Ahmad Shamlou:
A Rebel Poet in Search
of an Audience
By
Leonardo P. Alishan
Ahmad Shamlou is the primary, most
prolific and most popular engagé Persian poet of post-Mosaddeq
***
Shamlou was born on
What had tempted Shamlou to join the
Tudeh Party was the concept of an ideal dream-state for mankind which he saw in
socialism on paper and in words. In commenting on the Western intellectuals who
espoused the cause of the left during the Spanish Civil War, Charles Glicksberg
could be describing Shamlou when he writes:
The vision of the
Shamlou left the party for good,
however, when it became evident that the party leaders had "betrayed the cause,
"the military wing," "the members," and had fled the country following the fall
of Mosaddeq. In 1979, when the party had re-emerged after the revolution,
Shamlou wrote one of his most bitter articles against the Tudeh, condemning it
for its hypocrisy, and stating, "It seems that they [the Tudeh] are
intentionally trying to discredit socialism!" However, in the same year, when
asked about his ideas on the Iranian Revolution, Shamlou said: "In our age, a
true and successful revolution is one which results in the complete liberation
of the hard-working masses from the servitude of capital an solves the problem
of profiteering among men. I mean a 'revolution' cannot be in any other shape
and form....It cannot have any other definition or adjective or preposition."
Hence, Shamlou remains a believer in terms of the "ideology" of the left, and
knows that "the artist, in the words of William H. Gass, is a born "enemy of the
state." In his own words:
"I believe that an intellectual can
serve his mission [resalat] for as
long as he is in a position of protest. As soon as he acquires. . . 'a
governmental position and a desk,' he has abandoned his mission and has become
one of the nuts and bolts of the ruling system. In other words, he has left the
position of protest and attack, and has entered the position of a miserable
palace guard."
In 1979, Shamlou stated:
"Unfortunately I don't like any form of government and believe that whosoever
should consider ruling [hokumat
kardan] over me, will unjustly: be considering me as one condemned [mahkum]." Thus he is in a dilemma. On
the one hand, he believes that Iran's economic ills, and the abject and
impoverished state the majority of Iranians can be cured and improved only by a
"true revolution," a "socialist" one; on the other, he knows that even a
socialist government will be, after all, a government, and governments attempt to
"govern" all, including those free spirits who refuse to be governed. Fully
aware of this contradiction, Shamlou finally states: "I'd like a system where
man would not be forced to hide his thoughts and opinions, and such a system, of
course, can only exist in dreams. Yes, I am a dreamer." Shamlou the dreamer, who
is enough of a realist to know that he is a dreamer, is more of a rebel humanist
than a revolutionary socialist. Differentiating between the two, Arthur Koestler
writes:
What distinguishes the chronically
indignant rebel from the earnest revolutionary is that the former is capable of
changing causes, the latter not. The rebel turns his indignation now against
this injustice, now against another; the revolutionary is a consistent hater who
has invested all his powers of hatred in one object. The rebel always has a
touch of the quixotic; the revolutionary is a bureaucrat of Utopia. The rebel is
an enthusiast. The revolutionary is a fanatic.
In this context, Shamlou is the
"quixotic" rebel par excellence. Like
Albert Camus, he joined the Communist Party, left it, and chose "not to accept a
doctrine, be it Christianity or Marxism, on faith," but "to work out his own
principles, his own code of ethics.... " However, unlike Camus, he did not
condemn "the militant Marxists" but even wrote poems for them and for others
with very different ideologies who had sacrificed their lives in their struggle
against tyranny and oppression; the "humble discoverers of hemlock." Hence, it
may be said that Shamlou is more of a realist and a humanist than either Camus
or Sartre. Like Sartre, he knows that an abandoned, abused, and abject hungry
mass of human beings exists out there whom a socialist revolution could help.
And, like Camus, he knows that the artist is an idealist rebel who could not and
should not compromise his dream for a deformed reality such as the one that
existed in the Soviet Union, a rebel who would find fault with everything every
chance he got. Thus, Shamlou is a rebel with immense respect for the
revolutionary. Whereas the rebel and the revolutionary created an unbreachable
gap between Camus and Sartre, their conflict has been resolved harmoniously in
Shamlou, though he clearly knows that he himself is and must remain the free
rebel. A review of his poetry written in the early and mid-1950s reveals that
Shamlou began as not only the rebel but also very much the
revolutionary.
