End of The Game by Ahmad Shamlu
This is some video I found a link to on one of the twitter feeds of someone wrapped up in the movement in Iran, somebody, somebody ostensibly an Iranian student, part of the opposition? Poem’s by an Iranian poet, Ahmad Shamlu, written before the 1979 revolution in Iran, aimed at somebody, somebody in power (the Shah? that whole regime?) who “never believed / in integrity / of soil and water.” The poem reads in another part: “To what avail / you boast / to the world, / when / every dust particle in your doomed path curses you?” The person who posted it to You Tube wrote: “This poem describes exactly what I want to tell AN and Khamenei.” I looked up Shamlu on the internet and found an “offical site” that gave a brief bio. He was apparently in exile in Paris leading up to the revolution and at one point the bio reads:
1979-80 The Islamic Revolution succeeds.
Shâmlu returns to Iran, full of skeptical concerns.
Even though I can’t understand any of this really, and not knowing anything I wouldn’t dare to say if it is “good” or “bad”: it’s just amazing how there is such an intense symbolic convergence to produce a mass movement that seems to actually truly be bottom-up, demanding change, and involving the serious risk of life on the part of protesters. I heard one reporter say the other day that among the protesters in the street “the fear is gone.” Maybe all this is so amazing simply because I’ve never really truly “witnessed” anything with such momentum as this in my politically aware lifetime. In any case, the end of poem struck fear into my heart, fear for these people in Iran and what they may face tomorrow:
Alas! Our destiny
was the faithless ballad of your soldiers
returning
from the conquest of harlots’ fortress.
Wait and see what the curse of hell
will make of you,
for the grieving mothers
-mourners of the most beautiful children of the sun and wind-
have not yet
raised their head from their prayers.
Is the difference this time around that it’s not the “faithless ballad of your soldiers”, but the faithful ballad of your soldiers?
One thing that I have been wondering throughout all of this is that somehow there is this feeling that whatever is happening is undergirded, indeed on both sides, by passion and sanctity, there’s some feeling of both release and gratification (in the emergence of a long supressed political feeling into the relations between peopel that is sustaining this movement?), but there is also deep seriousness, or it seems that way…somehow. It’s all coming through the interent anyway, so it’s hard to say. But here’s what I wonder: is there a capacity for such momentous political energy in Iran because they 1) had a real revolution and 2) that revolution was not that far in the past? Does this make the politics of such a movement feel totally different than say political enthusiasm does in the United States in the contemporary era? There was this Op-Ed by some Iranian student — it also came out of the blue as it were, so that it is impossible really to understand — but it talked about how the political ideas of the people could switch so quickly in Iran due to the lack of political parties:
Iran has no real political parties that can command a fixed number of predictable votes. With elections driven primarily by personality politics, Iranians are always swing voters. …No one knew that it would come to this. Iran is this way. Anything is possible because very little in politics or social life has been made systematic. We used to joke that if you leave Tehran for three months you’ll come back to a new city. A friend left for France for a few days last week and when he returned the entire capital had turned green.
