 Thank you, Dr. Jahanbouh. It's, again, an honor to be standing in front of you. And I must say I particularly enjoyed the question and answer last night. I thought it was 20 minutes of very wide range, and at the same time some depth of inquiry into various aspects of not just the talk last night, but the entire investigative processes into Persian literature. It seems to me as though we are standing at the threshold of a sea change in the way we view literature, a literature that has been as glorious as observation upon it has been scarce and precious little insight into these things. It seems to me as though for generation after generation we have spoken about literature in literary terms, in poetic terms, in effect making love to the literature without really getting to know it. And it's a high time it seems to me, especially with the upcoming generation of whom I have had the honor of being associated with quite a number. And even last night I saw several here among the up and coming students of Persian literature who must be able to bring fresh perspectives into this glorious body of work, which really is something that we can all be justifiably proud of whether we are Persian speakers or not. It's in the end handy work of human beings and generation upon generation of people trying to create beauty out of all kinds of pleasant and unpleasant circumstances using images that at times never cease to stun you in the way they relate to reality and in the diversity of thought and idea and in the ways in which they reflect social reality but also refract it also go beyond reflecting. It's way beyond the mirror function literature does. It at times provides in almost prophetic ways insights into works that only generations later begin to manifest themselves in reality as we know it. So last night to recap and I was asked to recap the talk last night in just a couple of minutes as Dr. Jahanpur mentioned we began with a single image and saw this image traveling through time through the two words jar and dr a place and a companion and how it defines the concept of exile when you're away from your own familiar place and the people you can love and how that lack that absence really begins to test your humanity not only your humanity but the specific ways in which you conceptualize the world and relate to it. As Dr. Jahanpur again mentioned today we saw how the poets of the Ghazal and the Qasidic traditions seem to have a locus a particular locus sometimes more than one locus so when there is a native place the place where which raised you and in which your initial memories are housed when you have that kind of a place you always miss it whether you have moved up or not but as long as you're moving up you do not consider yourself in exile particularly if you are located in the same cultural environment so we did see poets going let's say from a marginal a kind of periphery a city to center such as Balq and Bukhara and Ghazneh and Herat and various other Isfahan and Shiraz in the Persian world this this movement towards the center but when that center rejects you and casts you out then you begin to feel pangs of exile of separation from prestige from power sometimes from your own humanity and then we moved into later centuries let's say 12th and 13th centuries when instituted the institution of the court gives rise to the institution of monastery and the the khaneghah the Sufi monastery becomes the place of of patronage the career of Sana'i for example reflects that very well an early court poet who converts into Sufism and begins a discourse there and we followed all of that to Hafiz where you can feel exile internally even if you have never been exiled from your own city then we went into the devastations that the Mongol and Tartar invasions of northern Iran wrought into that culture and the transfer of cultural centers from the greater Khorasan to Isfahan and Shiraz cities which are which at that time were known as Iraq Iraq Ajam in other words western Iran it was in those cities that the Safavids seized power and for two centuries directed patronage only towards or primarily towards religious offerings in in in the form of literature and therefore many more secular poets began to seek their fortunes elsewhere more importantly in northern Indian courts of of the Mughals of India and then we saw a process by which Persian speakers began registering a lack and absence in their own literature this is the time when going to school to Europe begins in late 18th century and almost all of 19th century when the caravans of matter caravan how you matter fact the caravans of knowledge begin going to to Europe in the aftermath of the the devastating defeats of of Persia at the hands of Tsarist Russia a process of rejuvenation renovation settles in and eventually from that men come out who begin to change and change the discourse entirely and bring poetry and literature into the social field make of it an instrument of social change I ended up with trying and I didn't have time to do this but in the larger project we do have a I do have a section where I discuss Khaterata Hachsaya that's the memoirs of Hachsaya one of the many many by the way I really recommend these these travel narratives of 19th century to you all travel narratives and memoirs these are new things from Heirat Naameh to Khaterata Tajo Sartane and so on and so forth you have a whole host of texts which really have never been explored recently I endorse the book published in England I think it was by Naameh Sohrabi called taken for wonder in which she develops a scheme for studying these as as works of literature