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 in the decades before the Iranian revolution. Shamlou’s poetics called upon the collective of human beings to strive for a meaningful and utopian kind of liberation. The idea that the world could be changed by the power of literature was exciting in the 1950s. Shamlou was a Humanist in the sense that he took humanity as the center of a universe, and modern poetry as the grounds for expressing the ideal that people should be free and construct their own destinies. So crucial was freedom to Shamlou that he never stopped advocating for it:
Searching for success, prosperity, and happiness is futile unless people are absolutely free. But people are not even relatively free, so they cannot be happy. A person who is in the bondage of laws, rules, duties, attachments, dependencies, and their own conscience, struggling to satisfy other people’s greed and lust, will inevitably lose all of his or her creativity and will mistake the advancements of technology as his or her own when in fact that person is nothing more than a cog in the wheel of those machines. So, of what use is freedom to this person?
Humanity and human culture will only ever blossom in the context of freedom. But as long as prejudice reigns, society will suffocate. Humans rise through freedom from superstitions. Superstitious people defend their own ignorance and bondage, enslaving others in the process. Freedom is not an illusion, a rumor. Believe in freedom as the higher goal for which we fight.
Defending freedom in an oppressed and classed society that has conflicting interests is not easy. In such a society each person champions what they imagine freedom to be, but few are those who seek the mysteries of freedom from the position of freedom.
13 points on Shamlou’s ideas about art and society:
1. It is important to distinguish between political literature and socially engaged literature. Social Realism was the aesthetic doctrine of the Communist Party, but neither Shamlou nor other writers worldwide, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, could get behind political literature, which espoused literature as propaganda, a vehicle for disseminating political ideas to the proletariat. For example, though many of Shamlou’s socially themed poems were written while he was imprisoned, he did not consider any of them political poems, per se. To Shamlou, politics was such a dirty game that the mere hint of it soiled the very hem of the skirt of poetry.
2. Shamlou believed that the masses could not directly connect with the work of an innovator, whose primary job it was to incite innovation. An intermediary was needed to make the connection. Yet these works, which would not pander to the masses, were not to be confused with “bourgeois art.” Therefore, there was no “people’s