The most interesting poem in the
context of Shamlou as revolutionary is "She'ri keh Zendegi-st" (A Poetry That Is
Life) (1956), wherein the poet says:
'Today
poetry
is the people's weapon;
For the
poets
are but a branch from the forest of
the people,
not jasmines and hyacinths of
someone's greenhouse.
...
He writes poetry
--
meaning,
he touches the wounds of the old
city;
meaning,
he tells a
tale
at night
of pleasant morning.
Shamlou, who used the nom de plume "Alef Sobh" [A. Morning] up
to 1953 and henceforth, "Alef Bamdad" [A. Dawn], has always utilized "night" as
a symbol of evil and oppression. Thus, when he
states,
He writes
poetry
meaning,
he opens sleeping
eyes
toward
the rising morning...,
he is clearly indicating that the
poet's function is to "awaken" the people and to assure them of the inevitable
"morning," the dawn of revolution and light. With few exceptions, Shamlou is
overflowing with hope in the poems of Fresh Air. At times, he is the heart of
the revolution: "Come/my companions/with your pains/and trickle the poison of
your pains/into the wound of my heart"; at times he writes, "I am the common
pain/cry me out!" In "Barun" [Rain] (1955/56), a poem written in a folkloric
form, "four vigilant men" tell a
helpless child:
"...not much remains to
dawn
...who's ever seen night
stay?
...When the men
rise
clouds will
disperse
the cock will crow at
dawn
and lady sun will
know
that night's time is
up..."
He knows that "One day we will find
our doves again/and kindness will hold the hand of beauty. " And on his shoulder
sits a dove who constantly reminds him "of light/and of man who is the god of
all gods. "
The most interesting poem in the
context of Shamlou and his "ideal" audience at this stage of his career is
"Avaz-e Shabaneh Bara-ye Kucheh" [A Nocturnal Song for the Street] (1952/53),
where he states:
I write
for the prostitutes and the
bare,
for the
tubercular,
the
destitute,
for those who, on the cold
earth
are
hopeful,
and for those who believe no
more
in heaven.
Let my blood spill and fill the gaps
among thepeople.
Let our blood
spill
and graft the
suns
to the sleepy
people...
In short, Shamlou is writing for the
"proletariat," and his mission is to inform the proletariat of its "historic
mission." However, from 1956/57, faint signs of despair began to appear in his
poetry for two reasons. One was that a great number of the intellectuals of the
Mosaddeq era knew that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's return to power had been the
CIA's accomplishment, and they were very hopeful that shortly after the coup the
people would overthrow the monarch again. Their expectations were never
realized. The second cause of this despair was the betrayal by the Tudeh Party.
The "cowardly" flight of its leadership, the "confessions" which led to numerous
executions and a number of other facts pertinent to the Tudeh in the mid-1950s
shocked leftist intellectuals. But Shamlou still had enough faith in the
ideology to go on fighting by himself, apart from the
party:
And a man who goes on alone on the
road tells himself:
"It's pouring in the street and here's
no warmth at home!
Truth has escaped from the city of the
living; I go with all my epics to the graveyard;"
And
alone,
for in which fellow-traveler's
sincerity
can one
believe?
....
The air I breathe is polluted with the
lie-infested breaths of my deceitful
fellow-travelers
and,
really,
what need has he, the traveler of this
road, for fellow-travelers?
As for the despair that resulted from
the people's resigned attitude toward the shah's return to power, Shamlou's
reaction may be seen in "Beh To Beguyam" [Let me Tell You] (1956157), where he
said:
There is no more room.
Your heart is full of
sorrow.
The gods of all your
heavens
have fallen to
dust.
Like a
child
you feel insecure and
alone.
You laugh because you're
scared
and a dumb pride prohibits you from
crying.
...
This is the human being you've made of
yourself,
of the human being I
loved
and still
love.
You're afraid--let me tell you--you're
afraid of life,
of death, more than
life,
and of love more than
both.
You stare at
darkness,
tremble with
terror,
and
forget
me
by your
side.
At this point, the poet is still very
much on the side of his petrified people, constantly reminding them of his
loving presence and compassion. In short, Shamlou still has hope in the people
and believes that they will listen.