not as historical documents and I recommend it to everyone to engage themselves those of you who are professionally in the field of Persian literature more more centrally with these texts and so we came to the threshold of the 20th century when a generation after after Ahunzadeh and Kermani and Malcolm the poets come who begin to contribute to the modernization of Persian poetry oftentimes in in articulating the literary history of Persian we still are prone to key literature to political history which is the most the most random and an unproductive way of periodizing literature anyway for example we talk about adabiata mashruti nothing happened in 1905 1906 people continued writing love love lyrics and and true certain things began to happen but it had nothing to do with the constitutional revolution although it predicted it and it reflected the data on so we do need to find ways of periodizing Persian literature or all of literary history as independent of political history the predominance of the paradigms of political history have captured our minds in such a way that we automatically think that a dynasty changes and therefore literature changes and people still talk about the literature of the Iranian revolution well I must tell you the literature is doing fine it's it's really doing very good even we even have people who from a religious ideology are redefining literature and are and are exploring new grounds and so I think again part of my effort to write literary history without distancing myself from the text is directed at getting literature giving literature its own dynamics of change so tonight I will be discussing two modes basically before the revolution and this this this can be more directly key to a political event such as the Iranian revolution of 1978 1983 because we're talking about exile and much of the fact of exile came about either because of or as a result of or in the aftermath of the that that revolution as such there are topics in literature that can be key to political events but even the Iranian revolution itself did not in literature did not begin in 1978 1979 it began in the 1970s and it manifested itself most importantly in that wonderful book Dah Shab which is a record of the Ten Nights of Poets Reading in 1977 October 1977 asked to go to Tehran and so it is it is for us cultural and literary historians and students of Persian literature and culture to find ways of of of articulating changes in literature based on literature itself and literary documentation so today I will be discussing before that that event before the 1970s let's say the late 1970s and after it a fairly considerable portion of Iran's early modern literature was written in Europe and much of what was not written there was inspired by 19th century European writings often initiated through translation that's a demonstrable fact of literary history almost all of the stories of the first collection of the modern Persian short stories Muhammad Ali Jamal Zadez Yikibood and Yikinabud or once upon a time were written in Europe in the 1910s in spite of his abundant love for his homeland the author spent much of his long life away from Iran the greatest fiction writer of the 20th century Iran Saadeh Hidayat also spent many years in Paris and in India some years and kept going back every time back to Europe every time he found the intellectual atmosphere in Tehran stifling. Bozor Galavi too lived much of his career abroad in Germany these writers sensibilities differed both from the likes of the poets that we saw last night let's say Sa'ib and Bidil and Vahshi and Kaleem and from ours as well being only two generations of of their posterity yet whether it was written in Tehran or Paris or Berlin whether its protagonists were wandering the alleyways of Varamein or Luavgh Hidayat's fiction for example is first and last about Iran so it's we have expatriates just like the lost generation the lost American generation in Paris in the 1920s these people are located in exile but they do not consider themselves exiles they have access to the home country they are there to read they're there to study they're there to enjoy life but at the same time to create without the the restraints and constraints that a that the political atmosphere in Tehran may impose on their work that it depicts the angst of perhaps profoundly Iranian psyche if I'm essentialized a bit to make my point one thrown overboard into the environment of Europe may provide the most palpable index of exilic writing jamal in Jamalja this fiction Jamalja this fiction too is set up in Iran and and reveals an innocent insubstantiality I especially like us to get away from once upon a time and read those texts of Jamalja that are read less frequently for example Sarotahiya Karbas or Yikruz Darostam Abadishem Iran or these texts where he ruminates on on on his memories of Iran and thus creates creates works that are new to literature in the form of memoirs in effect although he fictionalizes them enough to be truly worth studying as literature so it's an innocent insubstantiality the market of a vanished presence longing to return in imagination to the place he cannot be in reality this is this is important in the works of Jamal Jada and Hedayat how the imagination sets into in a compensatory way to make up for the actual physical absence of the author certainly the specific form of Iranian European encounter Hedayat and Jamal Jada foreground in the 1930s and 40s is shaped by the ambivalence they feel towards the country's attempt at westernizing modernization that's an important political factor that begins to impact literature