On July 8, 1962, Kayhan International, “the most popular foreign language daily in Iran” with a circulation of approximately eight to ten thousand, Footnote 1 published a barely noticeable news article titled “French School for Iran.” The article, laid out in a tiny column, is overpowered by the adjacent, large advertisement to fly with Lufthansa with the slogan “Any time is travel time to Germany,” and right underneath it is the broadcasting information and schedule for BBC’s Persian radio program. “French School for Iran” was about a partnership between the Ministry of Education and Mission Lalique, “a non-religious French cultural and educational organization,” to open a French school in Tehran.Footnote 2 The outflow of students to France had become so endemic that, according to the report, “A Ministry source told our reporter that the school is designed to discourage those students who currently go to France for a French secondary education from doing so. The … school will provide them with a French education here in Tehran.”Footnote 3 The seemingly inconsequential and arguably unpremeditated layout of this article about opening French schools in Tehran (to speak nothing of the article itself yet), next to advertisements about a German airline and the British Broadcasting Corporation—including the schedule of its English language teaching program—is an apropos encapsulation of Iran’s complex sociopolitical and cultural landscape at the time.
Nine years earlier, the US-backed coup d’état had taken place in 1953, overthrowing the democratically elected, nationally beloved prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq (educated in France and Switzerland), Footnote 4 who nationalized Iran’s oil industry. Nine years later, on May 23, 1971, the Iranian “poet-painter-translator,”Footnote 5 Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), wrote a letter from New York City, where he was residing at the time, to his friend “Goli.” The recipient, Goli Taraghi, is an Iranian female fiction writer who used to frequent Paris before the Islamic revolution of 1979. Sepehri writes the letter in Persian, with some Latinate words peppered in.Footnote 6 At this time, he had recently returned from a very short trip to Iran, after having lived in New York for more than eight months. Although his overall stay in New York was only a little over a year, in the letter, he facetiously identifies as an American, positing himself against Iranians and indicating that at one time he/they were French.
The news article, positioned at the juncture between the 1953 coup d’état and Sepehri’s stay in New York City, provides insight into the context in which Sepehri was producing his most significant and groundbreaking poetry; one such poem was “Address,” published in his collection Ḥajm-e sabz [Green Volume] (1967).Footnote 7 He wrote during the tumultuous decades before the Islamic revolution in Iran, concurrent with global decolonizing movements; and at a time when many of his contemporaries would write ostensibly sociopolitical poems protesting the status quo, Sepehri was accused of being an “aristocratic Buddha-boy.”Footnote 8 The news article, furthermore, was published roughly around the time as Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s slim book Gharbzadegi [Occidentosis: Plagued by the West or Westoxification]—a staunch and damning attack on the infiltration of Western thought and market (by which he meant “all of Europe, Soviet Russia and North America”)Footnote 9 in the East (“Asia and Africa.”)Footnote 10 Hamid Algar is of the opinion that “some of the theses of Gharbzadegi … anticipate with remarkable precision points made by Edward Said in his Orientalism.”Footnote 11 Vijay Prashad claims that the critiques of cultural imperialism in this text are “not original to Al-e Ahmad” and that precursors to this text can be found in the négritude movement, and more specifically, Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on Colonialism].Footnote 12 Whether it heralded Orientalism or was derivative of Discours sur le colonialisme, the statements made by Algar and Prashad underscore that Gharbzadegi, and by extension, the cultural and sociopolitical context of Iran, were part of the network of third world cultural activity that defined what Shu-Mei Shih calls the “global decolonial moment of the 1960s, broadly defined as the period between the 1950s and the 1970s.”Footnote 13 In an Iranian discourse, this period is characterized as (and by) the response of its “intellectuals … to the problem of encounter with the West.”Footnote 14 Al-e Ahmad’s 1962 response to this problem proved to be the most prevailing and influential during the decades that led to the 1979 revolution.
