I haven’t been writing and it hurts; it’s a tightness in my chest and a twist in my gut, and there is a part of me that wants to scream. Well, maybe not scream, but at least to grunt, let out some exclamation of frustration that I have not been making poems, and I have not been working–or only recently started working again–on the foreword I need to write for the translation of the beginning of Shahnameh that has been sitting on my desk more or less completed for the last couple of months. The other day, while I was waiting in a hotel lobby in Washington DC for a friend to call, I was able to get just a little bit of work done on that introduction, but it wasn’t writing. I was taking notes on a book that has been sitting on my shelf for at least a month waiting for me to read it. It’s an interlibrary loan, and I am sure it is very, very overdue. (I find it funny that they abbreviate interlibrary loan ILL; whenever I get an email telling me that a book I have requested has arrived, the subject heading is something like “Your ILL Request,” and it just makes me smile. I have a strange sense of humor that way.) Anyway, I was taking notes on this book and just that little bit of work made me so happy. Because it was my work, not for school, not to make money, but just the work that I do, or one kind of work that I do, to make my life meaningful, to make meaningful and beautiful things to send out into the world.

The book is called Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography, and it’s by A. Shapur Shahbazi. Ferdowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shahnameh, an epic poem of about 50,000 couplets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mythopoetic beginnings to the moment right before the Arab Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE. Shahnameh is often called Iran’s national epic, and for good reason. Not only do the stories in the poem still resonate in Iranian culture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the German scholar B. Spuler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shahbazi uses as an epigraph to the book:

In the last analysis it was The Shah-nama [...] that became the milestone for the self-affirmation of the Iranian identity. [T]he importance of the poems of Ferdowsi (and subsequently of later poets) for the preservation of the Iranian character can in no way be overestimated. They provided the entire Iranian folk–nobles, townspeople, artisans and peasants–with that “Iranianness” which despite all social differences united them, perfectly mirrored their image, and allowed them to identify themselves as fully and totally Iranian.

The book is called “a critical biography,” at least in part because Shahbazi arrives at his understanding of Ferdowsi’s life through a critical reading of Shahnameh. The poet left no notebooks, no memoir and the information that we have about his life from outside the epic, as Shahbazi shows, is entirely apocryphal. Indeed, an interesting question raised by this book, though I doubt Shahbazi intended this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to prefer a truthful accounting of a great writer’s life to the myths and legends that grow up around him, especially when the work he is famous for is as important to a nation’s cultural identity as Shahnameh.

So, for example, the traditional story of the poem’s composition has the peasant Ferdowsi laboring for 25 years to write the poem, hoping to earn from it a dowry for his daughter. When, through the good offices of an intermediary, he presents the poem to Sultan Mahmud of Gazna, however, the intermediary’s enemies among the Sultan’s advisers convince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, especially since Ferdowsi is a Shiite and therefore a heretic. Taking his advisers’ advice, the Sultan pays Ferdowsi only 50,000 pieces of silver, not gold, an amount which Ferdowsi sees as an insult. So, instead of taking the payment for himself, he divides the money between two people who have served him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sultan in a satire of which only a small number of lines survive. Eventually, he returns home, though he continues to live in constant fear of the Sultan.

One day, something happens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the greatness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his earlier to decision to underpay the man. So the Sultan sends along with a suitable apology, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin increase over the amount Ferdowsi had originally expected. Just as the couriers arrive with the money, however, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being carried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daughter, according to this story, refuses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.

Shahbazi shows that this story is completely false. It is now generally accepted, he points out, that Ferdowsi was not a peasant, was never in Sultan Mahmud’s court and never had a daughter. Yet which story is better, which one should be the story about Ferdowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Ferdowsi was a member of the landed gentry, that he composed the Shahnameh while living on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really matters is the truth, but the lessons in the apocryphal story are also truths that are important to tell and the way that Ferdowsi and his daughter behave when confronted with the different payments from the Sultan embody values it is worth emulating, or at least honoring. I’m not suggesting that we should accept falsehoods as history, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the falsehoods become part of the history, part of Ferdowsi’s biography, even as he (Shahbazi) claims to be arriving at as accurate a factual biography of Ferdowsi as can be gleaned from the text of the Shahnameh itself.