the shape of modernization in Iran how it's it seems half-baked to people it seems as though it's aping Europe but it's not really linking up to anything substantial that would connect Europe with with with let's say medieval Iran or pre-modern Iran this sense of identity has developed in Iran through the first half of the 20th century and was founded on the idea of the hedger homogeneity of Iranian culture based primarily on the supremacy of the Persian language now in a couple of times I've you've heard me mention the supremacy of the Persian language in the larger work I deal with it in in ways that may may sound different than what I have the impression I may have given you last night and tonight and that is that the Persian language is one of the languages of Iran Iran is a multilingual country whether we recognize it or not as unfortunately however no other language has had the continuous literary production that Persian has had and as such its predominance in literature may be justified although that should not be taken as a way of justifying the predominance that's pushed by governments because they think it it creates some sort of a the the idea of union in the country which which may not may not be true look at India a multilingual country but in which every language is contributing to the oneness of of of that country but of course we have not had that experience so that westernizing westernizing modernization the look the intellectual look at as cancer it in ways that that make it clear they're not comfortable with it I now want to come to the second half of the 20th century as as the century reaches its midpoint particularly in the wake of the defeat that Iranian intellectuals suffer in the early 1950s the desire to leave the country like so many other emotions becomes a sought after privileged vantage point in the literary imagination and notice I'm saying in the literary imagination I'm not talking about biography I'm talking about textual evidence and textual evidence codifies and articulates and and and and signifies desire as a particular individual expresses the desire to be outside the country whether he's serious or not or he may want to actually leave the country is a different matter it's it's the evidence from the text that suggests that ports like Shamu Akhavan Farrukhzad and Seperi among others of their generation registered desire to leave the country in order to show the stifling impact of a political order which would not allow their creativity to blossom by encouraging political development modernist poetry in particular interestingly patriotic poetry is not a province of modernist poetry the so-called Sharon O patriotic poetry is still at this time in the hands of the traditionalists the likes of let's say Hamidi Shirazi or various other radios are actually and various other poets of the middle of the 20th century who are losing ground to the modernist poetry modernist poetry of course is still affected by Nima's local the mozander on province where he was he grew up and also people pledge allegiance to the place Sorabseh Peri is inseparable from Qashan and Akhavan of course keeps going back to Khorasan but by and large patriotism the idea of Iran is not a forte of these modernists modernist poetry in particular privileges this desire to be elsewhere in this way Ahmad Shamu's early poem punishment or key fan depicts the poet's persona as a noble human being imprisoned for wishing to absent himself from the country and here may I ask you to look at your handout number one in your handout it comes from Kefar and these are the concluding lines the poem itself describes a prison and how a prison is organized and what the people in prison there may have done and then the poet distinguishes and separates himself from the old all the other prisoners in this way that the poet had been imprisoned because his estranged wife sued him in the court turns out to be a minor biographical point minor detail for scholars and literary historians to quarrel over yet there are in Shamu moments of genuine affection for the homeland the figure of the prince of tiles for example Amir Zadiyah Kashiha and the depiction of the turquoise sky of the homeland in Hejdani which is my second the second text in my handout is worth paying attention to are only two examples of several places were real or imagined separation from homeland has instigated an eloquent lyrical voice in that tradition and I love this poem this is the whole poem it's a very short one and indeed the reversal of this this notion of blue sky being reflected in in the blue of the turquoise is a wonderful image I think especially the turquoise that that in my hometown of Mashhad is known as Shajari which means tree like and it has it has branches of black of black running into the wonderful blue of the turquoise exactly like this the lake surface that he describes Akhavan too lurches and masterfully exploits the desire to be elsewhere as a trope a device for registering his protest against the stifling political environment where he actually is in a famous early poem titled procession or chavushi composed in the 1950s he depicts a persona who wishes to find out the truth behind the Persian expression that emphasizes the essential sameness of all places one of the ways modernism works in Persian poetry is by questioning questioning very old and established it's established proverbs uh so Bahar Kuja Keravi Osman Hamin Rangas is a statement uh pretending to be the truth the ultimate truth to to submit it to question is a way for the for the modernist Persian poet to say let's examine this so it