Mansor Pooyan
Ali Abdolrezaei the most acclaimed poet of pos-Revolutionary Iran was born in 10 April 1969 in Northern city Langarud. He completed his compulsory education at his native town in Iran. Ali finalised his higher education with a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tehran technical and Engineering University.
In September 2002, he had to flee Iran due to the serious scrutiny and censorship of his work. After a few months stay in Germany and two years in France, he came to Britain and has been living in London since.
He began to concentrate on poetry in 1986 and continued to write ever since prolifically. His poems exert great influence on many younger poets. He managed to get published seven volumes of his work inside Iran. His last four poetry volumes, published on the internet, make a poetic as well as a literary watershed. With an additional volume of poetry awaiting publication, he is the most controversial Iranian literary figure both inside and outside the country.
His twelve published books of poetry have challenged traditional Persian poetic language and have exercised a decisive influence on post-Revolutionary Iranian literature. These poetry books bring together a fascinating selection of themes by one of Iran’s most talented and extraordinary poets. They do focus on the feelings of anxiety, isolation and the sense of loss that Iranians in general, and intellectuals in Diaspora have been experiencing in the last 30 years.
Ali Abdolrezaei’s poetry shows that the contemporary art of Iran has been hugely influenced by the traumatic historic events of the last three decades and that they have affected millions of Iranians in one-way or another.
He is young and speaks for the new generation of Iranian aesthetics. The trajectory of Abdolrezaei’s career begins in a blaze of vision capable of speaking in the voice of a generation with multi-facetted vibrations. At times, he appears to portray deeper sceneries of the new artistic temperaments and the young’s cultural chasms with the past amid a repressive political regime. Abdolrezaei’s reputation as a poet, speaking in the voice of his time, spread in the early 1990s and received wide critical attention. His poetry tackles difficult themes with a mastery of craft. An impressive range of Iranian critics and writers has made statements about him and his work has been translated into several languages.
Ali’s outstanding contribution both honours visibility of contemporary Iranian literature on the world stage and creates a greater opportunity for new Iranian voices to be part of the modern conversation through these challenging times. His poetry caused a group of young poets turn away from the legacy of Modern Persian Poetry to establish the Persian New Poetry order.
They have relinquished the idea that the aim of poetry should be to express high emotion and the deepest feelings and forces of nature. Their subjects tend to be smaller and their language more colloquial with a sense that reality is interwoven into the text. I should explore these characteristics later on in this critique.
Abdolrezaei ’s life and work does not fit into tidy pigeonholes. There will be obvious overlaps and shortfalls when trying to compartmentalise his work or his own characteristics. We never step twice into the same Abdolrezaei, as his poetry doesn’t show a man bound into a decreasing circle of repetition. His creative power is at its peaks and not yet showing signs of descent. During the last 15 years, his poetic profile has been most jaggedly visible and ubiquitous across Persian poetic territories in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Abdolrezaei as one of the founding fathers of the Persian New Poetic tradition is creating new visionary, new expressive language and new potentialities in poetry.
Ali Abdolrezaei’s voice as a poet is clear and unmistakable; his style and subjects are completely his own. Ironically enough, his strongest poems are often those which describe personal experiences rather than world events. He sees changes in the forms and subjects of literature as a way of helping political and social change. This aspiration to change is reflected in the language of his poetry as well as the experiences it describes.
Early on in his career as a poet, Ali embarked upon a journey to find a language which could form the structure of his work. His initiated language has great life and energy; it does not look back to the archaically traditions of poetry/ writing. He gives the feeling that language has been forced into new forms to communicate new experiences.
In his poetry, image and language are inseparably made into oneness. He draws on a stylistic fusion of the two discourses that had for many years been deemed separate. Thus, his poems reflect a series of philosophical preoccupations. For example, the language of referentiality, the relation between sign and thing is denied. No singular construction of meaning is actually created through his poetic linguistic behaviour. That is to say, the intelligibility of the unknown is tightly implicated into the known. Knowledge and subjectivity co-exist in the reality of his language where knowing is coupled with not knowing and being with not being. It is in this sense that his poetry demonstrates the simultaneous occurrence of linguistic flow and ambiguous meaning-making activities. It is a language that speaks the impossibility of expression and, in so doing, exists in the space of its own negativity. Dominant themes of his poetry, therefore, revolve around the problematic nature of language, knowledge and subjectivity.