But I started writing about how painful it is to be not to be writing, which is ironic, of course, because I am writing this blog post, and I will admit that sitting here in my bed, half listening to the TV program my son is watching in the next room, pecking away at these keys is making me feel better. Except that my foot is starting to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the middle of one now for a couple of days, the result of having lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver detoxification regimen my doctor put me on. The pain is starting to distract me and so I have lost track of where I wanted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which writing seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actually reduce it, the way writing is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am wondering about the connection between the pain I feel when I am not writing, the pain of my gout, and the way writing seems to alleviate both.

I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how people experience pain as something alien, something other, something not of the body. Which is ironic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The preposition is significant. Metaphorically, it suggests that pain is something physical we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is correct, and if I understand her–or my memory of what she wrote–correctly, we experience pain as something inside of us that we need to get out of us, something that cannot be integrated into who we are. It can be forced on us, as in torture–and the first part of Scarry’s book is a discussion of torture–but it is not something that we can integrate, that we can make a part of ourselves, the way we make pleasurable sensations welcome within us, make them part of who we are in the world.

Language (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain meaning–language, after all, is how we give everything meaning–but it is the only way we can make the reality of our pain comprehensible to someone else. Indeed, perhaps on some level we need to make our pain comprehensible in ways that we don’t need to do with our pleasures. After all, it is–at least for me–perfectly possible to keep one’s pleasures entirely private, not to name them, and still find them immensely satisfying. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, especially but not only emotional and psychological pain, I need community; I need to be able to tell someone, and while I sometimes may be the only one I tell by writing about it, that is never an entirely satisfactory solution. I need to know there is someone else who understands me or who has at least tried to understand me.

And so I wonder about the degree to which community, the human need for community and communication, is rooted in pain, and I wonder if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body reminding me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No matter how deeply internal and personal and interior the motivation to write may be, no matter how solitary the act of writing is, everything I write is also an invitation to community the goal of which is not so different from the way Spuler describes the Shahnameh as being “the milestone for the self-affirmation of the Iranian identity.” Sometimes, especially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sadness, because I know I will keep writing anyway, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled instead with a giddy hopefulness, and that makes me happy.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

A friend of mine who does not like jazz–especially anything that has a saxophone in it–told me once about a conversation she and her ex-husband, a serious jazz-lover, had over dinner with a couple, the male half of which also loved jazz, while the female half felt similarly to my friend. This second woman defined her dislike by saying something along the lines of, “I don’t need to sit and listen to a bunch of men masturbating,” a reference both to the emphasis in jazz on the improvised solo and to the fact that most jazz musicians–or maybe most well-known jazz musicians–seem to be men. My friend said she felt an immediate click of rightness when her dinner guest made this statement, which led to a long discussion about the comparison between music and sex, between improvisation and solo sex–though, of course, jazz improvisation is not usually done in solitude. I have written elsewhere about the connection I made early on in my own sexual awakening between the orchestrating of sexual pleasure during lovemaking and music, but what my friend’s story made me think about was how, say, a certain kind of jazz solo, where the musician explores subtle nuances of melody and harmony, or the various ways in which you can slice up a beat to create different rhythmic textures, corresponds to the kind of masturbation in which you use the pleasure you are giving yourself to explore yourself, either through the fantasies that arise while you masturbate or through the different kinds of awareness your solo lovemaking gives you of your own body; and then I thought about how rock solos or blues solos or the large solo concerts that Keith Jarrett once gave all have an analog in masturbation, from the kind that is just a release of sexual tension to the kind that is an affirmation in deep sadness and/or joy–and/or the entire range of emotions it is possible to feel during sex, which means pretty much all the emotions of which human beings are capable–of the fact that you are alive, which for me is what defines the sound of the blues, to the kind that is large and complexly motivated and that you may never fully understand.