goes against the grain of tradition if you will man in jaw best deal I'm tangy as to her sazi Kimi be number the hangest such tactical utilizations of the desire to be elsewhere rooted in the impressively patriotic nationalism that has swept over Iran for close to two centuries creates the perception in the reader that poets are doubtless transplants from a more advanced culture now situated in backwaters where only a few noble souls can grasp the glory of their presence or this is the extent of their suffering in a way again the study of romanticism even though the word has been used about you know there's some some romantic strain in the modernist Persian literature Persian poetry it has never been investigated and I would like somebody to do that because obviously the desire for the far away and the long ago is part of the romantic tradition in Europe as well but what part it plays in the modernist Persian tradition particularly in Iran remains to be studied in a scholarly way what keeps the poet in his country then becomes evidence of his selfless love and absolute commitment to his homeland the poet is there in spite of himself rather than because that is where he receives the adulation the abundance of adulation and love for that all ports deserve in his estimation in separee we have a full fledged ideal city beyond the oceans with many illusions that would make it easy to contrast it with the ports a right native land and here is the poem in your hand number four in your hand up that city of course is not a real city for the port but the port painted in this case paints a city the the image of an ideal city beyond the blue waters in order to register again the the the strange land in which he does not feel at home even though he keeps returning to it in the end and even though a generation letter he of all the the the second generation of modernist he is being adored more than anyone else at this time so that brings me to the discussion of of the the motif of exile the exelic mode in the literature of the diaspora that has been instigated in directly or independent the indirectly by the iranian revolution for purely practical uh per reasons i have limited my discussion of the exelic voice in the literature of the last three decades to three basic areas of investigation i think these are the most important uh areas of investigation because they in a way they have temporal contiguity with one another but you may challenge that and and and people are welcome to do that and and definitely it's much more uh much more sophisticated and much more complicated than these three the three areas that i will concentrate on uh those that revolve around the operations of memory memory is a fantastic quality and the more i think about it the less i get to know it but the more i have to say about it it's one of one of those wonder wonder wonders of wonders uh how memory operates and this operation seems to be somehow turned off even more keenly when you're away from the homeland you keep harking back to it to prove to yourself and the people around you that you're actually alive maybe uh as as recaptured and expressed through the backward gland through backward glances and recollections those that involve observing and absorbing that's the second movement you still are located here in London in Washington in Los Angeles in Paris and you need to get to know the place and so what strategies you devise to get to know your own your own environment even as you just to exist even as you start going back to the environment that you may have left behind and finally those that depict the desires and dreams of exiles for return and restoration so we have a past a present and the future we have uh memory we have observation and we have dreaming of return whatever the merits and shortcomings of this approach it cannot be denied that these three mental operations recollecting observing and dreaming abound in the literature of exile all exile uh products of such complex processes of socialization and and culture ration Iranians who now live in one of the many diaspora communities around the world have had a difficult time sorting through their their emotions about the and attitudes toward their home and host societies by home I mean Iran and by host I mean wherever you happen to be a great majority wishes to be able simultaneously to use the rights and opportunities available to them in their place of settlement yet they often present themselves as exiles forced or compelled to remain abroad in spite of themselves and that's something for our anthropology and anthropology colleagues and psychologists to explore it's not the province of literature to enter those even though it becomes the kind of the raw material of literature itself so most importantly for our purposes a great majority seeks constantly to be reminded of all the real or imagined good lives that they left back left left in Iran that they had back in Iran at least until it was violently taken away from them by catastrophic revolution and it's unfortunate aftermath and that's that's that's again a designation that we the exiles are giving to the revolution we ignoring all the people who love the revolution and exactly you know are seeing their dreams come true the Islamic Republic so we tend to think that ours is the authentic notion of Iran and it's because of that that we've been driven away we refuse to recognize that there are people who are just fine where they are and then they love it for whatever it is so again we have to think of this the subjectivity involved in all of this rather than this being any objective state