Photo: Parham Shahrjerdi        

 

 

 

 

Censorship by Ali Abdolrezaei

 

Compared to the artistic means at one’s disposal when creating music or painting, W.H.Auden contemplated that for the poet, language has many advantages. In artistic discourse, there are three pronouns, three tenses and speech can occur in both the active/passive voice (1).
Ali Abdolrezaei idiosyncratically invokes all language possibilities in the narration of his subject matter. True or false his verses may be, but the deeds are distinctive of his style of diction/imagery and syllabic spell appropriate to the occasion. His approach breaks with the traditional Aristotelian narrative of a beginning, a middle and an end.
There are many poems in which the use of pronouns is fragmentarily accompanied by disorientated persona to indicate the heterogeneity of modern times.

Ali's lines, reflecting his temperament, do not please critics who prefer poets to remain stable entities both in their history and in their writing. His poetry questions the stability of the relationship between writer and critic as the registers he uses are subject to constant change. It is fluidity that makes Ali Abdolrezaei’s work so vibrant and so difficult to pin down. The poet’s creativity ensures the truth of his poetic identity can never, by definition, be found. His poetry is not the Word made Flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh. The meaning of his poems, like the meaning of a text on his biography, is not perpetually fixed. Thus, there is no original meaning that we can recover.
He is young and speaks for the new generation of Iranian aesthetics. The trajectory of Abdolrezaei's career begins in a blaze of vision capable of speaking in the voice of a generation with multi-facetted vibrations. At times, he appears to portray deeper sceneries of the new artistic temperaments and the young's cultural chasms with the past amid a repressive political regime. Abdolrezaei's reputation as a poet speaking in the voice of his time spread in the early 1990s with an impressive range of Iranian critics and writers making statements about him.
Abdolrezaei's life and poetry as constructions are of a critical nature. Layers of narrative and analysis, wit and prejudice confront his readers. We should remain vigilant that at a fundamental level, his life and work are "open stories" accommodating diverse interpretations. Abdolrezaei is particularly aware that his poetry is destined to undergo transformations beyond his control. His resistance to having a biography written about him is part of this awareness to his future literary metamorphoses.

When considering Abdolrezaei's work, the narrative makes up the constructed "I" that inhabits the poems. In other words, the poet is simply dispersed and lives in a bundle of texts strung together. The Abdolrezaei we perceive as a poet is also the product of discourses, which run through and beyond him. It is the wholeness and that depth of form coming from inner experience which allows intertexual readings their scope.

The poem "Censorship", strictly speaking, is an inferred biography. Although he prefers that no biography be written, he hopes attentive readers of his poems can extract as much knowledge from his language constructions as possible.
This poem is soaked in metamorphosis: as a very comprehensive metaphor. This motif in both literary and real forms crops up constantly. The weird isolation the helpless rejection and the tragic perversion forced on him are so intense that it would seem impossible in almost any other society.
 

My heart is bleeding for the poet whose queue of words is getting longer
for the branch less sparrow who's swallowed its twitter
for the restitution of a crow with no overhead wire
for myself
gone from the house like electricity

 

This poem is written from a heightened, desperate, point of view. The final assertion is the admission of the metamorphosis he underwent as to become a poet.
 

I was somebody
Did the foolish thing became a poet!
 

To be a poet is a foolish decision committed, oddly, by tragic heroes - with a suggestion of scapegoat or criminal. This transformation belongs to Us because We are negated by Them and Their alienation.
Poetry is a transcendental symbol for rebirth. It is only through such experience that we can leave the old baggage for good and be reborn. There exists a purification notion of poetry: a sustained flood of metaphor shifts throughout the poem.
In the exile, from his cold heights, he can see differently; free of the old perspectives one returns with new insights.
 

How this side of being where I am is all the more other-sided in Iran
Fathurt mothurt my brothurt!
My condition is more critical than hurt
writing's more emasculated than me
 

Writing is akin to mountain climbing or to the hero's dangerous actions/ journey. Analogy of the task of writing poetry is extended even to the painful labour of human birth.
Poetry is a means by which to realise that the well-entrenched discursive structures and social interests attempt to supervise meaning and truth. In the above stanza, the suffix `hurt` is added to the closest endeared family roles (e.g. brother; mother and father) to imply the painful sense of meaning associated with the concept Identity. Although the poet is reborn in exile, his sense of belonging to the beloved home is still hurtful. Here a symptomatic reading of the poem, as a metaphor, is called for.
 