About Gharbzadegi, Hamid Dabashi writes: “in formulating the most essential ‘anti-Western’ disposition of the Islamic revolutionary discourse, no other single text comes even close to Westoxication”Footnote 15 because it “captured the imagination of a generation in search of a revolutionary identity, a language of revolt.”Footnote 16 Sepehri’s language of revolt was quite different from this revolutionary language and identity that Al-e Ahmad had contributed to. In fact, characterizing Sepehri’s language as “revolutionary” is unorthodox because his mode of thinking and articulation has never been deemed central or even relevant to the revolutionary ideals that his contemporaries, the “committed”Footnote 17 writers, were preaching in their work. This article will demonstrate how his writing, while located on the very outer margins of the revolutionary discourse of the time, is in fact working toward decolonizing the mind of the Iranian subject. He achieves this by ignoring the discourse of the revolution and creating his own unique language of revolt, using elements of the very cultures and locations against which segments of this revolutionary discourse had posited itself. Through Sepehri’s letter, I read his position, literary and otherwise, at that moment in time, as the terminus in the road map of his poetic geography—a geography that is sketched succinctly in “Address” and its visual interpretation by Abbas Kiarostami in Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987). Although Sepehri lived most of his life in Iran (Kashan, to be exact—his birthplace and hometown), he traveled extensively across the global north and south. And in addition to reading plenty of literary and philosophical texts in English, Sepehri was also widely educated in French literature, as well as Japanese, Chinese, and Indian literature, all of which he mostly read in French and sometimes English translations. More often than not, however, critics emphasize the “Iranian-ness” of Sepehri’s work and maintain that any claims about European or Western influence on his poetics is unwarranted. My intention in this article is not to claim otherwise. Rather, by pointing out Sepehri’s disregard for the East/West binary oppositions and nationalistic discourses in which much of the cultural resistance of the time was located, I demonstrate the inconspicuousness of his language of revolt. Ahmad Shamlou, a “committed” poet and Sepehri’s contemporary, was bewildered at the “mysticism” of his poetry he “found irrelevant in the social situation of the years following the 1953 coup d’état”: “They’re executing innocent people by the brook and I’m standing a few feet further asking them ‘Don’t muddy the waters’!Footnote 18 … Our differences stem from the application of poetry … I prefer that poetry be a trumpet, not a lullaby.”Footnote 19 But Sepehri’s poetry is anything but a lullaby, if read carefully and studied in a context of counterculture. His unique language transcends the national in terms of ideology, literary creation, and cultural production and would fit well within the discourse that Pascale Casanova refers to as “autonomous literary worlds.”Footnote 20 Yet at the same time, Sepehri, and subsequently, Kiarostami in his interpretation of Sepehri’s work, decenter Paris, New York, and any other world cultural center in favor of a more encompassing, unspecified, and possibly Edenic landscape, and put into practice the very freedom of thought and form that allowed for revolutionary modes of creation—modes that take the reader and the viewer back to fundamental concepts of social being.
“French School for Iran”
A French education had always been highly coveted in modern Iran (and even in premodern Iran, during the Qajar dynasty [1794–1925]). In his towering biography of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, The Shah, Abbas Milani writes about Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi king, Footnote 21 sending his son, the crown prince Mohammad RezaFootnote 22 to Switzerland for his education in the early 1930s: “French was in those days still one of the coveted signs of distinction for the country’s status-obsessed elite. In the years before the Second World War, French was for the Persian elite still the lingua franca of power and culture.”Footnote 23 And this status of French continued well into the 1960s. The Kayhan International news article’s reference to “a non-religious French cultural and educational organization” attempts to put to rest any fears about the colonizing ambitions of this school. Opening this French school in Iran provided Iranians with the opportunity to gain this coveted education without living in France. But more importantly, it would allow the government to monitor its citizens, for many Iranians who returned to the country after receiving education in primarily European countries would prove to be crucial in the subversive political trajectory of the country. For example, the socialist movement that led to the formation of the pivotal Tudeh Party (Party of the Masses) in 1941 and had a “firm support for the Soviet Union,”Footnote 24 started with “a group of recent graduates from European universities.”Footnote 25 Their leader, Iraj Iskandari, “had won a government scholarship to Europe where he was influenced by the socialist and communist movements.”Footnote 26 Some historians have described this political party as playing “a treasonous role” in the coup d’état that overthrew Mossadeq: “As the mouthpiece of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, the Tudeh opposed Mossadeq, labeling him the representative of the ‘regressive national bourgeoisie’ and an anti-British aristocrat who was serving the interests of ‘American imperialism.’ ”Footnote 27 Mossadeq himself was educated in France (and Switzerland) and was part of a political faction called the Iran Party in the 1940s, whose leaders, with a few exceptions, were educated at the Universities of Berlin, Paris, and Geneva. One of the exceptions to this rule had received his education at a mission school in Tehran, signaling the fact that indeed all of the party leaders had Western educations, acquired either at home or abroad. The Iran Party “advocated a diluted form of French socialism.”Footnote 28 The Iran Party, in turn, had developed out of an Engineer’s Association created in October 1941, the origins of which clarify where this “diluted form of French socialism” stemmed from. Mehdi Bazargan, a founding member of both the association and the party, later reminisced, “While studying in Europe during the 1930s, we marveled at the sight of free student associations, free religious fraternities, and free political parties. In Iran, the regime had destroyed all independent organizations. Consequently, as soon as the opportunity presented itself in 1941, we formed the Engineer’s Association.”Footnote 29
Out of these European educations, therefore, two brands of socialism (Soviet and French) emanated that clashed with one other at the defining moment of Iran’s contemporary history in 1953. For the shah’s government, both of these brands had proved problematic. The Tudeh Party’s radicalism and proven ties to the Soviet Union led to its losing some of its most prominent members, including Al-e Ahmad, in the years before the coup d’état, and rendered it “formally illegal”;Footnote 30 yet Mossadeq allowed them to continue to operate (arguably due to the very same French liberal education he had received) and subsequently play a role in his demise. The Iran Party’s brand of French socialism, on the other hand, had thus created a space of free speech and fraternity that allowed Mossadeq to progress as far as he did in creating a government that fought imperial designs of expropriating the country’s resources.