of affairs during these decades iranian exile sense of themselves has been shaped as a result of complex interactions between their self-definition and definitions they receive from the outside that's interesting i can see each one of you watching television and saying that's not true that's not how we are like and yet why not i mean no one is no one is is is setting out to lie to us about us it's an impression and needs to be it needs to be taken seriously and still we think we know better and they're not talking about us they're talking about those 75 million people there and somehow we are a kind of tough to each other above the kind of separate breed if you will so a simultaneous groping and questioning process results from all of this which is fascinating to watch through the lens of the literary work not necessarily again through the works of anthropologists or psychologists or social scientists or whatever or historians but to through the text because it complicates to show the complexities of the of the matter to us so uh so exile is on the one hand the condition of being in the world and and a way of and at the same time a way of identifying oneself to others uh so we are the Iranians and and we are not terrorists of course you know regardless of what people about the world may think of us or of Iranians in general the questioning attitude that develops in exiles toward the history and traditions of their homeland may also be placed within the historical context that's a fascinating topic to me uh none of us remember the day of ashura and yet it's so such an important event in iran and two iranians but no one forgets mehra ghan and then we've added to it is found you guys found the gun and you know tear gun and and this and that and you know we we hark back to a portion of our history neglecting a whole segment of other and we we get furious when we see that Ahmadinejad is pushing for example to have the shia narratives as as as a cultural cultural the product of the world recognized i don't mind that if that if that happens if that's all that happens but of course it it's it will be used as a way of legitimating the government which we think is it does not have the legitimacy that we may have may once have had so the question of participant observer becomes important but once again i'm here stepping outside of literature so let me go back to the works of literature in general and see where we what we can find there actually let's let's deal with with the first question of memory as as it relates to our childhood childhood memory memories and exilic writing is an important topic the cluster of images that that revolves around the theme of exile from the most dominant amalgam of from the most dominant amalgam of expressive devices to poetry to to portray the situation to which the speaker is made to respond or react in in in literature life in iran of the speaker's memory appears as real while life in exile assumes an era of unreality the speaker is at once is is as sure-footed and sharp in recollecting his experiences at home as he is uncertain and flat-footed and ambivalent about his existence outside in fact the fullness of life experiences back home often emerges as the touchstone by which the absurdity of life in exile is measured and communicated uh notice the line by hoddy course anybody says uh jom al-haman nagya han yekshambi so yekshambi is unreal and unnatural and it has to be it should have been jom e but now it's all of a sudden you know it's it's yekshambi so there's there's that kind of articulation uh the sense of alienation and loss of loss of self that the condition of exile breeds makes it impossible to feel whole and the sense of fragmentation added to and aided by the fact of march his marginality comes to the exile as as as demanding to dominate his or her discourse recollections of childhood are of course a staple of poetry in all ages and given the nostalgic mode in persian literature people always idealize childhood furuk farrukh thought was not an exile ever in her life and yet andrew's how it's a beautiful poem where she uh talks about a childhood full of fragrances and of coffee and jasmine and and and acacia's and so on and so forth to conclude that she is now zany tanha akhmun zany tanha's akhmun zany tanha so it's uh the nostalgia is there but the nostalgia serves a purpose it's the purpose of contrasting the continuity of life it is not lamenting absence from places of spaces of childhood it's a different kind of uh a different kind of relationship is set up in soraba sehri in sadae payah the sound of water's footsteps where he really talks about his early childhood as a way of arming himself with wisdom and philosophy to then preach to us about life and death and love and all kinds of things so in a way the relationship between childhood and adulthood is always problematic always in contrasting and and comparative terms expressed in poetry and yet there's no rupture if you have if if you've lived in this live the same spaces uh whereas when you when you're uh in exile this separation seems as though a rupture something that should not have happened to you has happened to you has indeed happened to you and this uh I see in uh a poem by uh esmael khoyi uh who really makes it uh in a way ironic uh he talks about the the spaces of london and recalls a deracht etude a white a whiteberry uh which is a very lowly uh every every day uh tree in in in the alleyways of iran and almost all courtyards have it and it's accessible to everyone and he contrasts contrasts with a stately oak balut and so he makes a rhyme between deracht etude