The wind blew away your house
And, you still worry about the wind blowing in my hair?!
The myth of which cave’s sleepers has you intoxicated so?
Why are you sleeping?
A hundred tribes go to ruins while you sleep
The scandal about the kingdom’s thieves is everywhere
But, with your two hands, you still hold on to the two ends of my shawl
You are asleep behind this worn out curtain, and I,
with this same ‘forbidden’ hair of mine
will weave a ladder as tall as the sunrise
to bring out the sun
And you are asleep and water passes over you
And you never saw
how in the forest, pine trees were cut down, night after night,
in place of poplar trees
And there were no tigers when
mythological Damavand Mountain
was hanged from the loin
And for every grain of rice that had come to our table through hard labor,
in the rice paddies,
they planted iron, bricks, and walls
And you are sleeping,
and water thirsted for Hamoon Lake,
blood of Zayandeh River clotted,
and the breath of Hoor Wetlands’ humid nights
were buried under mud
The wind blew away your house
The scandal about the lootings has broken out
With your claws, you grab on to my night’s hair
Lest the famine-stricken nights of our dinner spread
reveals the emptiness of your fists
Lest anyone sees your temper
I am veiled
but not veiled according to volition of my own free body
I am veiled because of your spoiled body and mind
You are asleep behind this worn out curtain, and I,
with this same ‘forbidden’ hair of mine
will weave a ladder as tall as the sunrise
to bring out the sun.
- Hila Sedighi (1985- ), Iran.
Knowing the poet and the background would facilitate a better understanding of the poem here.
The Poet Hila Sedighi, was born in 1985 in Tehran. This brave, young, poet, painter and civil rights activist in Iran took an acive part in the 2009 presidential campaign of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
But the conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was ‘declared returned’ to
office. Demonstrations against such a farce became known as the Green Movement .The members and supporters of this movement took to the
streets claiming the election was fraudulent and demanding that the election be annulled.
Hila wrote powerful poems protesting against the severe repression that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election and emotionally recited them in public. Her public readings of poems drew her large audience and also the wrath of the government. Due to her active, direct involvements in protest activities of the Green Movement, she was forced to resign from her job with the Tehran Municipality in the summer of 2010. On December 9, 2010, the agents of the Intelligence Ministry searched her home and took away a number of her personal belongings including her computer, notes, books etc. By way of harassing her, the Intelligence ministry summoned and interrogated Sedighi countless times, including during nights. In August of 2011, the Revolutionary Court handed over to her a 4 month prison sentence. This was suspended later for five years. A travel ban was also imposed on her and that was concurrently lifted.
In the meantime in 2012, Sedighi was awarded the Hellman-Hammett Grant
(prize) for free expression for protection of human rights. The authorities arrested Hila Sedighi on
Jan 7, 2016, at Imam Khomeini International Airport when she and her husband
were returning from a trip to the United Arab Emirates. Sedighi’s arrest in
2016 was said to be in connection with a sentence issued against her in
absentia by the Culture and Media Court (a special court to try media and culture-related
crimes). No reason was given by the government or judicial officials for her
arrest or where she is being detained. International voices rose against her
arbitrary arrest and she was released on bail after a
couple of days.
Perhaps the January 2016 arrest
of Hila Sedighi was due to her posting, in her blog, a video of her reading the
poem critical of the ‘veil’(compulsory head coverings that women must wear
in the Islamic Republic of Iran). In the video, that went viral, she was shown
sitting alongside a photo of her without the ‘prescribed veil. In the
verse, she was forcefully harsh on the government for showing undue interest in
issues such as a woman’s ‘veil” while corruption and other maladies grow
uncontrollably in the country.
Hila’s has studied law and she continues to live in and write from Tehran. Her poems are mostly related to the trials and tribulations of Iranians and particularly women. In public recitals, she performs her poems with passion and genuine pain and draws the audience to her. She mostly writes in Persian and her poems are translated in several languages. Ms. Sedighi bases her art on current, gross and continued human rights violations in Iran, boundless injustices based on the regime’s medieval regression, and defense against unwanted Arabization.
The Background: The extremist fundamentalism practiced by the .Iranian government owing allegiance to the ideals of its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini and its Judiciary was one that will brook no dissent at any level. The authorities too worked overtime to instill a sense of mortal fear in the minds of the dissenters, their families and general public. Measures were unleashed to intimidate and silence any voice of protest through arbitrary arrests and dreaded imprisonments. Any artistic expression was under unprecedented assault in that period as evidenced by a steady surge in the crackdown on members of the artistic community.
In October 2015, a Revolutionary Court sentenced
poet Fatemeh Ekhtesari to 9 years and 6 months in prison and another poet,
Mehdi Mousavi, was sentenced to 11 years in prison. In addition, both were
sentenced to 99 lashes. The documentary filmmaker Keywan Karimi was sentenced
to 6 years in prison and 233 lashes for “insulting the sacred” and for showing
“illegitimate relations” ( for just Shaking hands with persons of the
opposite sex).Further, three music producers, Mehdi Rajabian, Hossein Rajabian
and Yousef Emadi, were sentenced to 6 years in prison alleging that their
productions were “propaganda against the
state”. The poet and lyricist Yaghma Golrouee was arrested at his home
on November 30, 2015, and later released on bail. Poet Mohamadreza
Haj Rostambegloo was arrested on December 16, 2015, and bailed out two
days later.
Not only poets and artists, the crackdown, has
also targeted journalists and individuals associated with reformist groups in
Iran. These arrests and intimidations have intensified as the country
approached the critical Parliamentary elections in February 2016. The mounting
arrests of young artists (‘national treasures’) in Iran was yet another
indication of the suffocating domination of Government’s security and
intelligence agencies over the Iranian Judiciary.
Now , in the light of these the reader ca go to the poem again.
No comments:
Post a Comment