Abdolrezaei avoids, deliberately, confining himself and his creativity within the strait-jacket of Persian orthodox perspective as to create poetry less individualistic and idiosyncratic. In spite of the risk of appearing eccentric or anarchic, he seems to speak to us from out of the depths of his solitude through schemata largely unmediated by social or literary convention. So to invent, to unravel a form via which he can express his own vision of life, may be interpreted as a means to self-style/ definition and as a demonstration to seek attention/ identity. Nevertheless, his language and his sense of identity are interwoven and have been changing respectively as his poetry grows from strength to strength.
Ali’s poetry breaks away with the traditional Persian poetic language alongside the traditional concepts of the heavy-weight Persian poets. He does not use traditional forms of rhyme and rhythm. He demonstrates the full swing away from the formal classical style of verse writing. Whilst playing with verse, Ali recognises that he was attracted by their appearance and not by what they claim to be their true substance. His style depends on the counting of syllables and the sound-patters of the words, in a way which reflects the patterns of Old Persian poetry-prior to the Islamic era.
Ali avoids adhering to great themes and grand language. His protagonists are engaged with daily life and correspondently, plainer language is used. His voice has achieved a relaxed naturalness, a fluidity which allows him to present poetry as though it were easy. He is a skilled storyteller, recounting the extraordinary in the voice of the everyday language.
Ali’s difficult style is the result of his unusual knowledge of words and bold ways of stanza building. There are buried layer upon layer of literary metaphors in Ali Abdolrezaei’s poetry. At first, his work is too obscure and dense. But its richness of imagery, its uniqueness of language and sudden surprising shifts of diction are remarkably convincing as the dust of obscurity settles.
His lengthy poems, in particular, are highly complex and often bring together a group of characters different in kind and time.
A guide is required to travel into his novel terrain which has all the semblance of the old, and yet is new. It is precisely this novelty clothed in the familiar that puzzles but also reinforces the reader’s desire to explore further into the twilight zone.
It is fluidity that makes Ali Abdolrezaei’s work so vibrant and so difficult to pin down. The poet’s creativity ensures the truth of his poetic identity can never, by definition, be found. His poetry is not the Word made Flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh. The meaning of his poems, like the meaning of a text on his biography, is not perpetually fixed. Thus, there is no original meaning that we can recover.
Abdolrezaei’s life and poetry as constructions are of a critical nature. Layers of narrative and revelation, wit and prejudice confront his readers. We should remain vigilant that at a fundamental level, his life and work are “open stories” accommodating diverse interpretations. Abdolrezaei is particularly aware that his poetry is destined to undergo transformations beyond his control. His resistance to having a biography written about him is part of this awareness to his future literary metamorphoses.
When considering Abdolrezaei’s work, the narrative makes up the constructed “I” that inhabits the poems. In other words, the poet is simply dispersed and lives in a bundle of texts strung together. The Abdolrezaei we perceive as a poet is also the product of discourses, which run through and beyond him. It is this puzzled wholeness vis-à-vis that obscured form which allow readings their genuine scope of experience.
Since poetry is, primarily, a drama of the self, it wouldn’t be Tautological to say that the notion of the self itself has its source in language that never inheres in the real. That is because writing i.e. the act of turning experience into language possibilities, deals, in the first instance, with epistemology and matters of cultural perception and communication.
Ali’s lines, reflecting his temperament, do not please critics who prefer poets to remain stable entities both in their history and in their writing. His poetry questions the stability of the relationship between writer and critic as the registers he uses are subject to constant change.
There is, hence, a challenging risk the proponents of the convention may pose: are you playing the role of this or that character? The poet has given in advance his verdict: I am this and that and the “Other”. I am enacting them all. To say this is to relinquish any demarcation between wickedness and righteousness. In art as in life, he doesn’t mind being confused with slovenliness or a lack of consideration for others.