Yet “French Schools for Iran” and its surrounding advertisements also signal the continuation of the cultural imperialism that Iran had been subjected to since the modernizing efforts of Reza Shah, later continued by his successor and son. While divorcing French education from French political thought in the guise of state-sponsored schooling could help Mohammad Reza Shah’s government in controlling the output of this education, it neglected the anti-Western spirit that was building in the country—a spirit that Al-e Ahmad captured and summarily articulated in his book. Writing of the unidirectional enforcement of goods from the West that has come to define its relationship with Iran and the East, he claims:
This enforced trade even extends to cultural matters, to letters, to discourse. Go flip through our half-dozen so-called heavy literary publications. What news do you see of our part of the world? Of the east in the broadest terms? Of India, Japan, China? All you see is news of the Nobel Prize, of the new pope, of Francoise Sagan, the Cannes Film Festival, the latest Broadway play, the latest Hollywood Film.Footnote 31
He also laments the pervasiveness with which Western history was being studied in schools and discussed in national media:
We ourselves, in the fever of our Occidentosis, have been trumpeting this foolishness for years in our schools and publications and on the radio: the Renaissance, the discovery of the compass, the conquest of America, the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, the invention of the steam engine, the opening of India, the discovery of electricity, and so forth. One even learns these things in fifth-grade geography.Footnote 32
The promotion of this French school is thus taking place against this backdrop of severely critiquing an educational system that was already touting and privileging Western knowledge against local, national, and regional knowledges. Yet Gharbzadegi, this “intellectual bible of several generations of Iranian intellectuals,”Footnote 33 did not capture the imagination of Sepehri. Although some would argue that this could be due to the fact that Sepehri never considered himself an intellectual, Sepehri’s subversion of this East/West binarism in the form of a total disregard for it would indicate otherwise.
The Letter
When I read your letter, I thought, “this one wants to become a poet, too. God help us!” But then my mind was put at ease because I remembered that you Iranians are very, what’s the word? As we Americans would say, Sentimental. Footnote 34 And that’s why no good poets come out of you. You sit in a cafe in Paris, drink your coffee, speak to your friend, and you’re still unhappy. The people of Persia call it insolence. But in fact, it’s a kind of disease. Like the disease that we would call Aerophagie when we were French [emphasis added]. But good poetry is related to health. It requires insight and logic. As far as I know, you Iranians are usually affected with Autoscopie. And only the people of Kashan have remained immune. You’ve made me say proper things. You’ll hear the even more proper things [I have to say] in New York. Come to New York so you can get to know American culture and me. I’ll be your Guide and will show you the following things: my own room. A few skyscrapers, one of my paintings, the UN building, a couple of lines from my own writings, two bears from the zoo, my own intelligence, a few hippies, and a fashion salon. Then you can return to Iran and claim that you have perceived American culture all in one place.Footnote 35 , Footnote 36
It would be quite remiss to interpret Sepehri’s letter literally. Although it would seem that he’s effectively speaking to his Iranian friend from an elitist stance, a more nuanced reading of the letter invalidates such an impression. Through his facetious positioning of himself as a newly minted American against his fellow Iranians, he cleverly exposes some of the shortcomings of critiques leveled against himself as a poet removed from his people and his own time. Yet there are also elements in his letter that should be interpreted straightforwardly, specifically his critique about the situation of poetry in Iran.