and balut which and because it's a half rhyme because there's a te and a tother uh it makes it very ironic highly highly ironic so uh in an amazing way poetry works to and this this the ironic mode of expression in a way consoles the speaker as if as if he's making an attempt to reconcile himself to his rafiq el andaniam Shah balut uh now that he has he's missing the the the more white mulberry uh in a word and I want to conclude this and I'm you know skipping quite quite a lot here in a word memory that bet noir of the human mind and the beautiful damsel called imagination while displaying apparent differences that ought in principle to make them both attractive and threatening to one another at times set up relations that are dazzling in the rarity of occurrence uh that's that's what I'm after a poetic and aesthetic way of combining coming from that memory of of of the mulberry to the imagination of the balut as as a the london er friend who's who's waving to you from afar so that in itself may be rare but it's it's the kind of gem that shows the nature of exotic exotic mode in literature uh now as far as observing and absorbing is concerned I deal with two uh areas of investigation that's the climate and culture of exile iran is sunny london is rainy forever and ever days like this notwithstanding uh so it's it's it's that kind of an articulation and of course sun is good and rain is bad and you know it's it's it's a way it's an easy way out and I'm already sick and tired of reading all these images of you know climate the climate of exile to the iran exile living in the city of london london's weather is not just the condition external to human beings one to which human beings may be a culture is in acclimated it is what makes and breaks one's mood and one's sense of being far more than an at-home attitude each one of us may have to our local climatic conditions sunny weather makes makes you alert cloudy weather makes you numb of course in other words the relationship between the weather out there and the mood one feels inside is immediate and automatic and here I pause to recall a similar strategy in the sufi tradition the sufi tradition does the same thing too so much so that you have this dichotomy this binary opposition between bahar and day or bahar and paiz where bahar is a season of joy opening up expanding going out there and winter or fall are ugly seasons and seasons of of of rigidity and bending over backward and getting into yourself I recall that the the opening line of the the qaza with the opening line of khabaret hask der mesh shikar arzan chod one line says khabaret has the bidad day divane shahney ad le bahar amad and zindan chod so there's always this battle whether it's shahney and and and someone who's unjust or done something wrong whether it's it's two armies fighting one another they are at fight and this happens not in so much in the ghazal and qasidah tradition but in the sufi tradition the ghazals of the sufi tradition uh again we see the same thing here this time directed at the world out there which is why I posited a move from the objective world out there to the inside the human soul last night calling it interiorization and now uh you know with the advent of modernity we have that interiorization turned into socialization where poetry captures the public realm and now of course it becomes a a way of distinguishing between exile and home home and exile the same thing here this is Shahrukh meskub and I love studying meskub because he seems to me to have found out thus far and as far as I have studied the most successful progression of exile from incompatibility to reconciliation with spaces of exile I think that's an important gesture I have not seen the gesture in anyone else thus far in his three books musafir name 1984 uh goftegoud arbaq late 1990s and uh goftegoud arbaq and saffard arkhab one of his latest works before he passed away in 2007 I think it was or 2005 anyway each one of those books charts for me one stage of of of compatibility this first stage is of course deals with climate and here I'm dealing with text number five in your hand handout this is the opening the opening paragraph of musafir name shabee rude mork no kimi zad subhaned arbaran asman ms lakrui zameen of tadeboud wa adham ha zir chat ms lak pojtae padrads wa garchae saq bulan sargardan shetab zadeh cheraq masheen hara ushan boud az noor e kheese shan ab mi cheki khiaban barik saqtoman ha bulan wa asman gayeb ms leen boud ke tahe darya rahmi raban dar tariki e kheese ama talk about being feeling out of element uh it's an important uh opening in that and and here's the artistry that goes into this every time he sees one of these unpleasant scenes such as the two women rushing to work so early in the morning he goes back on a cliche in his own language and then he sees the the dove the pigeon and uh subhaned arbaran all these catch phrases that he remembers from his childhood become ways of expressing and epitomizing and condensing the the the texture of his experience when he feels out of element and notice that animalization process people are not pay people anymore they resemble animals and the animals go down in darwinian darwinian ladder if you will uh so in a way he goes from animals to vegetation to garch mushrooms so it's uh it's it's a very well structured articulation of an exile feeling not at home in exile uh so uh again i need to skip quite a bit uh the narrative begins one early morning as the narrator leaves peresian home etc etc i mentioned all of that london at night and this of course is is is shuttling back and forth between paris and