Neda Agha Soltan

1982-2009

Neda Agha Soltan, an Iranian student, was attending a protest in Tehran today when she was shot in the chest by a Basij militiaman.  Her death was captured in a shocking video that has now been seen around the world.  She may not have desired it, but she has become a symbol.  Her name, Neda, means “The Voice.”

Her death may have been foretold by another Iranian woman, who anonymously wrote on the night before:

"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I’m two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children…"

After Neda was murdered, she wrote again:

Yesterday I wrote a note, with the subject line "tomorrow is a great day perhaps tomorrow I’ll be killed." I’m here to let you know I’m alive but my sister was killed…

I’m here to tell you my sister died while in her father’s hands
I’m here to tell you my sister had big dreams…
I’m here to tell you my sister who died was a decent person… and like me yearned for a day when her hair would be swept by the wind… and like me read "Forough"… and longed to live free and equal… and she longed to hold her head up and announce, "I’m Iranian"… and she longed to one day fall in love to a man with a shaggy hair… and she longed for a daughter to braid her hair and sing lullaby by her crib…

my sister died from not having life… my sister died as injustice has no end… my sister died since she loved life too much… and my sister died since she lovingly cared for people…

my loving sister, I wish you had closed your eyes when your time had come… the very end of your last glance burns my soul….

sister have a short sleep. your last dream be sweet.

These moving and powerful symbols are emerging from a culture that, to Western eyes, has historically been oppressive to women.  Nonetheless, they emerge as brave and fierce opponents of oppression.  Embedded in their cultural heritage is figure as meaningful to Iranian woman as any Judeo-Christian symbol is to us: Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, wife of Ali.  Through the centuries, just as our Christian symbols have been manipulated to suit the purposes of the powerful, so has Fatima. In spite of this, she has survived.

From Massoume Price’s Lecture “Distinguished Women, Past and Present: Fatima is Fatima” :

Yet at another level she is the fighter and the defender of the true faith and justice. After her fathers’ death the power struggle starts, her family representing the true faith, the pure and the holy blood is pushed aside. It is her speech that stirs, accuses and reveals all that is wrong and how deviations will happen with the greedy leaders who will change the course of Islam for ever and for worse. At the domestic level she is the loyal daughter, the devoted wife, the caring mother and a symbol of endurance. Such themes have been used for centuries to project her image as that of the ideal Muslim woman. The one who will not hesitate to sacrifice all including herself for the sake of her family and the true fate.

Friday, the 19th of June 2009

Tomorrow, Saturday, is a day of destiny

Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar are heard louder and louder than the nights before.

Where is this place?

Where is this place where every door is closed?

Where is this place where people are simply calling God?

Where is this place where the sound of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?

I wait every night to see if the sounds will get louder and whether the number increases.

It shakes me.

I wonder if God is shaken.

Where is this place where so many innocent people are entrapped?

Where is this place where no one comes to our aid?

Where is this place where only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world?

Where is this place where the young shed blood and then people go and pray?

Standing on that same blood and pray…

Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?

Where is this place?   You want me to tell you?

This place is Iran.

The homeland of you and me.

This place is Iran.

These words reference and were inspired by I Corinthians 13.  I am by no means a bible scholar, but I happened to recognize these references to a particular passage that I am using as a theme for Winslow.  I’m also not particularly religious, and I firmly believe in secular government, but if you’re going to reference scripture, and use words that can touch believers of all faiths (and even non-believers whom Obama made a point of including) you can’t find a better passage to reference than this:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face-to-face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

I think it’s entirely appropriate that a poet speak at a presidential inauguration.  I just saw filmmaker Ken Burns on television describing America as a country based on nothing more, nothing less, than ideas.  I believe that is true.  We are a nation of immigrants, all from different cultures and different religions.  The only thing that binds us together are the ideas first expressed by Thomas Jefferson what he wrote of “truths we hold self-evident.”  The power of these truths is that they have been in the past, and should be now and in the future, stronger than anything that divides us.

Words, that express ideas, that attempt to articulate truth, matter.  They matter deeply.

One can be skeptical about art that is produced to support a state event.  How can it be any good?  Isn’t it just fancy propaganda?  To ask that question ignores the difference between  art and politics.  Art seeks to express deep universal truths.  It may or may not align with a political agenda.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

I imagine that it’s very difficult to create a poem that both serves its inspirational purpose, but also reaches beyond political agendas to to touch some universal truth that resonates with us.  As much as I love it, Ginsberg’s “Howl” (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”) isn’t going to cut it at an inauguration.  The poem must be patriotic, which doesn’t mean it has to be propagandistic.  The poem must be positive, but not falsely so.  It must be emotionally moving, but not sentimental.  But its most important purpose at such an occasion is to give voice to our common identity, those ideas that bind us together, and the journey that we have been on in perfecting how reality reflects those ideas.

As a writer, and especially as a poet of modest talent, I’m in awe of how well Elizabeth Alexander spoke for us.  Every word, every image, contains an epic story:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

Fiction

• “A Couple” – Cantaraville Two (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Absolutely Fourth Street” – The Square Table
• “Bonnifer” – Lily (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Calvin’s Monster” – Word Riot
• “Indian Summer” -  Cantaraville Four
• “Truths” – The Square Table
• “Natural Selection” – Cantaraville Eight (also available in the eBook Store)
• Short Story Cycle – in progress
  • “Brothers” – The Square Table
  • “Come Together” – Cantaraville Six

Memoir

• “After the Fire” – Oregon Literary Review (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Gifts” – Seeker Magazine
• “The Persistence of Gravy” – Static Movement

Poetry

• “On The Beach” – The Green Silk Journal
• “Compartments” – Mississippi Crow, Issue 7, available in print and download here.
• “The Clouds, A Highway…and Joni” – The Shine Journal
• “A Victorian in 1990″ – Loch Raven Review. Also anthologized in the annual edition:
  
  

  Loch Raven Review – Four

  Jim Doss. Loch Raven Press 2009, Paperback, 316 pages, $14.95

Early Fiction

My first published stories appeared in Tangent, the student literary journal at SUNY Albany in 1981 and 1982.  They were my only published stories until 2005 when I started writing again.  During that long silence I always intended to write again, and I made a point of transcribing all my early writings from typed manuscripts to electronic format, beginning with Wordstar on my first computer a Kaypro II.  Over the years I converted the files as word processing technology advanced.  Here they are, with a couple of vintage cover scans in adobe pdf: Early Stories.