The letter must be read with a view of his well-known humorous disposition—a disposition that allowed him to critique certain modes of thought both in Iran and abroad, namely, the positioning of East against West. In the letter, as Sepehri takes on the affect of an American situating himself against Iranians, he simultaneously critiques the affect of the French bourgeoisie taken on by Iranian intellectuals. At the same time, in this humor (and with a study of some of his other letters written during that same period of residence in New York City), one can locate the importance he places on studying what was regarded as Western literature (without becoming plagued by it) and using the possibilities, aesthetic and otherwise, that they offer—possibilities that can be traced in his own poetry.
In the very first lines of the letter, we thus have a multiplicity of places. In fact, we have a triangulation of Iran, the United States, and France (or Paris, to be more precise), along with the qualities that each of these nation-states seemingly generate, in absolute terms, in their citizens. In this triangulation, he is posturing the American citizen-subject, while his friend, Goli, is the Iranian citizen-subject. A few lines later, his choice to write “Persia” in Latin script rather than in Persian, and more importantly, calling it “Persia” instead of Iran, makes his American affect complete.Footnote 37 From the outset, then, he’s creating a distance between himself and “Goli.” Taraghi was not alone in frequenting Paris. Sepehri himself spent two years in Paris, where he enrolled in École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts [National School of Fine Arts] to learn lithography.Footnote 38 Among Sepehri’s generation, Paris in particular was a center for Iranian intellectuals. One of Sepehri’s contemporaries, Daryush Shayegan, who wrote an introduction for and helped publish a collection of Sepehri’s poetry in French, writes, “In my childhood, the name of Paris resonated an unattainable distance for me. In my land, they referred to Paris as “the bride of cities.” But I didn’t know anyone who could draw a clear picture of this city.”Footnote 39 Shayegan succinctly encapsulates the aura of intrigue and grandeur that Paris had in the Iranian imagination and how this aura remained precisely that: an unclear, inarticulable impression left on the mind.
It is possible to connect the Iranian intellectual’s mode of thinking about Paris to Casanova’s argument about the city as “the universal republic of letters,” as:
the capital of a republic having neither borders nor boundaries, a universal homeland exempt from all professions of patriotism, a kingdom of literature set up in opposition to the ordinary laws of states, a transnational realm whose sole imperatives are those of art and literature … Paris therefore became the capital of those who proclaimed themselves to be stateless and above political laws: in a word, artists.Footnote 40
Casanova claims that these qualities arise out of the “apparently antithetical properties” of being “the intellectual capital of the world … and … the source of political democracy.”Footnote 41 Paris’s quality of statelessness and lack of borders and boundaries could thus be connected to the status of the intellectual’s mind in Paris. In other words, those who claim not to belong to any nation-state could also develop a statelessness as it pertains to their minds. Paris becomes “an internal mood,” to cite Shayegan once again, who, echoing Walter Benjamin’s concept of flâneur, writes: “It’s a mental mood that is created by the passing of years, by aimless excursions, by completely senseless strolls, sensitivity to light and to old, worn out stones.”Footnote 42 And it would seem that it is precisely this mode of presence in Paris and the literary creations it leads to that Sepehri is critiquing. Sepehri decenters Paris in the Iranian intellectual imagination by advocating for excursions that are not aimless—excursions of the type that can be seen in “Address.” The title of the poem itself signifies a meaningful search. But before getting to the poem, it’s important to clarify that Sepehri is not writing against Paris itself, but rather the effect that it has on the Iranian intellectual’s imagination.
