Returning to the Roots

This chapter explores the enduring symbiosis between the village motif, social justice, and populist politics in Iran during the first three decades after the revolution. At first, it briefly highlights the evolution of the allegorical village in classical and contemporary Persian poetry. The focus will later be shifted towards the representation of the village in revolutionary poetry. We will see that it has remained a recurring motif in Persian poetry of the post-revolutionary period, employed by a variety of writers and state institutions for a range of means. As a symbol, it has been a conduit into which any ideology can be poured; the village allegory can be manipulated to both condemn and support the official politics of the state. The chapter examines the key socio-political influences behind the evolution of rural themes, the work of official poets, and the impact of the village on the cultural doctrine of the Islamic Republic.

Loss and Nostalgia

The war ended in a ceasefire in 1988, followed a few months later by the death of the nation’s charismatic leader, Khomeini, in 1989, plunging the beleaguered country into social, political and cultural chaos. Conformist poets reacted with conflict and division, struggling to regain consensus in the wake of multiple strands of loss. This chapter analyzes the ideological ruptures and transformations experienced by these poets, and demonstrates how, to stabilize and make sense of the present, poets turned to yet another round of co-option of a distant literary past. In this chapter, the co-option of the medieval form of elegy (marsieh) will be scrutinized to show how the official poets returned to tradition to find suitable coping mechanisms to deal with three forms of loss: the loss of a charismatic leader, the losses caused by the war and the loss of a revolutionary utopia.

Rethinking the Islamic Republican Canon

The opening chapter tackles the problematic aspects of literary canonization, with specific reference to the complex process of literary de-canonization and re-canonization in the wake of 1979 revolution. It introduces, for the first time, the work and lives of two generations of poets who belong to the Islamic Republic’s canon of poetry, their approach to, and relationship with, the Persian poetic tradition. The reader thus begins the book grounded in the foundations of a poetic trend in modern Iran that was sponsored and promoted by the establishment following the 1979 revolution. While introducing the ‘key figures’ of the Islamic Republic’s official canon of poetry, the chapter throws light on the complex and multilayered process of reshaping the pre-revolutionary poetry canon in years preceding and following the 1979 revolution

A War to Remember (1)

The Iran–Iraq War ran for eight grueling and bloody years between 1980 and 1988, when the Islamic Republic was still in its infancy, irrevocably changing the official literary discourse of the 1980s. Through a socio-literary analysis, this chapter investigates the way in which the state’s martial campaign was manifested in, and promoted by, the canonized voices of the war, resulting in the launch of a whole new genre of Sacred Defense poetry, and the deployment of a form of mystic militantism, drawing on the lexicon and tropes of the classical Persian mystical and devotional poetry.

Introduction

On November 4, 1964, under the orders of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Ruhollah Khomeini, was forcibly exiled following his arrest by the Shah’s Secret Police (SAVAK). Iran, still haunted by the memory of the CIA/MI6-backed 1953 coup, which toppled the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh (d. 1967), was in the grip of rising protests against the Shah....

Inventing a Courtly Tradition

The final chapter of this book aims to theorize the current dialectics of conformist poetry and power in Iran. By focusing on the ceremonial aspects of this relationship, the chapter introduces and analyzes the annual poetry nights established by the new leader, Ali Khamenei, whose ascension into power has been marked by ongoing episodes of political anxiety and ideological instability. Official poetry under Khamenei has been brought into the center of state operations; this chapter explores the reasons behind this, and the ways in which its ideological importance has been cemented by the current political administration in Iran. The chapter brings the book to a close by arguing that Khamenei’s plight for political legitimacy has been one of the main factors behind his strategy of inventing a new poetic tradition.

A War to Remember (2)

As the war continued, and the death toll grew, some official poets began to engage with the conflict through greater degrees of realism. This chapter examines this aspect, and the ensuing complications in the relationship between poetry and the state, to present a nuanced, more complex portrait of the diversity of official war poetry. By drawing on other war literary traditions, such as English poetry during the First World War, this chapter aims to shed light on the ways in which the official poets of the Islamic Republic symbolized their emotional responses to war, depravation and trauma.

“Surgery of the Soul”

Having explored the origins and profiles of the first two generations of the poets involved in the production of official poetry in Iran, this chapter presents the key organizations and mechanisms involved in publication and distribution of their work. The reader is given a firsthand historical account of the most influential state-owned cultural institution of the Islamic Republic, the Center for the Islamic Arts and Thoughts (Howzeh-ye Honar va Andisheh-ye Islāmi, 1980) to shed light on the process of the institutionalization of poetry following the establishment of the Islamic Republic. As the chapter demonstrates, the apparatus responsible has itself undergone change and conflict, mirroring the chequered development of the official poetry canon and the ruling ideologies.