Masturbation is, as all sex is, a working through of who we are and how we feel about ourselves, of what we wish for, of what we wish to avoid, of the history of our bodies, of everything that makes us human in the capacity of our bodies to experience that humanity; and there is a way in which sex is the creation of a symbol of that humanity: in the pleasures we move through on our way to orgasm, not because orgasm is the only and necessary goal of sex–though in masturbation orgasm usually is the point–but because each orgasm, whether we are conscious of it or not, is something to which we have to give meaning, and meaning requires history, not only the specific history of the sensations that brought you to this particular orgasm, but the larger personal and cultural history that each of those sensations taps into. I know I’ve had orgasms that changed me. Some were solitary and some were shared, but all of them captured a truth about myself that I needed to face if I was going to grow, sexually and otherwise.

This symbolic aspect of sex–which may or may not be an accurate way of talking about these things, but which makes sense to me–reminds me as well of something I read a long time ago in Suzanne Langer’s book, Feeling and Form about how music is the symbolic representation of the process of human emotion and that it is this symbol which the composer creates on the page and that the performer plays into existence when he or she performs; and so it occurs to me that sex, solo or otherwise, is the playing into existence of that part of ourselves that is waiting to become, and sometimes we will understand what we are becoming in and through sex, and sometimes sex is what opens us up to the fact that this understanding is what we need to find.

So I am wondering: What have people out there understood? What have they found? Which are the orgasms that have changed you?

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Three students from my technical writing class came to see me during my office hours a couple of weeks ago because they were unhappy with the grades they received on their first assignment of the semester and they wanted my help in rewriting it for a better grade. The assignment, which I give every time I teach technical writing, is pretty straightforward. Students are instructed to imagine that it is the end of the previous semester–which in this case would be Spring 2009–and they have gone to the English Department office, where they are told that registration for Technical Writing is by instructor’s permission only, and so they need to submit to me a letter of application. In writing this letter, they are allowed to use any source material they think is relevant: the syllabus I have handed them, the college catalog, my faculty and/or personal website, my ratings on ratemyprofessors.com–anything–as long as what they write contains the following:

1. An explanation of the course’s relevance to either their career goals or their academic careers;
2. A discussion of what they perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses as writers;
3. A discussion of what they believe they have to offer the class.

The assignment is difficult, especially given the fact that my students are, overwhelmingly, college freshmen or sophomores. Not only have most of them never had to write a real letter of application before–and good letters of application are damned hard to write–but even seasoned writers can find it difficult to articulate their writing strengths and weaknesses. More, it is rare that an 18-, 19- or 20-year-old has the maturity to write persuasively about either her or his character traits or plans for the future. Indeed, one of my goals is that, by confronting students with just how difficult it is to write about themselves in a way that is both persuasive and professional, the assignment will spur at least some of them to think a little more deeply about who they are, what they want to do with their lives, the place of writing in their lives, and how and why they choose to present themselves in writing the way they do.

The first student who came to see me, a woman from Senegal for whom English is a third language, received an F on her paper because it was filled with so many grammatical, editing and proofreading errors that, had it been an actual letter of application, I would have stopped reading after the first half of the first sentence. Truly, it read like she’d spent, at most, fifteen minutes typing, unfiltered, whatever was in her brain and then handed to me the piece of paper that emerged from her printer without giving it even the most cursory of second glances. Almost the first thing she said to me when she sat down in my office was, with her eyes starting to tear up, that maybe the best thing for her to do was drop my course. Clearly she was a horrible writer, she said, and she did not want to end up with an F on her transcript. I asked her if she was a good writer in French, the language of instruction in her country, and she said yes. I asked her what grades she’d gotten in high school on the essays she’d written in French, and she told me A’s and B’s. The problem, then, I explained–and I am paraphrasing a much longer conversation–was not that she was a horrible writer. Literacy skills transfer from a first to a second–and even a third and fourth–language. The problem was that she hadn’t taken the time to do her best work, and when I suggested that maybe this was because she’d figured writing a letter would be easy, she smiled and nodded. Now that she knew better, she said, she would at least give rewriting the assignment a chance before deciding to drop the course.