Through a critique of the Iranian intellectuals sitting in cafes in Paris, he is offering a critique of contemporary Persian poetry. What others would perhaps regard as the intellectuals’ insolence and sense of despondency, he calls a disease; aerophagie or aerophagia is “excessive swallowing of air … in times of stress”Footnote 43—some definitions even include the term hysteria. Footnote 44 His naming of the disease in French and more importantly, attributing it to a time when they were considered (or considered themselves) French, distances him from those who were looking for either literary or political inspiration in Paris, France, and Europe. The disease of swallowing too much air due to anxiety leaves one sick and full, but filled with nothing but air bubbles, and this keeps one from writing good poetry. In another letter written from New York later that same year to a different friend, he compares the possibility of creating literature and art in the United States with Europe:
American poetry, whatever it may be, has an expansive field. And gives one courage. What is impressive in art here is distance, space. In the works here, there is room for movement and breathing. Critique comes later … We haven’t been raised well. Europe has put us in a trance. We’ve had to look a certain way to [be able to] see what is familiar. Before entering the museum, we’ve looked at Vermeer along the way … It’s hard to avoid the sweet flutters that certain aspects of Western civilization have awakened in us. But here, one must become disburdened. One must reach a certain nakedness and begin … I haven’t come here for the smell of democracy.Footnote 45
The weight of European civilization, modernism, and democracy could, therefore, lead to the disease of aerophagia, and it is indeed what burdens the poet and does not allow for original creation. Sepehri moves away from the European modes of aesthetic training toward the nakedness and possibility of the New World. It is not the geographical location of America that is important; rather, it is what the possibilities of its space offer, and that is space itself. Similarly, it is not simply Europe that is the problem. The disease associated with being Iranian that, he’s claimed in the first letter, keeps one from writing good poetry, is autoscopy—literally, self-watching. More specifically, the mental illness of autoscopy is “the visualization or enhanced awareness of one’s own internal organs.”Footnote 46 In this case, therefore, the Iranian writer presumably has an out of body experience, as if witnessing what is going on inside one’s body from outside one’s body. If this is a disease that is specific to Iranians, it would seem that Sepehri is suggesting that in order to have a clear idea of one’s internal organs, of the insides of one’s own country, one needs to have some distance. His travels and his readings give him this distance. The people of Kashan, he claims (tongue-in-cheek), are immune from this disease. For, being from Kashan himself, Sepehri is able to move outward, while remaining cognizant of his origins. Furthermore, by articulating these shortcomings using the language of disease, one could argue that he is offering his own version of the discourse that Al-e Ahmad created in Gharbzadegi. Al-e Ahmad’s first chapter, titled “Diagnosing an Illness,” defines gharbzadegi as a disease acting as “an accident from without, spreading in an environment rendered susceptible to it.”Footnote 47 Sepehri, by referring to the Iranian being afflicted with autoscopy, challenges this diagnosis of the illness as “an accident from without.” In fact, it is the Iranian’s deliberate fixation on the insides that has left the mind of the Iranian subject diseased. Sepehri’s prescription for this disease is purposeful movement that will lead to a revolution in thought. And while the movement itself is purposeful, the end location of the movement is not always clear, nor is it important.
“Where Is the Friend’s Home?”
Sepehri’s language of revolt and revolutionary spirit can be found, unexpectedly perhaps, in his poem “Address.” About this poem, Shayegan writes, “All of the main concepts of Sepehri’s poetic geography are summarized in ‘Address.’ ”Footnote 48 The poem, dedicated to his friend, the painter Abolghassem Saidi, is as follows:
Before getting into the poem itself, it is worth pausing on Sepehri’s dedication to the painter Saidi. Describing a painting by Saidi that includes tree branches reaching out beyond the vertical and horizontal framing of the artwork, Shayegan writes, “These branches stretching out here and there, herald ‘another place’ … ‘another place’ that, despite constant references, is still undiscovered.”Footnote 50 Shayegan’s description of Saidi’s painting practice maps on to Sepehri’s painting and poetry practices (discussions of Sepehri’s work often see his painting and poetry as extensions of one another). Moreover, similar to his friend Saidi, a lot of Sepehri’s paintings included natural landscapes. The directions that the passerby provides in the aforementioned verses thus map on to a vivid, imagistic representation of a landscape that renders it ideal for a visual interpretation in the form of Kiarostami’s film; in fact, in “Kiarostami and the Aesthetics of Modern Persian Poetry,” where Khatereh Sheibani studies his cinematic vision in direct relation to Sepehri’s poetic vision, she writes that his “poetic language [is] inherited from Sepehri [emphasis added].”Footnote 51 Morteza Momayez, a prominent Iranian painter and graphic designer, in an essay about Sepehri titled “Address” writes, “Sepehri the poet is the same as Sepehri the painter, and in his paintings, it is that same breeze of his words that is leaping around.”Footnote 52 Paridokht Sepehri, his sister, writes, “[Sohrab] believed that whomever has a hand in painting will not be left adrift anywhere in the world, and without knowing language can convey his meaning using the language of image.”Footnote 53 For Sepehri, then, the universal language of painting could be translated into a poetic language that was straightforward and evocative in its articulation and that illustrated the centrality of movement across varied landscapes, an integral component of his practice.
