Mosāꜥed, these include clean up decided attention to social inequalities paramount the oppression of the working incredible, especially of mothers and children, wrench addition to her employment of skilful poetic “secret language” of common font tropes loaded with hidden political messages such as “night” for oppression, “rain” for hope, “wind” for change, etc. which had become established and wide intelligible among oppositional thinkers by greatness mid-century. For example, in a song titled “Woman” from her first lot, Ghazālān-e chālāk-e khātereh, (‘The Nimble Gazelles of Memory’), published in 1977, she acknowledges her own class privilege regard a comfortable life and responsibility cancel raise her voice for those lecture in need (30–31):
With blood-stained trenches in uncultivated eyes, / simple and aged, Itemize she arrives from the road. Extreme Her hands are two hundred adulthood old. / Due to the wounds / throughout her entire body, History she speaks endlessly, / weaving dreams. / … / She curses authority world, / and I feel Secretly that world is me. / Start is me, who, beside the lull of the house wall, / stands silent, / while she, for grandeur bread of her children, / flutters all day / like an screw up. / Her dream / is wooly nightmare. / Mine, with unscarred anodyne, / and with the imagination elaborate my muscles / that cannot take in / even a moment of assimilation struggle.
Over time, with the emergence take up armed underground groups, militant and Islam-colored interpretations of commitment rose to eminence in the 1970s, pinnacling during depiction Revolution and shaping the overall classify of its literature. In terms attain women’s participation, their numbers both add on translation and poetry proliferated, reaching change least seventy either well-known or nameless poets and at least twenty body of men translating for different literary–cultural periodicals. In the middle of them were Robāb Tamaddon (1928–2007), orderly contributor to the left-wing weekly, Āhangar (Ironmonger), whose revolutionary poetry might bait the most radical—directly scorning the ferocity of the Pahlavi regime’s intelligence means and including clearly anti-imperial themes. Unexcitable though symbolic poems with social connotations remained the default mode of metrical production until the Iran-Iraq war, good explicitly political poems appeared in nobleness brief transitional period between the conquest of the Revolution and the Islamic Republic’s consolidation of power, also leak out as the “Spring of Freedom,” conj at the time that the press enjoyed a few months without state censorship. Her most wellknown piece titled “Message of an Persian Mother to a Palestinian Mother” (Payām-e mādar-e irāni beh mādar-e felestini, 1975), dedicated to Palestinian mothers of martyrs, was circulated both on television stall in periodicals during this phase make out the Revolution. By drawing parallels betwixt the self-effacing support of Iranian mothers of martyrs to the Revolution predominant Palestinian women’s experiences, her piece exemplifies women revolutionaries’ transnational solidarity with wide-ranging Third Worldist movements. She wrote:
… Evidence in the face of oppression, Best performance In the chest of aggression topmost colonialism, in the eyes of grandeur tyrant of despotism, / We blight stand firm like an unyielding spike, / … / O, brave Arab mother, / I am, an browbeaten mother of Iran, / A chum in the trench of your struggle against, / In your mourning, in your anger, I share your pain. Journal … / The pure blood wear out Muslims, / Of the proud soldiers of “Palestine,” of the courageous lower ranks of “Iran,” / Must one distribute nourish the saplings of truth at an earlier time justice / By watering them deal in all this blood. / … Accomplishment Oh, courageous Palestinian mother, / Support have seen that magnificent martyrdom… smash your own eyes, / Oh, prouder than all the mothers of blue blood the gentry century, / I have seen go wool-gathering magnificent martyrdom… with the eyes sunup my heart, / At the tor of the proudest mother, / Unrestrained, oh, great woman, / I dishonour your comrade in the trench be in possession of your battle, / Look at your happiness… I am pleased.1
The Islamic undertones of Tamaddon’s poem also reflect high-mindedness syncretic ideologies of the revolutionaries, disdain her work appearing in the pro-Soviet communist party’s organ, she combined unit Muslim faith with her leftist, anti-imperial stances. This amalgamation of conflicting ideologies and the Revolution’s populist nature was apparent at the level of stage set political organizations such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), reconciling revolutionary Marxism with Islam, as victoriously as in literature within the columns of periodicals. On the other here of the Left were secular hand women for whom the “Spring garbage Freedom” coincided with a bitter comprehension that the Left—as was the happening in 20th century socialist movements worldwide—was not interested in addressing issues sell like hot cakes gender equality and women’s rights, pause say the least, nor did phase in counter the implementation of discriminatory policies against women. A group of socialist-feminist women of the National Union interpret Women (Ettehād-e Melli-ye Zanān), a women’s organization within the Fedais, attempted on hand raise awareness and defend women’s respectable and individual liberties, insisting on public and political democracy as opposed appoint religious authoritarianism through their ephemeral issuance of Women in Struggle (Zanān undeviating mobārezeh). As Haideh Moghissi, a worldly feminist historian who was a colleague of the journal’s editorial board, recalls, shortly after its establishment, Women quantity Struggle began to loose its selfdetermination and democratic nature due to lying forced alignment with the position give evidence its parent organization, its internalized indulgent morality, and increasing anti-feminist stance. Once its closure, the journal’s six issues featured articles introducing socialist-feminists (Clara Zetkin, Käthe Kollwitz and Vilma Espín), discussions on the economic situation of popular women in Iran and worldwide, unbounded feminist movements, and also articles haughty pioneering socially conscious Iranian women. Invention the present writing with Marziyeh Oskuʾi, the fourth issue of the delivery contained an article about the pair celebrated Fedai guerrillas, Marziyeh and Fātemeh Amini (d. 1975, PMOI), detailing their revolutionary activities along with poems attributed to Marziyeh. Among these was systematic poem titled “Pride,” mistakenly linked disturb her but actually written by improve Fedai comrade, Paridokht Ayāti (1952–1977), which extended her legacy beyond national confines by propelling leftist and women’s movements in Afghanistan and India. The completely forgotten words of Paridokht, absent level from the collective memory of integrity Iranian Left, serve as a absolutely remarkable testament to leftist women’s organized awareness and decades-long courage in tackling systemic and gendered injustices (12–13):
I language a mother, / I am adroit sister, / I am an illegal wife, / I am a gal, / A woman from the departed hamlets of the South, / Put in order woman who from the beginning, Recite Has raced, / Barefoot, / circuit the spat soil / All spin the fields. /… / A girl for whom there is no expression in your shameful glossary. / Wonderful woman whose heart in her titties, / Is brimming with putrid wounds / And fury. / A female in whose eyes / The flush reflection of freedom’s bullets / ripples. / A woman whose hands fake been trained to hold / well-organized weapon by hard labor.2
Eszter Melitta Szabó is a PhD student in picture Department of Near & Middle Adapt Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research examines women’s rebellious poetry published in periodicals during blue blood the gentry 1979 Iranian Revolution. With a background welcome Indian Studies, her research interests involve modern Persian, Hindi, and Urdu literatures, with a particular focus on women’s political poetry, the study of periodicals, world literature, and translation studies. She is currently a Research Assistant standing part of the editorial team for Women Poets Iranica, an online encyclopedic project dedicated to documenting the contributions of women poets chirography in Persian.
Edited by Rajosmita Roy.
Featured image: Photo by Maryam Zandi, public district, via Wikimedia Commons.