london in the 1980s when he was teaching uh persian at the institute for smiley studies and lived in paris and so two days a week he would he would commute from paris to london and that's most of an amazing record of that i recommend that text very it's an easy uh exilic text to read in that it gives you clues about exile a more poetic and lyrical if no less emotive contrast between home and exile appears in many of nadir who's exilic poems and i believe nadir who never really overcame that early stage of maladjustment of not of in in in capability to adjust the it's the spaces of exile in one the beauty of nature at home instills in the poet the speaker a poem of imaginative power that enables him to ponder the certainty of return images of this sort are a staple in nadir poor's exilic poetry and here i'm alluding to a to text number six in your hand out a multi be a group a marzo boom a peer a javan bakhti a asha and a kuhni a seymour yekruz nagahan chun cheshman the panjaroftad ba asman maybe nam aftab atura darbara baran don't ask me how it's a forced ending it's just a forced ending he needs that ending to continue to live it's uh there's no logic for that ending uh that that's when you know it's it's almost as forced as uh the ending to sham loose parry all but all of a sudden you know there's there's all that clanking and all of that revolution has happened uh it's it's an amazing thing the automaticity of of of these desirable conclusions coming out of undesirable processes and situations and if you follow that in poetry it can become a touchstone for you to know when poetry really is forced as it is in this in this case in the end of parry all and when it it has a logic of its own and it's it there's premises and those premises lead to some sort of a conclusion so uh if the image recalls masood sad and i have this this section where i i compare nadir pur to masood sad which to me the the resemblance is very important to me uh because it it it works towards irrationality the irrationality of poetry the the way in which poetry becomes curative it becomes therapeutic if you will uh it consoles the poet himself and maybe some readers it does not satisfy any curiosity but at least it offers some sort of you know bandit or aspirin for the headache of exile and yet you have you have this notion of attempting but failing to adjust that i see in a poem by ismail khoi again he capturing this mood the speaker in khoi's poem outlandia the title of the poem was bidak koja and michael beard and i as translators tried hard to capture that bidak koja and we did not fall want to fall back on utopia or not koja about or any any any any one of those coined or or authentic persian words so we made up our own word outlandia to use it in this case in particular so celebrates everything in the place to which he has been exiled and this poem appears in songs of exile uh edges of poetry songs of exile by ismail khoi capturing this mood this this the speaker in khoi's poem outlandia celebrates everything in the place to which he has been exiled i i e london from its land and water to its culture and history as the essence of setting setting the setting the setting he seems he sees himself in there is he insists an essence to outlandia and he tries to discover that essence and that essence reflects a combination of reason and experience still in the end the speaker assertively registers the deep-seated negativity of his personal experience even if it comes to make his inner feeling ineffable to himself why is it then oh god he says that here too in this paradise happiness is still my forbidden fruit the feeling may lie beyond reason and experience but is the surest thing the poet has to fall back on and here's now text number seven in your handout again a persian proverb a line of poet a bit of poetry becomes the source text for this and he tries to modify it so he separates the car from the azar so the azar of course it's good that no one is bothering you telling you to fix your your your headscarf or whatever but people don't have any car with you they don't care for you it's it's that that that's missing from the paradise that he sees and of course it's missing for him as it would be for many exiles because we are we are foreign objects in the body of this city or any other any other city the cold and welcoming atmosphere of exile is thus rendered even more inhospitable by the people who occupy it and you have this high and low expression of the people you face either people you face you you face in your daily passage in the streets of London or Paris or Rome or wherever are seen as lower lower human beings or they see as somehow frowning not smiling I haven't seen anyone any passers-by smile at me in Tehran and yet that doesn't matter that doesn't seem that in fact I see a lot more smiles when I I walk the streets of Washington than in Tehran but that objective fact is irrelevant here if you're talking about textual textual articulation of the condition so once again I would like to skip quite a bit to take you to the last part which is an important part the most important part I have to deal with and that is the question of dreaming dreaming of return how this dream happens in Persian Exile literature the urge to simultaneously mourn and create seems to have given rise to recuperating processes that lead to two distinct aesthetic tendencies first the experience of exile has led to more circuitous more more layered narratives than those that mark the normal functioning of memory as a tested at home and here of course there's that distinction that I make between what I did last