Reading beyond a literary reception is how Behnam M. Fomeshi describes his critique of the textual circulation of Walt Whitman (1819–92), “the good gray poet” of American democracy, in modern Iran. Fomeshi's travelling Whitman is not merely the poetic vanguard of the American Renaissance but a universal poet who has gained local significance in the cultural context of Iranian modernity.
The historical and theoretical foundations of The Persian Whitman portend a paradigm shift in the comparative studies of American and Persian literatures. From the outset, Fomeshi sets his appreciation of the poet against the backdrop of US–Iranian relations. The reception of Whitman's inclusive poetry in modern Iranian culture, and quest for democracy more broadly, is for Fomeshi an antidote to the politics of hostility between the two nations. In the course of nine chapters, the book examines the “creative, critical, and political” reception, as well as the textual and visual production, of Whitman from 1922 (p. 9), when he was first translated in Iran, to the present time as the poet is available to the Iranian audience in multiple editions.
Fomeshi pursues an ambitious range of theoretical objectives. The book seeks to transcend “the polemics of influence/reception,” endemic to nation-based models of comparative literature, which reproduce the colonial “superiority/inferiority binary opposition” between American and Persian literatures (p. 7). Towards a new historicist extension of reception studies, the “Persian Whitman” is an autonomous subject, often independent of the American poet, who is perceived based on the “sociopolitical and literary necessities” of the Iranian readership who imagine new poetic forms and expressions in conversation with the world at large (p. 8). Fomeshi's scholarship is essentially predicated on a reading of American literature as world literature. As “Whitman becomes a Persian,” Fomeshi's decentering of the US canon leads “not only to the globalization of American studies, but also to a better understanding of Iranian culture” (p. 5). This dual lens should appeal to scholars of transnational American studies, and critical Middle East studies alike.
Yet unfortunately, Fomeshi does not account for the above objectives. The prerequisite for a productive appreciation of Whitman in Iran must be a rigorous critique of the poet's own standing in American literature. Whitman has in the past decades been subject to serious scrutiny, much of it informed by the New Americanist interrogation of the contradictions of US history in terms of race, gender, and imperialism. Fomeshi, however, provides a celebratory view of Whitman's life and work, his democratic politics and poetics, as well as a history of the early American Republic in light of the interdependency of “nationalism” and “democracy” at the heart of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855–1892). While revisionary interventions into the canon of American literature rightly continue to celebrate the poet's defiant politics, working-class ethos, and queer sexual agency, Whitman's racial attitudes, despite his staunch abolitionism, have been deemed ambiguous and certainly not antiracist.
Such scholarly developments (e.g., Ivy Wilson's edited volume Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet [Iowa City: Iowa Press, 2014]), by no means recent, are categorically absent, and even muted, in The Persian Whitman. Not that an examination of Whitman's representation of black bodies is in the scope of Fomeshi's work, but disregarding the full scope of the existing scholarship is a disservice to the reader. In fact, a more consequential erasure in Fomeshi's work is what Amy Kaplan in Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), has called the “absence of empire” in American studies. After all, the Iranian reception of Whitman as a universal poet of equality, and the globalization of American culture along the lines of the liberal international order into the 20th century, did not occur in a historical vacuum. Yet surprisingly, Fomeshi's contextualization of his study in the contemporary geopolitics of the Middle East aims to tackle, primarily, “the discourse of ‘Āmrīkā-sitīzī’ (i.e., hostility towards the US)” and not, equally, discourses of Islamophobia (p. 3). Similarly, the opening three chapters, which are supposed to lay the groundwork for comparative critique, are almost completely isolated from the core agenda. Instead, the provided biography of Whitman is episodic and the overview of his work reads like CliffsNotes with no critical contribution to transnational American studies, except to reiterate the common platitudes on “the ‘bard’ of American democracy” (p. 58).
Where the book does comment on the deepened patriotism of the later editions of Leaves of Grass at the expense of the poems’ earlier radicalism, Fomeshi subscribes to the exceptionalist narrative of US history and the flawless inclusivity of Whitman's poetry—which “crystalises the essence of America. […] Democracy” (p. 59). In such statements, Fomeshi disregards the studies that have mapped the margins of American democratic institutions, and the limits of Whitman's own democratic poetics. Three years before Whitman attempted to publish “the first edition of Leaves of Grass on 4 July 1855,” a fact glorified in The Persian Whitman (p. 60), his contemporary Fredrick Douglas (1818–95) had delivered a speech titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” where he denounced the exclusion of the then-enslaved African Americans from the antebellum body politic. In the era of US-led globalization, when militarism abroad is an extension of racism at home, Fomeshi should have asked a parallel question: “What to the Iranian reader is the myth of American exceptionalism?” The question has informed not only the politicians Whitman vehemently abhorred, but also the reception of his own “poetic modernity” in Iran.