As for the poet himself, there is not
a shade of compromise. Addressing the staunch defenders of traditional Persian
poetry and the antagonists of modernism, he states: "I am neither Fereydun/nor
Vladimir./I will neither turn back/nor die. " His reference to Fereydun
Tavallali (1919-1985) indicates that Shamlou does not intend to abandon his engagé modernism and to revert to
traditional forms and themes as Tavallali did. Nor is he going to succumb to
pressure and commit suicide as did Vladimir Mayakovsky. Though Fresh Air exhibits traces of
Mayakovsky's influence and moral support along with Eluard's and Aragon's,
Shamlou is more confident of his own revolutionary zeal than of anyone else's.
With Fresh Air we also begin to see
masks of Shamlou as the rebel.
Shamlou's favorite persona for the
rebel's archetype is also Marx's, both choosing Prometheus. In the Foreword to
his -doctoral dissertation. Marx wrote in 1841:
"Philosophy makes no secret of it.
Prometheus' admission 'I hate all gods' is its own admission, its own motto
against all gods, heavenly and earthly, the consciousness of man as the supreme
divinity. " Shamlou writes: " I am the starless Prometheus/who has spread his
wounded liver for the fateless crows forever." And, in "Ghazal-e Akharin Enzeva"
[Lyric on the Ultimate Loneliness] (1952/53), he declares the supremacy of
man:
Is not man a
miracle?
Man. . This just cruelty! This
bewildering bewildered thing!
Man. This sultan of the greatest love
and the most dreadful loneliness .
Like Camus, who believed "Once the
rebel has abandoned his faith in god, he is saddled with the responsibility of
himself creating the order of justice.... " Shamlou also believes that modern
man has acquired a new responsibility which he cannot and should not shirk. He
declares '"Man...the god of all gods."
In Bagh-e Ayeneh
[
We wrote and
wept
We laughed and rose to
dance
We roared and forfeited our
lives....
No one heeded
us.
***
Far away
they hanged a man.
No one raised his head to
see.
***
We sat and
wept
and, with a
cry,
we vacated our
frames.
Now he witnessed the sufferings and
executions which had followed in the post-Mosaddeq trials, and felt the
loneliness:
My unknown
companions
fell like burnt
stars
in such
numbers
to the dark
earth
that you'd
think
the earth
remained
forever
a starless
night.
And finally, the poet finds himself in
a prison where the crimes of many of the other prisoners have stemmed from their
abject poverty. His sole "crime" is that he knows who the real criminal
is.
The long, pessimistic, folkloric poem,
"Dokhtara-ye Naneh Darya" [The Daughters of Mother Sea], when contrasted with
the very optimistic "Pariya" [The Fairies] of Fresh Air, reveals the change that took
place in Shamlou during the last four years of the 1950s. He still had flashes
of hope: "I feel/in the worst moments of the deadly dusk/thousands of
sun-springs/bubble in my heart/from certainty"; and he could still declare, "A
lamp in my hand/and one before me/I go to battle darkness." But such hopeful
utterances were balanced, if not actually drowned, by despair. Perhaps the best
expression of Shamlou's struggle between hope and hopelessness in
I became neither free of
hope
nor of sorrow,
how I
struggle
in the
middle
to stay afloat.
Shamlou's struggle with sorrow and his
subsequent anger at the cause of this sorrow begins to clearly manifest itself
with the poems of Ayda dar Ayeneh
[Ayda in the Mirror] (1964). The poems of this collection, dating from the
spring of 1961, along with the poems of the next collection, Ayda: Derakht-o Khajar-o Khatereh [Ayda: The
Tree, the Dagger and a Memory] (1965), constitute a distinct period in Shamlou's
poetry. His main persona in this period is, to a great extent, Jesus, and to a
lesser one, Moses. He is an angry and totally disillusioned prophet, suffering
amongst his own pathetically passive people. And although this mask of the poet
continues well into 1969, his rage quieted considerably during the years
1966-69. It should also be noted that, from the mid-1960s onward, Shamlou ceases
to search for or to believe in an ideal audience.
Love, a new theme introduced into
Shamlou's engagé poetry with Garden of Mirrors, now became his
primary preoccupation, replacing his ideal people and audience. In "Az Shahr-e
Sard" [From the Cold City] of
Make me invulnerable with the armor of
your caress.