night as well they're very similar and the allegorical you have the poems I have read thus far have been very similar in a way they have an observed fact to build or change or alter or reverse or otherwise deal with whereas in allegorical things such as we saw in in so about these texts last night and we are seeing in the couple of texts that I will discuss now what we have is a an overlay it seems as though a layer has been placed on reality you know the concept of palimpsest these these these either parchment or paper that that's washed the way to make room for other other writings on top of it it seems as though the allegory lays over the the narrative that may have been may have been there but you don't see the narrative you can only guess at it and here let me apologize for a mismatch in the in the handout please go to text number nine not eight in your handout this is the opening paragraph of a work called surat ul-qorab or the chapter of the raven by a writer called Mahmoud Masoudi it started being serialized in Zaman and no in 1988 but then later was published as a as a novel as well by the same title surat ul-qorab in 1996 I recommend it highly although I'm not sure it's reading for everyone it's a very complicated text basically the the the the underlying text is is is mantegotir the conference of the birds at tarz 12th century narrative here it's the story of a raven who at the moment of realizing that he's not going to make it took off he is not going to make it took off he's going to die right there so here's the opening the opening it's a very well constructed narrative in which the story of the conference of the birds is laid over by a narrative of a rat of a someone who has ratted on his friends probably a political activist of the left who has compromised his integrity and has broken in prison and has cooperated cooperated with the agents interrogators and so on and so forth and now he finds himself in Paris and is very very sorry about what he has done and this this story is is his way of overcoming and reconciling himself to the fact of his own existence in in this way it is as it as a novel it's a very difficult text but it's also very rewarding once you finish it it's really truly rewarding and in a way it it it resembles some recent strains such as magical realism or surrealistic writings in in in the west i want to compare and contrast this in the larger project with another very finely crafted work by reza qasemi and that is uh hamnabai shabbani orchestra chubha uh he lives in paris and this apparently is his first novel it's a very well written novel he harks back to modern Persian literature whereas uh masoodi links up with a classical text conference of the birds he links up with that wonderful image at the end of uh and here's the an excerpt from it this is number eight uh i'm surprised and pleasantly so by the number of these exotic texts that link up with and hark back to the classical texts of classical and modern uh Persian literary texts um to wama manai shabbas you know links up with uh that wonderful scene in in in hedayat's hedayat's blind owl and here we have another analog of that it seems as though uh now modernism finds itself at home enough speaking in in terms of literature and not in terms of uh the location of the author to now make its its its compact with the classical texts there was a time and of course it's had this happened in many traditions where you have the battle of the ancients and the moderns and the moderns call the ancients works rubbish and the traditionalists call the worst of the moderns garbage uh but then there comes a reconciliation i'm i recall ezra pounds making compact with walts witzman for example uh let the let there be trade between us uh so the the established trade uh between their own texts and the the established texts of the tradition uh finally let me read you one more and that's the last uh text in your handout and this is from the uh final pages of of sharoq mescubes last uh fictional work uh safar dar khab uh he dreams that he has returned to his native city of isfahan uh in the in the company of and under the uh guidance of khaji amid uh one of the makers of isfahan in saljogid period um and he's looking for his baby brother and he sees it have you thought that you you will not be you will not be uh the one you will not be recognized by any deceased person that you may have loved we always work on that on the assumption they'd recognize us if they see us uh whenever but can you imagine them passing by and not paying any attention to you it's that kind of a uh a final a final break with all all manner of uh reconciliation and at the same time reconciling yourself to your new spaces so again i have much that i have left out and i apologize uh let me very quickly recap that in the last two talks that uh last night and tonight uh we have really scratched the surface only uh and i hope i have given you some clues about how to approach these texts these texts of uh of exile how to follow the exilic mode in purging literature uh one thing is for sure and that is as i said uh my attempt as as as as hopeless as it might be is to find my way from the text to history not in contravention of the text not ignoring the text to reach history as literally historians typically have done thus far but to exploit the resources of the text to give me clues as to how to register and how to examine and how to at least begin to see those motifs that become uh registers of change in Persian literature once again i thank you for your patience and i thank dr hakimion for my the for inviting me thank you very much