As my interest awakened, I started feeling a need to be around other writers and artists. I fondly remembered my college days where my circle of friends included not only writers, but also poets, actors, painters, anarchists, Marxists, vegetarians, and various other misfits. I had spent my final two years in college with at least one writing workshop each semester. I wasn’t about to abandon a successful and fulfilling career to give in to a midlife crisis, much to the relief of my family, but I still needed to feel some connection to other people who view the world from an artistic (“odd”) point of view. I decided that a two week immersion at a writers conference would be enough to satisfy this need without causing too much disruption.

I decided on the New York State Writers Institute conference for several reasons. First, the conference was in Saratoga Springs, of which I had fond memories. I went to school at SUNY Albany and I had spent some time in Saratoga Springs. It’s a beautiful place, especially in summer. Second, I had a somewhat remote connection with the Writers Institute. The New York State Writers Institute was founded in 1984, two years after I graduated from college by William Kennedy, who had taught at SUNY Albany. Although I hadn’t studied with Kennedy, I had known him slightly from just hanging around the English Department. Finally, it was the writers who taught and read at the institute. Many years earlier, I had read Mary Gordon’s Final Payments and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Having recently returned to reading literary fiction, I was now captivated by Robinson’s gorgeous prose in Gilead. Both were teaching at the institute that summer, as they have for many years. I sent in a writing sample, an early draft of a story called “A Couple,” and was utterly surprised when I was accepted into the intermediate writing workshop. I was far too intimidated to even apply for the master class taught by Gordon and Robinson.

And so, with the blessing of my wife and daughter, I packed up my car and drove up to Saratoga that first summer, with the first two chapters of my still unfinished novel, Winslow. Needless to say, since I returned for the next two summers, it was a wonderful experience. There were a few things that were a little unsettling at first. Age, for one. Although the students of all ages attend the conference, and while I was far from being the oldest one there, I certainly wasn’t the youngest one. Most of the students were undergraduates or graduate students. There were times that first summer where I felt a bit like Roy Hobbs from Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. Also, as an undergraduate, I’d always gotten a queasy feeling whenever my work was coming up for discussion in a workshop and that hadn’t changed, but the workshop and the entire environment was so supportive that I never felt like I didn’t belong there.

During the three years I have attended, I’ve had the privilege to participate in workshops conducted by some wonderful teachers: Elizabeth Benedict, Kathryn Harrison, and Gish Jen. The most enjoyable parts of going to these conferences, however, have been the evening readings (which are followed by equally enjoyable beer and wine receptions). I’ll never forget the inspiring creative buzz I felt on those leaving the lecture halls on those moonlight summer nights. Many of the writers who read at the conference read new work before it has been published. Some moments that stand out in my mind are Elizabeth Benedict reading a very moving personal essay called “Mad Dog Taborsky & Me,” one year and another year reading a hilarious and adult-rated essay on internet porn. Yes, she is indeed, “wickedly entertaining.” Another experience that I’ll never forget is Joyce Carol Oates reading from her novella, “Papa at Ketchum, 1961,” before it was published in her book Wild Nights. More than simply mimicking Papa’s writing style, she captured his desperation at the end of his life. Sentences rang out like gunshots and the only way I can describe the experience is shattering.

The most inspiring performances at the readings, however, were the poets. Invariably, they were the ones who sent me off in the night ready to try anything as a writer. The purity of their focus on language, words and words alone, helped to see all over again that every single word matters. I’m not really a poet myself, but the few poems I have written were written in the days and weeks that followed these readings. As poor as they are, my poems owe their existence to Carolyn Forche, Robert Pinsky, Charles Simic, and Campbell McGrath.

I’m hoping to begin a low-residency MFA program next year, so I won’t have enough vacation time to be able to attend both the conference and my on-campus residencies. so this year was probably my last trip to Saratoga. When I left Saratoga for the last time this past July, it was with a bittersweet feeling for many reasons, but it was also with a conference inspired poem called, “Compartments,” which has been published in Mississippi Crow.

Writers and poets mentioned:

Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis. Vintage 1998, Paperback, 208 pages, $6.72

Almost

Elizabeth Benedict. Mariner Books 2002, Paperback, 272 pages, $0.01

While They Slept

Kathryn Harrison. Ballantine Books 2009, Mass Market Paperback, 288 pages, $3.80

Who’s Irish?

Gish Jen. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 224 pages, $5.94

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson. Picador 2006, Paperback, 247 pages, $2.56

Final Payments

Mary Gordon. Anchor 2006, Paperback, 304 pages, $8.17

Blue Hour

Carolyn Forche. Harper Perennial 2004, Paperback, 96 pages, $8.04

The Figured Wheel

Robert Pinsky. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997, Paperback, 320 pages, $1.97

Sixty Poems

Charles Simic. Mariner Books 2008, Paperback, 108 pages, $0.47

Seven Notebooks

Campbell Mcgrath. Ecco 2009, Paperback, 240 pages, $3.39