I will not succumb to
darkness.
I have summarized the world in your
small bright dress
and will not
return
toward
them.
In other words, Shamlou had expres-sed
his wish to seek refuge from the cold and careless city in the arms of love. But
love was more than a refuge: it was also armor protecting the poet from the
blows of "darkness. In love he sought and found the strength to withstand the
onslaught of darkness, which had become increasingly gripping once his ideal
ally, "the people," had proven to be, at best, unreliable and, at worst,
antagonistic. Contributing to Shamlou's disillusionment in the people- -not to
mention to his frustration and anger--was that the very people for whom he was
writing his poems were complaining of the difficult and not easily communicable
manner of expression which he had employed, i.e., modernist poetry. Turning to
his beloved, Ayda, now the poet said:
O my written and unwritten
poems!
Let there be no
doubt
as to your royal
reign
if she
alone
remains your
reader!
For she is my independence from petty
merchants
and people alike
also from those whose sole motive for
reading my poems
is to criticize me for their own dull
minds.
And addressing the people, he
wrote:
I am twice condemned to
torture:
to live
so,
and to live
so
amongst
you
with you
whom I have loved for so
long.
Shamlou now felt his intense
loneliness among his people. He realized his pleas and pledges, all offered
through his passionate poems, had not been understood and had remained
uncommunicated. He wrote: "Those who understood how innocently I burned in this
unjust hell/in number/are less than your [Ayda's]
sins!"
It was also with Ayda in the Mirror that Shamlou began to
employ the unacknow-ledged prophet as the symbol of the poet. In Tekrar [Repetition] (1963), for the
first time, Shamlou spoke of "poets" as "prophets" and of both as "martyrs."
Writing on the French authors of the nineteenth century, Glicksberg
says:
many writers and artists felt cut off
from their public and at odds with their world. They turned against society
because it was more interested in material well-being than in art; it betrayed no
genuine understanding or appreciation of their work. Furthermore, they were
antagonized by the stupidity of conservative critics and of the inveterate
hostility of the venal press.-. Gradually they created the legend of the artist as the prophet without honor in
his native land, the martyred victim of philistine society (emphasis
added).
Shamlou's anger was intensified
because the people were not even realizing that in order to achieve "material
well-being," they had to rise, to move, to change the status quo. However, it is
interesting to note the message, of these poets-prophets, these seemingly
Marxist martyrs:
And the tired prophets descended unto
the dark spread
and the cry of their
pain
when torture was tearing the skin of
their frames
was thus:
"The Book of our mission is kindness
and beauty
so that the nightingales of
kisses
may sing on the branches of the
Judas-tree."
We have
wished
a happy ending for the
ill-starred
freedom for the
slaves
and hope for the
hopeless,
so that the divine dynasty of
Man
may
regain
his eternal
reign
over the kingdom of the
earth.
The book of our mission is kindness
and beauty
so that the womb of the
earth
may not become
imbued
with the seed of rancor.
A very similar message was to appear
in "Lowh" [The Tablet] (1965) also. However, as Vernon Venable has pointed
out:
Engels polemicizes against "'true love
of humanity' and empty phraseology about 'justice,"' and Marx attacks the
"higher ideal" type of socialism which wants "to replace its materialistic
bases...by modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Freedom, Equality and
Fraternity." They deny explicitly that communists preach
morality...
Hence, it should be noted that Shamlou
is more of a humanist at this stage than a "Marxist." His search is for an
"ideal state," populated and governed by "ideal human beings."
In "The Tablet," written less than
four months after SAVAK had issued a public statement on the exile of Ruhollah
Khomeini effective
Gone are the times you wept in
mourning
for your crucified Christ;
now
every woman is a
Mary
and every Mary has a Jesus on a
cross
though with no crown of thorns, no
cross, no Golgatha,
no Pilate, no judges, no courts of
justice;
Jesuses with similar
fates,
Jesuses with similar
souls,
uniformed
Jesuses,
with boots and leggings of the same
kind--
the same kind,
with equal shares of bread and
gruel
(for Equality is the precious heritage
of Mankind!)
And if there is no crown of
thorns
there is a helmet to wear on your
head;
And if there is no cross to bear on
your shoulder,
there is a
rifle
(the means of
greatness
all at hand.)