The grammatical structure of the question posed in the first line of the poem indicates that the horseman is searching for a particular friend. Yet, the friend is ubiquitous in that anyone to whom the question is posed knows who is being referred to. Although this has led some critics to claim that the friend is God, thus attributing a mystical element to this poem, a reading that moves beyond the identity of the friend makes clear that the path to meeting the friend is more important than the friend itself. A visit with the friend is not the matter of concern in the poem, nor does it take place. Rather, the entirety of the poem is an address. But after reading the directions in full and approaching the end of the poem, contrary to the reader’s expectation, the address, and thus the entirety of the poem, provides directions not to the friend, but to the child in the tree, who can then tell the horseman where the friend’s house is. Part of the act of interpreting the poem, therefore, rests on a correct interpretation of the figure of the child and his role. Kiarostami’s film provides a masterful interpretation of this figure. As Dabashi puts it in Close-up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future, “Like his kindred spirit Sohrab Sepehri, Kiarostami sought a re-reading of reality from a tabula rasa that would make the world once again meaningful and trustworthy.”Footnote 54 In Where Is the Friend’s Home?, this act of rereading reality takes place through the figure of Ahmad and the manner in which he bypasses the power that his teacher exerts upon him and his fellow classmates. Unpacking the dynamics of power in this film, then, manifests Sepehri’s inconspicuous language of revolt.
After the opening credits and a dedication to “the memory of Sohrab Sepehri,” the eighty-minute film opens with the scene of an angry teacher entering a small, bleak, and crowded classroom of boys in a remote village in northern Iran (not far from where Sepehri wrote “The Traveler”—another one of his canonical poems—and where he would spend a considerable amount of his time when he was in Iran). The teacher is angry because he was ten minutes late and he’d expected the children to be sitting politely and waiting patiently for their teacher to arrive, as he had previously instructed. He closes the only open window, and after scolding them, he asks them to take out their notebooks so he can check their homework. A boy raises his hand and notifies the teacher that one of the students is absent. The teacher responds by telling the boy not to speak unless he’s been asked a question. One of the students, Nematzadeh, Footnote 55 takes out his homework, but to the teacher’s dismay, he has written it on some loose pieces of paper instead of his notebook. The teacher repeatedly asks him, “How many times have I told you to write your homework in your notebook?”, to which the boy finally and timidly responds by holding up his three fingers. The teacher continues to yell and reprimand Nematzadeh, who starts to cry. At this point the teacher decides to ask again, repeatedly, “How many times have I told you to write your homework in your notebook?” Once more, the teacher must repeat the question several times before Nematzadeh replies, in a small voice, “Three times, sir.” The teacher then explains that students need to write their homework in their notebooks because first, there are rules to follow when doing work, and second, by keeping a record of their work, the teacher can compare the homework that they’d written two months ago with what they’ve written now. He threatens Nematzadeh that should this happen again, he’ll be expelled from school.
Kiarostami’s preoccupation with the practice of homework in Iran, and the punitive and often ineffectual rote aspects of it, have been well documented in his oeuvre, particularly in his film Homework. In fact, both Homework and Where Is the Friend’s Home? were produced by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults [Kanun-e Parvaresh- Fekri-e Kudakan va Nojavanan]. In Homework, made in the style of a documentary, Kiarostami sits behind the camera and asks elementary schoolboys a series of questions about their homework, including what kind of homework they’re assigned, whether anyone helps them with it, and what the (occasionally physical) disciplinary actions are that they face, both at home and in school, as a result of not completing their homework. In the opening scene of Where Is the Friend’s Home? described earlier, we see how the act of having completed the homework does not count unless it’s been written in its proper place. While the teacher with “his petty-dictatorial mandates and rules”Footnote 56 tries to justify his reasoning for dismissing Nematzadeh’s homework, the final scene of the film overturns any illusions the viewer may have had about the righteous intentions seemingly hiding behind the abusive, suffocating conduct of the teacher.