In pursuit of the lesson I did at school
I'm no longer Jack the lover to my Jill
I'm doing my new homework
You cross it out
 

His estrangement from society, either indigenous or exiled, allows him to see its shortcomings. Poetry for Abdolrezaei is a vehicle by which he treats serious subjects in an ironically lowbrow manner.
The most important poetry technique that Abdolrezaei explores in his work is what we might call the ‘unexpected’ principle. He allows the reader to develop a series of expectations which he then disappoints by injecting incongruity. In the stanza above, the second line negates the first and the forth line is demanding an action to annihilate the third. Once the reader has exerted the conscious effort needed to solve these incongruities, s/he may inescapably come to accept a fresh evaluation as to rethink their life on the basis of the poem's insights.
Abdolrezaei's position comes close to trapping the elusive truth and making it available to the conscious mind. The truth that this poem reveals may be a serious insistence on the impossibility that humankind speaks truth. By the same token, it is inevitable that humankind suffers from past experiences.
 

I in my life who am pen like to the lines of this meagre page am mother
The cat's paws are still prancing
to scare the mouse
running for the hole they filled
 

Poetry is itself an instance of play-acting to reveal something to actors who may never come to realise what they are really like off-stage. This poem implies the poet can say something true only on the page face, as the stage on which he verbally plays. The poem asserts that speaking the truth may irritate the reader. So Abdolrezaei indeed contradicts Keats's axiom that "poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity". His poetry is meant to scare those incapable to face truth. It requires an effort to discover the exact relevance of his allusions used in this stanza. In poems, he acts as cat scaring readers, mice-like, to run for the hole.
 

In the massacre of my words
they've beheaded my last line
and blood ink like is hitting on paper
there's death stretched over the page
 

The poem starts in earnest with an outright violence "massacre of my words" which is responsible for the rest of it. The rebellious massacre of words occurs when the assumptions behind `truth` are confronted. Via a system of dichotomies, someone who desires `beauty` assumes it is `truth`. Those who are shocked into moral awareness beyond the dichotomy of the pretty and the ugly must have waged such a bloody war on the poet's words. Their demands are simple and absolute. The naïve, enraged audience marched on to massacre his words and behead his last lines. But their enduring belief would bring them to grief elsewhere.
This "Achilles' heel" constitutes the contrast between what the poet looks for and what the power relations expect him to show.
Despite the expectations, the poet moves, deliberately on not trying to be aesthetically pleasing or emotionally adhering to the dualistic vision of `manhood` versus `womanhood` as in the nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill" learnt at school.
 

a new gun has finished off the world
and I imported goods like through this alley's doors
am still the very meagre room that emigrated
 

 

The new weaponry safeguards the same long literary and iconographic tradition believing that aesthetic qualities signify righteous ones.
The theme of pain, running through the entire poem, refers to the difficulties inherent in the execution of poetry that might elevate humans from such prejudiced assumptions. This endeavour forced the poet to leave his homeland and immigrate to Britain. In spite of such a huge step, he says he is still the same "meagre room" in an alley back home. The lines in the following stanza describe his plight not yet relieved in the exile.
 

and London with its hair highlights of a weather is still
sisterly awaiting
Death to stretch over my body
for life to kill me again
 

 

Abdolrezaei's experiences of life in London are presented here in an abstract form because literal depictions can't be met by instrumental language.
If poetry isn’t wish-fulfilment, what is it? Abdolrezaei would say it’s a means through which our aspirations for the developmental truth and existential rebirth are satisfied.
In the very last stanza, the poet appears to have contempt for poetry:
 

I was somebody
Did the foolish thing became a poet!
 

 

Is his assertion to be taken at face value? His poetry says it all for him: he made his poem and it is our turn to "cross it out", censor it or face reality.
This heavy metal poem exhaustingly manages to achieve the metamorphosis of pain and vision into art. The beauty of the representation and the ugliness it represents are both affirmed and concealed under the success of its illusion.
In this poem, the role of the reader is crucial; for what it sets up is an open-ended interpretation in which the hermeneutic circle is never closed.
Abdolrezaei's poetry is a carnival rite rather than a solemn memorial, and his language has an astonishing lexical range and ironic implications.

September 2008

 

 

1- DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT-VIII-1959
2- I should thank Dr. Helen Pearce once again for her friendship and kind contribution in auditing this article.


 

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