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The embedded visions of Ali Abdolrezaei’s poetry consists of both a continuation of the experimentation- championed by Persian writers of the modernist period (1950-1979), and a reaction against traditionalist ideas implicit in classical Persian literature. The epithet “Persian modern poetry” refers to poetry that was written as long ago as the Constitution Revolution in Iran (1905), but in general the usage of the term usually implies literature since the 1950 until the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Suspended between a half-forgotten traditionalism and an anti-establishment modernism, the occurrence of the Iranian Revolution initially won the heart and mind of the intelligentsia.
Following the foundation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, the devastating eight-year war with Iraq, where thousands of teenagers ran for martyrdom, scarred the psyches of the younger generation for years to come.
The distinctiveness of new poetry began to emerge nearly a decade later after the Revolution. Along with the progressive tendencies in Secularism and Human Rights, Iranian literary avant-garde began to take shape. This New poetry order grew up out of a body of ideas which, primarily, rest upon individualism and imagined reality.
The term Post modernistic is used to describe Ali Abdolrezaei’s tendencies in post-Revolutionary Iranian literature. Post-modern Persian literature is difficult to define its exact characteristics scope, and importance. However, one could specify that the unifying features of Abdolrezaei’s poetry rest upon the denial of “Meta-Narratives” (Jean-Francois Lyotard) and “archetypal patterns” (Carl Gustav Jung). For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, his poetry eschews, often playfully, the possibility of clear cut meanings.
This distrust of conventional poetry extends even to the author; thus to undermine the author’s “univocal” control (the control of only one voice). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked by the use of colloquial language and multi-phonics/genres not previously deemed fit for Persian literature.
In his poetry, there is a tendency to use personal/ social references which an unfamiliar reader cannot place. This spectacular ability to discuss vast areas of human experience through his own brand of psycho –politics, if not daunting his rivals, nevertheless has been, quietly, inspirational to his opponents. Some critics have attacked certain lengthy poems as being maximalist, disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake.
Ali Abdolrezaei usually exposes the undesirable aspects of the Iranian status quo through a clever, and sometimes quite bewildering, use of language. Abdolrezaei as a sharp-minded intellectual plays with the multiplicity of words’ meanings. Thus, one of the outstanding characteristics of his poetry is its receptiveness to language impressions.
Abdolrezaei’s work is, prophetically, heralding something new about to emerge into view. His imagery is consistent with contemporary life representing the spontaneous expression of own thoughts and feelings. He sees poetry as a vital part in the process of creating transformation.
Certainly, poetry is essentially a private art form. But his description of human hardship and suffering are not those of a man who can look at misery from a distance. His line of poetry counteracts traditional Romanticism supplying workings of form and language on which the reader can rely to bear their own interpretation. That is to say, create meaning through making connections, establishing priorities and building structures.
In today’s Iran, the right to freedom of expression is curtailed; thus poets cannot engage directly with critical political issues. In addition, general disillusionment with politics means political poetry is now largely unfashionable in Iran. Having said that, Poetry is the still small voice of opposition which avoids attacking the abusing power head on, nevertheless shows it to be the crude bully boy that it is. In current circumstances, Iranian poets can’t write without any resonance to politics as if they could shut the window and get on with their work. It’s something you can’t choose to forget about. Ali Abdolrezaei does not engage directly with politics but at the same time he cannot afford to ignore them.
The poets of the new order have an altogether sharper and more painful view of the suffering caused by a totalitarian regime seizing power in the wake of the 1979 Revolution. Among the poets of post Revolutionary era, there exists a sense of hopelessness in the face of world/ national events which they feel powerless to change or influence.
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Ali Abdolrezaei’s poetry revolves around a wide range of subjects. In his war poems, the misery of Iran-Iraq war and natural disasters take centre stage. These poems of fine qualities are against the futility of war and against the senior officers who avoid realising the death and destruction that their orders will cause to the men they command. Death and sorrow are intertwined into wider social problems.