The final scene of the film takes place, once again, in the classroom, and the events that unfold this morning are almost an exact repeat of the previous day’s events. What has taken place in the interim, however, is a day-long quest by Ahmad, Nematzadeh’s friend, to find Nematzadeh’s house, for as it so happens, Ahmad accidentally takes his friend’s notebook home with him. Upon realizing his mistake, he sets out to find his friend’s house. Among landscapes of expansive hills and valleys, green forests and humble homes, we see Ahmad going from door to door, asking neighbors and villagers whether they know where Nematzadeh lives. At the end of his unsuccessful search, he returns and sits down in his home, with a mix of exasperation and resolution, to write his homework. The next day, the teacher asks the students to take out their homework; the same boy as yesterday raises his hand and tells the teacher that the same boy who was absent yesterday is absent today as well; the teacher tells him not to talk unless he’s been asked a question. Nematzadeh takes out a few loose pages and waits in despair for the teacher to come to his desk. But this time, before the teacher gets to his desk, Ahmad, who arrives late, slips in next to him, takes out Nematzadeh’s notebook as well as his own, and opens both notebooks to last night’s homework; we find that he has written his friend’s homework for him. We wait anxiously with the camera to see if the teacher will notice the identical handwritings. Unsurprisingly, the teacher does not notice; he flips quickly through the pages, marks them as complete, and moves on to the next student.
The formulaic repetition of the opening and closing scenes are exemplars of the repetitive act of writing homework for Persian literature that historically has been asked of students in Iran. Teachers would normally ask a student to copy the Persian lesson they’d learned two or three times. Another common practice was to repeatedly write words or sentences that a student had blundered in dictation. A common practice among students, when forced to repeatedly copy entire sentences, was “raj zadan”—literally, creating threads of words: the student would write the first word of each sentence on each line, then the second word, then the third, and so on, to save time. As a result, the student would produce perfect columns of words on a page while circumventing the teacher’s intended lesson, which was to learn how to copy the sentence in its entirety. In the “Sound of Water’s Footsteps,” another one of Sepehri’s canonical poems, we similarly see perfect columns of text. At first glance, the lines of this text remind one of the thankless and often useless job of dictation practice; but as the lines continue, the reader’s expectation of what will follow is upended—the columns become imperfect:
Throughout the poem, Sepehri thus starts with the implication of a traditional writing practice, a thankless chore that reminds one of dry exercises forced upon students but changes the pattern immediately after the first few words. Each sentence is different, and the repetition at the beginning of each sentence creates, rather, a harmony and musicality, that is anything but thankless or useless. Similarly, Ahmad helps his friend mislead the teacher and fight his authority—an authority that, to cite Dabashi once again, is “not so much defied as ignored.”Footnote 58 What makes his act of writing his friend’s homework even more subversive lies in a scene we witness right after he’s arrived home. Exasperated from his fruitless search, Ahmad sits down to finally complete his homework of copying the lesson from his book (and, as we learn later, complete his friend’s copying lesson as well). His mother asks him to turn off the lights once he’s finished with his homework, and then leaves the room. Some mere seconds later, the door to the room is flung open by the windy night, and through the doorframe we see his mother out on the balcony in between white sheets that are hanging from the clothesline; Ahmad gazes into the night sky, his eyes focused not on the homework in front of him, but on the horizon, and along with him, the camera fixates on the allure of the crisp night air of the village and the white sheets flapping against the dark sky for a few moments. This scene fades into the final scene of the classroom with the teacher standing at the front of the room. The teacher’s earlier act of closing the classroom window, to keep the air and reality of the outside world from creeping in and distracting the students, is thus overturned here by Ahmad’s gaze into the expansive night, even if momentarily—for we know he must have ultimately returned to his homework.