I’ve been teaching in the English Department of the community college that employs me for twenty years now, and I am still surprised–though perhaps I shouldn’t be–that it’s the students who are used to getting good grades with whom I have to have the above conversation. Not that these students are the only ones who fail to take assignments seriously, but they tend to be the ones who come to my office either, like my student from Senegal, more or less destroyed by the poor grade I have given them or convinced that what they need is to get from me my personal “Student Road Map to the A.” Student who are looking for the latter tend to argue that my standards are not just different from those of all the other teachers who have graded their work in the past; my standards are much, much tougher. This was what the second student who came to see me said. An African-American man who wants to be an inventor and a consultant, his first words after he sat down across from me were, “I don’t understand what you don’t understand about what I wrote.” It’s a fair question, and one I usually look forward to answering because it can lead to real dialogue and real learning on the part of the student, except that–at least at first–this student was more interested in persuading me that the strategy he used in his letter should have gotten him a better grade than the C I gave him than in hearing my explanation for why it didn’t. I explained, giving several examples to illustrate my point, that his letter was neither well-focused nor well-enough substantiated and organized to convince me, were he truly applying, to admit him to my class. Each time I paused to see if he understood what I was saying, though, he responded by explaining in turn that his goal in the letter was for me to get to know him as the impressive person he is–that is my paraphrase of what he said; he was not, in fact, arrogant enough to say it like that–because that knowledge, he felt, ought to have been sufficient for the letter to succeed. When I suggested that asking me to read five paragraphs of often irrelevant detail about himself before he even mentioned the fact that he was applying to my class might be asking a bit too much, he explained, again, how important it was for me to get to know him. “I still don’t understand why you don’t get this,” he said.

So I went over one paragraph with him in extreme detail. I showed him how adding specific examples to support the claims he was making about himself, while at the same time taking out the irrelevant information, would make his letter persuasive. He understood, or at least seemed to understand, but instead of taking this understanding and going back to rewrite his letter, he tried to push me into doing the same thing with every other paragraph. When I told him I would not do that, that he needed to take what he’d learned and try to apply it–to do, in other words, his own work–he said, “I’m beginning to understand what you want from me, and so what I need to know now is how to get you to give me an A, and the only way I am going to learn that is if you go over each paragraph with me.”

What I need to know is how to get you to give me an A. I recognize that students want good grades; I acknowledge the emotional validity of feeling like, if you are paying for an education, part of what you should be receiving is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I certainly appreciate that there are students for whom the practical value of their grades outweighs, legitimately and reasonably, whatever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show students how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help students learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really matter to me if a student moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What matters is that they have moved, that they are better writers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indifferent to students’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learning to write is not like filling in a blank or coloring in a circle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each question and so the formula for getting an A is clear. Rather, learning to write is a lot like growing up. No matter how much advice and guidance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never manage it at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Zahhak: We’d Need To Hear His Mother’s Story, an excerpt from my translation of parts of the Shahnameh, the Iranian national epic, was published recently on Ekleksographia. I hope you’ll go check it out.

This review was originally posted on a literary blog that no longer exists called The Great American Pinup. My understanding is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the people who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuccessful. I am reposting the review here because I think the books are important enough that the review should continue to be available.