In all fairness, the rest of The Persian Whitman is a thoroughly researched account of the Iranian reception of the poet, beginning with Yusif Iʿtisami's translation of an excerpt from “Song of the Broad-Axe” in 1922 (Chapter 4). As Iʿtisami extolled Whitman for his progressive urban modernity, Nima Yushij refined his own poetic innovations in dialogue with Whitman's turn to free verse beyond the conventions of meter and rhyme (Chapter 5). Fomeshi proceeds to examine “creative” and “political” receptions of Whitman, respectively, in a feminist revival of the poet Parvin Iʿtisami, whose “God's Weaver” was allegedly influenced by Whitman's “A Noiseless Patient Spider” (Chapter 6), followed by a reading of the Marxist intellectual Ihsan Tabari who, in a series of publications in 1943, further articulated the link between Persian New Poetry and Whitman's poetic modernity (Chapter 7). The final two chapters jump half a century ahead to discuss the visual representation of Whitman in recent, postrevolutionary editions of his work as a mystic poet (Chapter 8), and the political reception of the same image among the competing discourses of nativism and globalization in 21st-century Iran (Chapter 9).
Because Fomeshi upholds Whitman's inclusive poetics (“I am large, I contain multitudes”) as the high point of Western liberal democracy, and because he views Whitman's Iranian interlocutors only at the receiving end of globalized modernity, The Persian Whitman is inevitably grounded in the modernity–tradition dichotomy. In the chapter on Nima Yushij, whose poetic breakthroughs Fomeshi associates with Whitman's radical experimentations, the epistemic supremacy of Whitman's literary modernity over Persian classical aesthetics is viewed as a given. Although he does provide an account of Nima as a creative artist who appropriated the Whitman he received in French translation, Fomeshi embeds the broader anxiety of Nima's influence in the discourse of modernity as the only means to reinvent Persian poetry. Thus, despite his original intention to transcend the limits of “influence” studies, Fomeshi reproduces the very “superiority/inferiority” complex he sought to abolish in the comparative studies of Persian literature. A far more problematic outcome of such belief in modernity, however, is an internalization of Whitman's discourse of nationalism which has led Fomeshi to use the words “Persian” and “Iranian” synonymously, irrespective of the potential sites of reception elsewhere in the Persian-speaking world.
Finally, a study of literary reception, especially in a postcolonial context like Iran, cannot be limited only to the question of style, with which most of the interlocutors under Fomeshi's scrutiny seem to have been obsessed. In the case of Ihsan Tabari, who praised Whitman's departure from “metrical rules and poetic forms” (p. 116), Fomeshi makes no effort to investigate whether Tabari, a Marxist revolutionary, ever took note of the immigrants, prostitutes, prisoners, and the working-class “b'hoys” whom Whitman vocalized in his poetry. The point of reception studies is not simply to reiterate what has been received but, more crucially, what has been repelled in translation. The fact, for instance, that the 20th-century Iranian reception of Whitman did not tap into his abolitionist tendencies, gender politics, or queer sexuality sheds light on a heteronormative discourse of modernity, and ethnocentric conception of nationalism, which did not allow readings of the subversive Whitman beyond the level of “poetic form.”
It is only in his conclusion that Fomeshi invokes a set of resources for future research which, at least to this reader, should have been the backbone of his own. The 50-year historical gap in-between Chapters 7 and 8, which crucially coincide with the second Pahlavi era when Iran was a locus of American soft power (1941–79), is hastily filled with the Franklin Book Program's bilingual edition of Whitman (1960) and the visiting Fulbright lecturer Willis Wager's edition of his University of Tehran students’ papers (1968–9), five of which address Walt Whitman's Persian affiliations. The extent to which the Persian Whitman of this period contributed to, or possibly resisted, the liberal anti-communist consensus is a question that has evaded Fomeshi. Whitman's digital circulation in Iran, mentioned in passing at the very end, would have made another intriguing chapter which Fomeshi, with reference to an entry on the poet in a Persian-language LGBTQ website, describes as “a more honest” portrayal of Whitman than was ever conceived by the established intelligentsia (p. 166). The Persian Whitman, therefore, closes on a promising note to a new generation of scholars who shall engage with American, Persian, or comparative literature from more meaningful and consequential perspectives.