In the aforementioned “The Traveler,” Sepehri writes: “And with a starling sitting on the branch of a cedar tree / the page of the season’s book flipped / and the first line was this: / Life, is Eve’s momentary, colorful inattention.”Footnote 59 Eve’s rebellious act is illustrated as “colorful inattention,” and is glorified and humanized. Examples of such “momentary … inattention(s)” are identifiable throughout Sepehri’s work as they are part of the human condition. Eve’s consumption is thus neither vilified nor gendered. Rather, it is artfully claimed as the source of life. Sepehri’s Edenic vision for the world, therefore, pertains only to its physical qualities and its landscape, as it is stripped from its authoritative, religious meaning. The “momentary, colorful inattention” of Eve and that vision of an Eden is present here. It is present in the figure of Ahmad, who, according to Dabashi, “is the Adam of an Eden yet to be created, and even if it is never created Ahmad is already there.”Footnote 60 And going back to the origination of the film, it is also present in “Address.” The path that the horseman must travel to get to the child evokes an Eden-like landscape, and the elements of this landscape read like a culmination of Sepehri’s poetic geography, to echo Shayegan’s contention about the poem. In this landscape, even a cigarette is a “branch of light,” and the alleys are beyond what God could have envisioned in his dreams. Sepehri thus undermines the creative imagination of, arguably, the highest authority figure and dares to imagine an Edenic landscape with more creativity that is as earthly as it is ethereal. In this earthly reality, an insurrectionary child will climb a tree to take a hatchling from its nest, but what the child is reaching for and taking is, in fact, light. And it is that child, like Kiarostami’s Ahmad, with his insurrection and momentary inattentions, who can show the way to the “friend.” About Kiarostami’s cinema, Dabashi writes, “[it] has always been the furthest from the political, and yet it remains ‘political’ in the most subversive sense of the term. Whether intentionally or not, his cinema is actively engaged in teasing out the hidden assumptions underlying the constitution of the Iranian subject.”Footnote 61 Sepehri’s “political” response to the revolutionary climate of the time, then, consists of returning to the origins of human existence—to the childlike innocence that can be replicated if one simply ignores the hegemonic power structures that attempt to shape the various modes of being present—and of defying authority at the most fundamental level. The culmination of this response is the unspecified landscape that is far from any cultural center, where Sepehri locates his rudimentary language of revolt.
In the final lines of the letter that I read as the terminus in the road map of Sepehri’s poetic geography, he tells Taraghi that if she visits him in New York, he’ll show her some things that will allow her to go back to Iran and “claim that [she] has perceived American culture all in one place.” The components of the American culture he describes and, more importantly, the fact of New York being the repository of this culture, is quite telling in his characterization of not only American culture in particular, but culture at large: “A few skyscrapers, one of my paintings, the UN building, a couple of lines from my own writings, two bears from the zoo, my own intelligence, a few hippies, and a fashion salon.” Notably, he inserts himself within this culture as well. In other words, his own artistic and literary productions, in his view, could also be part and parcel of American culture. The more immediate implication of this could be a gesture toward a worldview that consists of an inherent diversity and multinationalism within the literary and cultural productions of nation-states perceived as fixed and unitary. But more importantly, this gestures toward his idea about culture writ large, as well as his qualms with the elitism of it. The American culture that Sepehri is introducing, consists, once again, of the mundane and the inconspicuous. In other words, Sepehri is not at all concerned with culture in the traditional sense of the word. To go back to his contentions about the United States in one of his other letters mentioned earlier, in a “naked” American landscape and the space that it offers, there is an opportunity to use this New World as a testing ground for his Edenic imagination, to “disburden” himself and to flesh out the ideas for which he was vilified in Iran. This does not mean, however, that New York was that Eden. Although he was constantly traveling, his poems were mostly written when he was at home, and mostly in villages, not in Tehran—for Tehran was the epitome of the homogenized nation. My intention has not been to argue that Sepehri was at home abroad and that he constantly traveled because he was trying to find a space to belong. Rather, in the “best and most accurate account of [Sepehri’s] work ever written,”Footnote 62 according to the poet himself, Shayegan writes:
Sepehri’s poetry is filled with spaces beyond … The space beyond is a threshold, the interval between here and an imaginary land. And isn’t there always an aperture open through every passage from one manner of presence to another? … Every poem is an invitation to the space beyond, to find the absent friend.Footnote 63
One could read these lines through the lens of mysticism, which was indeed a matter of interest for Sepehri. Yet, reducing his advocacy of finding spaces beyond to a mode of spiritual presence ignores his lifelong practice of traveling, whether it was physical travels across the globe or the mental transportations he would experience reading Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot while living in the south of Iran; journaling about their poetic practices and musing on the meaning of art, he endorsed Ezra Pound’s editing of “The Wasteland,” for, he wrote, “a work of art is not complete. It doesn’t have structure.”Footnote 64 Far from being a “lullaby,” then, in his work he put into practice this very freedom of thought and form that allowed for revolutionary modes of creation—modes that took the reader back to fundamental, Edenic concepts of being. For Sepehri, New York, both as a world literary space and a New World terminal, became a “space beyond” for this poet-traveler and his traveling poetic personas to articulate manners of freedom from hegemonic modes of thinking, both on an individual level and through engaging in dialogue via a multiplicity of languages on a collective level. Yet this collective transcends the boundary of the nation-state and thinks beyond independence in the realm of the geopolitical and works toward a liberation from border thinking altogether.