And every
supper
may well be The Last
Supper
and every
look
the look of a
Judas.
....
And, alas, no more is the way of the
cross
an ascent to
Heaven
for it is a descent to
Hell
and the eternal wanderings of the
soul.
But the people do not seem to heed the
poet-prophet's call for a secular struggle. They disagree with his view of
religion as a "sin" in our times. And the speaker realizes the futility of his
appeals:
I now knew that they
waited
not for a clay
tablet
but for a
book
and for a
sword
and for guards to assault
them
with whips and
maces
and drop them to their
knees
before the steps of the
one
who would descend the dark
stairway
with a sword and a book.
Fully aware that his reader knows
Islam is the religion of the sword and the book, Shamlou attacks it, an attack
which gains significantly in its bitterness when one reads "Dar In Bonbast" [In
This Dead-End] (1979) where his fears have been realized and the guards have
appeared in the form of the "Pasdaran," the "revolutionary guards," and "the
one" has descended in the shape of Ruhollah Khomeini. The poet-prophet goes on
to say that "this people," the Muslim Iranian
people,
only accept the martyrdom of
him
who, for
truth,
makes a shield of his
chest
before the sword.
It seems as if they don't
believe
torture, suffering and
martyrdom
(all exclusive to the ancients!)
exist
if they're accomplished by modern
means....
In other words, his anger stems from
the fact that the people go on regarding only Imam Hosayn and his 72 followers
at
The realization of religion's appeal
to the masses, along with continued complaints on the "difficult" style of his
poetry which he counterattacks most aggressively, add to Shamlou's loneliness,
bitterness, and need for Ayda's assuring love. Angrily, he tells the people, "My
intention is to hurt you!"; and "my death is not a journey/but a migration/from
a homeland I did not love/because of its people! " He sees the people as
hypocrites whose courage is limited to throwing stones from their rooftops which
may or may not hit the right target. He realizes
that:
now,
ideology
is nothing but a
memory
or a book in the
bookcase
and a
comrade
is a
ladder
on which you
step
to climb out of the
pit!
He sees that his friends and fellow
travelers were wasted for the sake of Man who, "naked and with chains on his
feet/looked at our struggle/as a sane man/would look at lunatics!" He feels that
"Man/has grown accustomed to his centuries-old agony." And "in a darkness where
God and the Devil appear the same," and where "ideologies" have become mere
"excuses for power struggle," his mind still echoes the heartrending cry of
those who were crucified on "the cross of the people's ignorance": "Father,
forgive them/for they do not know/what they do unto themselves! " Their deaths
permeate his love- -the only thing which has managed to retain its innocence.
Turning to Ayda, he says,
let our first
kisses
be in the memory of those
kisses
that
comrades
with the red mouths of their
wounds
placed upon the ungrateful
earth.
Ayda: The Tree, the Dagger, and a
Memory enforced what the critics
had suspected and feared in Ayda in the
Mirror, namely, that the people's poet was turning away from the people.
They were displeased that "their poet" of Fresh Air had said in Ayda in the
Mirror:
People and the stench of their
worlds
are all
a hell from a
book
which I have
memorized
word by
word
so that I may
understand
the long secret of
loneliness--
the deep secret of the
well
through the meanness of
thirst.
But instead of being intimidated or
even influenced by growing criticism, Shamlou gave a number of statements
wherein he manifested the unprecedented anger and indifference to which we shall
return shortly.
In 1964 Shamlou refuted 1,A Poetry
that Is Life" as an "Art Poetique" in which he had ceased to believe. He also
said, "If someone asks me now, 'What good is a poem?' I won't know what to
answer him." In short, he had ceased to view poetry as a "means" through which
he could lead the people or which the people could utilize as a "weapon." But he
also stated that "no human being could be indifferent to the miseries of
others." He said, "even in my most lyrical love poems you will find a social
theme." And he added that this "sympathy" was inevitable whether one was a poet
or not. In other words, he was not distinguishing any longer between engagé and non- engagé writers as self-consciously as
before. One, he realized, did not "choose" to become an engagé poet but became one by virtue of
being a decent human being who saw the sufferings of others and was touched by
it sufficiently for it to be reflected even in his most private
poems.