In poems written in exile, the poet finds a basis of faith in memories of childhood and in the magic realm of being. Here he remembers the themes and stories of his early life. Nothing can be heard besides the voice of the protagonist whose floating thoughts are searching for a new system of meanings.
More over, such poems communicate a strong sense of vainness and loneliness. They do not suggest that life is a bitter tragedy. Quite the contrary, they show great drive in intervention on the one hand and acceptance, i.e. going with the flow, on the other hand. Much of his anger in these poems is directed against the pointlessness of adherence to an ideal type. They illustrate the urge to engage with the ambiguity as part of the creativity nature of poetry.
Ali’s latest poetry contains tricks of style and unusual images to depict the melancholia. Temporality appears to take centre stage in these. The greatness of the work is not in the thought or story it conveys, but in the music of the verse and the magical atmosphere it creates. All this is described in ordinary words which produce a strange and magical picture.
I would like now to move on shedding some light onto the reading of some prominent poems of Ali Abdolrezaei.
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The poem “Censorship”, strictly speaking, is an inferred biography. Although he prefers that no biography be written, he hopes attentive readers of his poems can extract as much knowledge from his language constructions as possible.
In favour of subjectivism, the poet turns from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness.
The poem: “At the Priory” is often cited as an example of his style. This poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche to demonstrate the working of extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis. What we call reality is actually the construction of our minds. This is to say, our lives are not the subject of random fate, but reality is of our own making. It is shaped by manipulation of material events and emotions around us from a logo-centric point of view.
While people are inundated with information technology, there is a shift into hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard) in which our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. The poem “Sausage” presents a virtual narrative with virtual imageries. Here, particular techniques are invoked to address this post-modern hyperreal information bombardment. The first thing that strikes a reader about this poem is the absence of certain familiar elements. Underneath though, there is a great deal clarity of diction and a rhythm that is organic. Intrinsic to the mood of the poem, are a vivid economy of language and a subtle technique of intensification by repetition. It is the entire poem, not the word that constitutes the unit of meaning. There is a dynamism and unified complexity configuring a fusion of subjectivity and objectivity. The reader’s imagination makes the connection- juxtaposing the Photographic negatives to discover the unitary meaning.
Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in poem “Mother me out!” is the belief that there’s an assumed ordering system behind the chaos of the world. For the poet though, no ultimate ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd. The poem has many possible interpretations.
The sprawling canvas and fragmentary narrative of the poem “Bandar Abbas” has generated controversy on the ‘purpose’ of the narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. Abdolrezaei believes that the style of a poem must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents. In this poem, the post-Revolutionary Iranian socio-cultural landscape constitutes a text that with the help of the poet can be read and understood. This poem provides us with a narrative vision which is in sharp contrast with the utopian dreams preceding the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
In poem “Junction”, it seems to define the attitude of a generation exuding a much needed confidence in an age that could easily descend into disillusion and decadence. There exists, desperately, a quest for action demanding recognition that the status quo-following the reign of a totalitarian regime in post Revolutionary Iran-has to change.
The poem “Great Men” expresses a belief that fires every Iranian poem into life i.e. the lost identity of the poet is compensated for by the act of poetry writing. The poem as the identity of the poet is actualised in the process of writing it. By the same token, one can argue that poetry enacts identity for the reader as s/he gets engaged in the re-creative process of reading. Thus, poet and audience create, interactionally, a brief momentary sense of communion through a fragile web of words.
The embedded elements of surrealism and expressionist symbolism in the poem “Cloud” explore the damaging restrictions of social life following the Iran-Iraq war.
The narrative substance of “Held my hands and step by step died of sorrow” refers to the lost relationships in the poet’s mind. His past deeds and aspirations are itemised as a way of fixing the odds of a confused identity in exile. Here the poet himself appears to represent a strategy of existing in space rather than time.
The poem “Park” indicates that there exists no teleological sense of Progression and development as life circles back and forth. The circular movement of life is reflected in this poem. There exists an expression of the idea that, as well as going to a life without end, we come from another life.
In “Hermafrodite-5”, hotel as a metaphor is used to depict life in exile. The setting as an enclosed space circumscribes the narrative at an undefined location and undefined time. The hotel is the quintessential example of the exilic experience: solitary and mysterious.