Talk about two very different books by two very different poets, but there are connections, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side. I first met Suheir Hammad some years ago when she came to Nassau Community College (NCC), where I teach in the English Department, to give a reading as part of a day-long program on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The program was sponsored by NCC’s International Studies Committee and it generated, even in the planning, a lot of controversy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the college administration voiced concerns about adequate security, about who the panelists would be and whether a balanced view of the conflict would be presented. What they meant by “balanced,” however, at least as I understand it, was that no one who spoke for the Palestinian side should express views that were overtly hostile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that people representing the Israeli side might express views overtly hostile to Palestinians and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speakers was a woman representing a far-right Jewish organization—not Israeli, but Jewish—who spoke quite forcefully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, except that all the references to Jews had been changed to Arabs.

During lunch that day—her reading was in the evening—Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revisited)” a poem from her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the previous semester called Introduction to World Jewish Studies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims—approximately 100 were injured—in which the speaker, a woman, imagines the violence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flatbush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the specific details of the violence it describes, but also for the nakedness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates herself for even imagining that she would perform those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my students, all of whom happened to be Jewish and most of whom came from conservative and orthodox religious backgrounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly surprised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a similar anger and that Suheir Hammad therefore had every right to express herself in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave readings. I don’t remember her precise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so violent that she was not sure how her audiences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that people needed to hear, that she owed it to herself and to her audiences to read it, precisely because the pain and the violence in the poem are so deeply embedded in the emotional center of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and no one should be spared a confrontation with that center.

My own opinion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City responsible for the views of Baruch Goldstein and, by extension, the policies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more precise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is comprehensible, however, it is also an excusable moment of Jew-hatred, no different than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African during apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What matters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes responsibility for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remember, frankly, whether Hammad takes on the question of that responsibility in any of the other poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My overall recollection of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remember a couple of withering poems protesting the way Middle Eastern women are exoticized in the US, and I remember poems that were clearly intended to confront the reader with the physical horrors of occupation. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explicitly that I am not accusing Suheir Hammad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mistake to confuse a poet with the speakers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she harbors that kind of hatred for anyone.) Read the rest of this entry »

This panel should be very interesting and, given what’s been going on in Iran and the new protests that took place there yesterday, I think it’s a good time to learn more about Iranian culture. If you’re in NY, I hope you’ll come.

THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
(EDWARD NERSESSIAN AND FRANCIS LEVY, DIRECTORS)

invites you to a Poetry Reading & Discussion
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 7:00pm
at
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: info@philoctetes.org)

This event is free and open to the public.

Persian Poetry: Origins, Translations, and Influences

This reading and discussion among five distinguished Persian poets and translators will begin by touching on the two-thousand year history of poetry in Iran. Panelists will highlight the significance of such classical masters as Sa’di, Hafez, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam, as well as contemporary Iranian poets like Nima Youshij and Forough Farrokhzad. Special attention will be given to what often gets lost in English translation. The poets will consider how their understanding of Persian verse and culture, from its origins in Iran, influences the poetry they and others write in English.

Iraj Anvar is the translator and editor of Jalal al Din Rumi’s Divani-I Shams-I Tabriz: Forty Eight Ghazals of Rumi. He has been a leader of the New York Ava Ensemble, which is dedicated to promoting traditional Persian music and performing classical Persian poetry.

I just finished reading The Man in the White Sharksin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal whom we have invited to read as part of Nassau Community College’s Literature, Live! reading series, sponsored by The Creative Writing Project (CWP). A memoir that is at once a love letter to her father, Leon, and also her mother, Edith, as well as to the city of Cairo and its way of life in the days of King Farouk, The Man in the White Sharksin Suit chronicles the difficulties Lagnado’s family faced as they navigated the often tortuous path they were forced to travel from the privileged life they enjoyed in Egypt to the difficult and, especially for her father, often humiliating existence that life as exiles forced them into. The book has a lot to say about the arrogance with which European and American Jews–as individuals and as workers in agencies that were supposed to help families such as Lagnado’s–treated their Mizrachi coreligionists, who fled or were forced to leave their home countries in the years following Israel’s founding; and when she tells the story of Sylvia Kirschner, the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) caseworker assigned to the Lagnado family, and how Kirschner refused to find any compromise between her progressive values relating to women and Lagnado’s father’s deeply patriarchal old world values, it is hard not to sympathize with Leon. Not because there is anything defensible in his desire completely to rule the lives of the women in his family, but because Lagnado makes it so clear that Sylvia Kirschner’s intolerance only served to accelerate the unraveling of the Lagnado family by encouraging the independence of Lagando’s older sister Suzette. I’m not suggesting that Suzette should have allowed herself to remain firmly held in place beneath her father’s patriarchal thumb, but surely there were gentler ways of introducing Leon and Suzette to the greater independence of women in the United States than Kirschner’s dismissal of and disrespect for the values Leon had brought with him from an older generation in a far more traditional part of the world.