However, by 1966 these very people
whose sufferings had touched his life so deeply were being compared to those
Jews who had resumed worship of the golden calf while Moses was on the mountain.
Angrily, Shamlou recalled the SAVAK-instilled insecurity and loneliness he had
suffered and, in the Novruz issue of
Ferdowsi magazine, bitterly wrote:
Anxiety, horror, and nightmares have
filled my nights and days. Everytime the phone or the doorbell rings, a cold
sweat settles on my forehead. I have wasted the best years of my life over
nothing, either in prisons or in front of a Justice who carries a sword in one
hand and a scale in the other. While on one side of the scale they place what
you have been charged with, in the other, you must put the amount of money you
can dish out. These prisons and prisons were the price I paid, the atonement I
made for living with those whom I loved, with whom I have shared common
memories, and in whose name most of my poems have been written. The people who
once were my most awe-inspiring love.
Shamlou now fully realized the
ultimate loneliness of the Iranian engagé poets who "shout in a vacuum" and
know that not one sympathetic ear will make an effort to listen to their cries.
Hence, he concluded, "they are moaning, sincerely, for themselves. "
Aside from the people's relationship
with the poet in general, another interesting issue which Shamlou touched upon
in a 1964 interview, is the poet's relationship with his audience, i.e., the
reading public:
Interviewer: The reader of
contemporary [Persian] poetry hits the brakes as soon as he sees a modernist
poem... What must one do to avoid this?
Shamlou: I don't have much to do with
readers. I mean, if a reader doesn't read my poem ... so
what?
Interviewer: My question is why
shouldn't people be able to read contemporary
poetry?
Shamlou: It's not my job [to find out
why]...
Interviewer: Is it
theirs?
...
Shamlou: If our poetry isn't very
successful, there are many reasons for it. I publish my poem. This guy likes it,
that guy swears, another doesn't publish it, and a fourth one writes from such
and such a place, requesting to see my new manuscripts.... This depends on the
people, individually, whether they like it or
not...
Later, in 1966, Shamlou also complains
of limited readership, limited to the extent that the poet "knows his readers
individually!" Firstly, it is surprising to find an engagé poet unconcerned whether someone
is going to read his poems or not. Secondly, Shamlou doesn't seem, at this
point, to know precisely what it is about the modernist Persian poem which may
intimidate a reader and turn him away. One may conclude that from this point
onward, Shamlou realizes that "poetry in its highest form," as Nima put it, "is
an observation that a certain handful of people have for a certain handful of
people." In other words, he doesn't expect it to do the work of "political
propaganda." However, Shamlou is also aware that he must, regardless of its
probable lack of effectiveness, continue to cry out against injustice in his
poetry. As Eric Bentley puts it, "an artist cannot give up regarding himself as
the conscience of mankind, even if mankind pays no attention." Shamlou cannot be
a writer who is "fiddling with words while
In Qoqnus dar Baran
[
Phoenix in the Rain marks the beginning of a period when Shamlou does
not waste words anymore or use the first one that comes to mind. Though he had
begun "coining" compound words and creating new ones in Fresh Air, it is with this collection
that he and the Persian language seem to become inseparable and
indistinguishable from each other. Based on this and on the following
collections, one may boldly and with sufficient justification state that no
Iranian poet since the fourteenth-century Hafez has contributed as much as
Shamlou to the Persian language. Nor has any poet since Hafez used language so
fully aware, as is Shamlou, of the denotative and connotative dimensions of
words. His mastery has reached such a level that Mohammad Hoquqi asserts that
Shamlou can even use "linguistic compounds that are grammatically 'incorrect'
which may be seen in his poetry not as mistakes but as precedents that other poets may follow
without fear." In The Tradition of the
New, Harold Rosenberg says:
Lifting up a word and putting a space
around it has been the conscious enterprise of serious poetry since Baudelaire
and Rimbaud. .. The commonplace is the effect of a perspective to which the
observer is held by a web of vocabulary. It turns to dust when the acid of
poetry burns each word away from the old links.
Lifting up the word and making it new,
giving it new energy or even a new meaning, is what Shamlou accomplishes
henceforth in a far more acceptable and refined manner than in his previous
collections.