In the poem called “Go as the go that I went”, by taking up the “I” role, the poet demonstrates that actually there is no difference between his role and the “Other”. Never throughout his career, has Abdolrezaei presented a stable sense of the “I” in his poems.
This singular pronoun might be referred to anybody whose role is not desirable. But the poet puts himself in that position taking on the wicked roles and writes about the implications. The poem, evidently playful and sprightly mobile in cadence and rhythm, announces that life is an open-ended motion which at times creates unease. As the poem “Go as the go that I went” draws to a conclusion in which very little is actually conveyed, the narrator seems to be speaking only for the elusive character of his own identity.
The poem “Album” is a manifestation of reinventing past memories in order to re-create a new identity in exile. This poem establishes a link between the world of poetry and the poet’s original/ local world of farming life. “Album” is an indicative of a certain alienation resulting from present life of exile and at the same time postulates the need to negotiate the distance between origins and present circumstances. The distance between the two identity parts is marked by physical distance as well as a kind of cultural disjunction.
In another poem “White Reading”, we witness an intimate contact between the “I” and “you”. All barriers (temporal, spatial and cultural) between poet and audience are abolished as the creation of the poem itself has become an act of communion. The open-endedness of this poem is not simply portrayed in the brave closing lines. On the contrary, it is scattered throughout the entire conception of the poem. Life like a poem is an on-going construction whereby we are parties to organise it interactively.
The self-conscious dialogue between the poet’s varied personae sets the tone of the poem “Dictation”. The poem interrupts itself twice with a third commanding voice while the poet looks back over his life. Although the poem is written in the first person, the reader learns little about the protagonist, who remains a representative figure. The “I” of the poem can speak for all men because no particular identity is ascribed. The mood of the poem brushes with tragic in the final stanza, in that a new poem “always rubs out other poems”. Thus, the final line: “Poets! Stop writing hands up” is a verdict in the sense that defeat is inevitable and all people will die.
The poem “Long Live War” illustrates the themes of love and war entwined in human affairs. The feelings and ideas associated with these are enacted upon in this poem.
As well as the Iran – Iraq war during the Eighties, the poem can be read as a virtual depiction of a state of civil war in Iran between religious totalitarianism and secular pluralism.
War in the shape of division and conflict recurs in this poem in varying themes: split families; friends who’ve turned cool; supporters who turn against the state; tensions between classes and conflicts between factions. War, however, was only one powerful agent of change at the beginning of post-Revolutionary Iran.
In this epic poem, love (in the form of sexual and patriotic) takes centre stage as the cause of the protagonist’s suffering.
His return from the battle-front appears as a plunge into a disorientating nightmare of confused feelings. He walks back into a society in which all areas of life have changed and everything is measured in terms of money. Now languid and moody, our `hero` begins to play poetically with words and discursively talks about front-line events. After return, the protagonist is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In addition, his patriarchical and at the same time puritanical religious inclinations have come in conflict with contemporary city life which demands he behave otherwise.
The character wondering what to do: re-inventing his lost identity; re-marrying the right person; re-storing broken relationships with the authorities or turning to fulfilment of unsatisfied desires. He is however pulled overall from two different directions: love and war. Many themes in the poem derive from these two ideas. He decides, eventually, to opt for a far more egoistic vein enjoying the pleasures of solitude and melancholy musing.
“Long Live War” is a powerful poem to remind us not only of the beastliness of war but also of Wilfred Owen’s infamous poem “Dulce Et Decorum”.
The poem “Terror” is a continuation of a sequence from Abdolrezaei’s earlier poems. What links his exilic poems more than anything is this overriding sense of not belonging, of fragility, even in relationship with the self.
The poet in “Terror” is concerned with both emotional and cultural splits. Surreal reminiscences of homeland and the exploration of personal fragility constitute two pillars upon which this poem is based. “Terror” is a varied collection of themes with echoes across its different parts, all equally vital to the whole. Terror is a dark, unified poem moving towards regeneration.