Having thus found his language and
fully realized his métier, which
Picasso defined as "that which is not learned," Shamlou also transformed his
persona from a public poet-prophet to a sensitive, often helpless, and seldom
silent observer who was not only a witness to the "crime" but was also a victim,
an observer who refused to compromise his conscience. From Phoenix in the Rain onward, Shamlou
portrays himself less and less as one of the effective elements of
sociopolitical change and, instead, begins to see that role in the persona of
those militant revolutionaries who literally fought and died for their cause.
One such poem is "Zendegan" [The Living] (1966), which was written for the
second wave of communist army officers executed by the Pahlavi regime:
They
said:
"We don't
don't
want to die!"
They
said:
"You're enemies
enemies
enemies of the masses!"
How
simply
how
very simply they spoke
and they
how
simply
how very simply
killed them!
In another poem of Phoenix in the Rain, "Majalleh-ye
Kuchek" [Small Magazine] (1966), Shamlou's agony and loneliness in the role of
the observer emerged most clearly:
To stay
yes
to stay
and to sit and
watch
yes
to sit and
watch
the lie:
how very
royally
passes life
in the
city
where no one hides
hypocrisy
and the sincerity of your fellow
citizens
is
only
in this!
Phoenix in the Rain was followed by Marsiyeh'ha-ye Khak [Elegies of the
Earth] (1969), which began with: "Poetry/is liberation/it's salvation and
freedom...." However, by this point it is poetry in itself that is so liberating
and not its effectiveness in altering social reality. As a matter of fact, in Elegies of the Earth, the people's
relationship with the poet is depicted as one of audience and tragic actor. In "Hamlet" Shamlou sees
the people as "sadists" who know the "plot" but have paid good money to come to
the play and watch him suffer all over again! He knows that the people will not
change, that their reaction will remain the same as it has always been:
What help can I ask of
them
who, in the
end,
call for me and my
uncle
equally
to bow before
them,
though my agony has clearly proclaimed
to them
that
Claudius
is not the
personal name of an uncle
but
is a general concept!
The poet, now in his mid-40s,
contemplates death; he is so sick of surviving under such degrading and
alienating circumstances that he ends "Hamlet" by saying:
not a
question
but a temptation is
this
to be
or
not to be.
Finally, having refused to dwell upon
death's inevitability, the manner of death becomes the central issue for
Shamlou:
To become a rain of
blessings
for the earth- -
[a
fountain-death
of this kind]
or else the
earth
with you will
become
a swamp
if you have
died
as humble brooks
do.
The distinguishing poem of Shekoftan dar Meh [Blossoming in the
Mist] (1970), "Sorud Bara-ye Mard-e Rowshan keh beh Sayeh Raft" [Song of the Man
of Light Who Walked Into Shadow], is an elegy on Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-1969).
Shamlou, however (in a personal letter to the author dated
This "victim," in his energetic
devotion to his people, had been so full of life and was still so very much
"alive" that Shamlou now said, "Cockroaches stare at your corpse with
suspicion." Shamlou's subtle choice of words imbues this line with far more
meaning than is evident at first reading. His choice for "cockroach" was kharkhaki, a seldom used compound noun
which contains the word khar, meaning
"donkey," "ass," and khaki, "earth."
Also, his choice of su'-e zann for
"suspicion" had immediate "police" connotations which recalls SAVAK to the
reader's mind. Hence, aside from the obvious meaning of the line, Shamlou had
cursed SAVAK (through kharkhaki),
reminding the reader of SAVAK's "suspicion" of all anti-establishment members of
the intelligentsia, and had, by implication, accused SAVAK of
murder.
Al-e Ahmad's death, which occurred two
and a half years after Forugh Farrokhzad died (1935-1967) [the foremost Iranian
woman poet in the 1,100 years of Persian poetry] and one year after the death of
Samad Behrangi (1939-1968) under mysterious circumstances, left the Iranian engagé intelligentsia in a state of
desolate shock followed by a feeling of helplessness and
sorrow.
Shamlou's Ebrahim dar Atash [Abraham in the Fire]
(1973) depicted a sick and static, a morbid and lifeless society. The first poem
of this collection, "Shabaneh" [Nocturnal], was an appropriate prelude to the
poems which followed:
There is no
door
there is no road
there is no
night
there is no moon
neither
day
nor sun.
We
are standing outside
time
with a bitter
dagger