What starts as a self addressing piece (”From far away / you bury your father / wipe your mother’s tears / from far away”) quickly shifts into a poem about the speaker’s own elusive hold on the past:
”Friday is a bleak house that was massacred
and the family, the Iran which was executed at home”
In final section, “Terror” adopts the voice of a pragmatist as he speaks about the subtleties and complexities of his fortunes. The poem is delicately surreal, exploring the fragility of life and uncertainty.
Throughout, the poem draws on fantasies transforming the familiar into strange evocations of tensions of frustration and paranoia. This poem is a good example of his ability to compose with surreal agility, glimmering with shadows and more ominous implications.
Ali Abdolrezaei’s rich imagery and luxuriant imagination recalls the transformations of Chagall paintings and the dream-visions of Salvador Dali. His poetry is distinctively illustrative of post 1979 Iranian literature. This phase in particular includes a tendency to protest against social idealism, very characteristic of the previous literary modernism. Post-Revolutionary Iranian literature promises a new dawn – much like that outburst of art, literature and philosophy in Europe following World War II.
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Publications in English:
1- A collection of poems translated by Abol Froushan into English of Abdolrezari’s poetry under the title “In Riskdom where I lived” went to print by the Exiled Writers Ink in 2008. “In Riskdom where I Lived” is the title to a collection of 28 poems by Ali Abdolrezaei with a wide typo-topical range.
2- A review of “In Riskdom where I Lived” by Mansor pooyan published in “Exiled Ink!” issue 10, 2008.
3- For a better understanding, one has to look at his translated poems available on: www.haftaad.com. In these assembled rather short pieces, a glimpse of his poetic intentions and range of theme/ genre is available to English readers.
Bibliography of Ali Abdolrezaei’s writing:
1- ‘Only iron Men Rust in the Rain’, Vistar, Tehran, 1991.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/revue/ebook/aadmhaayehaahani/
2- ‘You Name this Book’, Tehran, 1992.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/revue/ebook/naameinketaab/
3- ‘Paris in Renault’, Narenj,Tehran , 1996.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/revue/ebook/parisdarrenault/
4- ‘This Dear Cat’, Narenj,Tehran, 1997.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/revue/ebook/ingorbehyeaziz/
5- ‘Improvisation’, Nim-Negah,Tehran, 1999.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/revue/ebook/felbedaaheh/
6- ‘So Sermon of Society’, Nim-negah , Tehran, 2000.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/revue/ebook/jaameeh/
7- ‘Shinema’, Hamraz , Tehran, 2001.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/revue/ebook/shinema/p0.html
8- ‘I Live in Riskdom’,Paris , www.poetrypub.info, 2005.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/revue/ebook/khatarnaak/
9- ‘Hermaphrodite’,Paris, www.poetrypub.info, 2006.
http://www.poetrypub.info/%d9%87%d8%b1%d9%85%d8%a7%d9%81%d8%b1%d9%88%d8%af%db%8c%d8%aa/
10- ‘A Gift Wrapped in Condom’, Paris, www.poetrypub.info, 2006
http://www.poetrymag.ws/docs/kaado_kaandom_ali_adbolrezaei.html
11- THE WORST LITRATURE, Paris, 2007
http://www.poetrymag.ws/docs/rakiktar_az_adabiat_ali_abdolrezaei.htm
12- ‘La Elaha Ella Love’ under publication.
Further Reading on Ali Abdolrezaei’s writing:
1- Saeed Ahmadzadeh Ardabili. ‘Neveshtaar Hargez’, 2006.
http://www.poetrymag.ws/docs/saeid_ahmadzadeh/neveshtar_hargez.htm
2- Pooyan, Mansor. ‘Shelik be Sonnat’, 2007.
http://www.poetrypub.info/%d8%b4%d9%84%db%8c%da%a9-%d8%a8%d9%87-%d8%b3%d9%86%d8%aa/
3- Shahrjerdi, Parham. ‘Risk of poetry’, 2008.
http://www.poetrypub.info/%d8%ae%d8%b7%d8%b1-%d8%b4%d8%b9%d8%b1/