There are many other moments in this memoir that are worthy of note–the Italian Catholic friend Lagnado found and lost because of a housing dispute between their parents and the neighborhood’s antisemitic response to that dispute; the contrast Lagnado draws between her experience being treated for Hodgkin’s disease by a private physician in New York City and her father’s dismal treatment at the Jewish Home and Hospital, and then at Mt. Sinai Hospital, in the last years of his life (and each of these contrasted with the medical treatment the family had been able to command when they lived in Egypt, and Leon could summon the best doctors in Cairo to look after him and his family); Lagnado’s meeting with the woman whose father-in-law and uncle had negotiated the purchase of the Lagnado family home when Leon finally, reluctantly, realized he and his family could no longer remain in Egypt–but what struck me most as I read this book was how much it hinted at things I didn’t know about Mizrachi Jews. Leon’s family was from Aleppo, in Syria, and Lagnado’s discussion of that culture’s family traditions left me frustrated that I had never learned about them when I was in Hebrew School, or later when I was in yeshiva, and it was hammered into us that kol yisrael arevim zeh lazeh, all Jews are responsible for each other. That lofty sentiment notwithstanding, the curriculum we were taught certainly made it seem like the only Jews in the world, or at least the only Jews in the world that mattered, were those of European, and especially eastern European, descent.

It’s not that I didn’t know Mizrachi Jews existed, and I certainly cannot blame my contemporary ignorance on the faulty education of my youth. After all, nothing has stopped me from educating myself other than the way I have set the priorities of my life (and it’s entirely possible that I would not have picked Lagnado’s book up except that the CWP has chosen to invite her), but so much of my early Jewish education was focused on Israel–the need for Israel, the value of Israel, the struggle to found Israel–that it’s surprising I remember no attention being paid to the fact that, after Israel’s independence was declared in 1948, nearly a million Mizrachi Jews were either forced to leave their countries or chose to leave because the conditions there had become untenable. Surely learning about Israel ought to have meant learning something about the culture of the millions of Mizrachi Jews who chose to settle there. Equally surprising to me is that nowhere in Lagnado’s memoir is Israel mentioned except as either a primary cause of the problems the Jews of Egypt were starting to have after 1948 or as one the places where the Jews of Egypt could go that would accept them without fail. Lagnado does not laud Israel as the Jewish homeland, nor is there any sense from her book that the Jews of Egypt saw Israel in that way at all; even when she talks about the Egyptian Jews who chose to go to Israel, she presents the choice as matter-of-fact, even as desperate, not as one that might contain within it some small part of the hope with which the European Zionists clearly embraced the idea of a Jewish homeland there.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, however, is a memoir, not a history. I am sure that there were Mizrachi Jews who embraced the founding of Israel as fervently and hopefully as the European Zionists did. More, I am sure that the feeling I had after reading Lagnado’s book, that the Jews of Egypt were far better off in Egypt than in any of the places to which they fled, has more to do with the privileged life her family lived there than with the reality of the lives of all Egyptian Jews. I am fully aware, in other words, that the story of the Mizrachi Jews is, has got to be, far more complex than anything I could learn from reading Lagnado’s memoir; and yet reading the book, especially the chapter called “The Last Days of Tarboosh,” brought me back to a translation conference panel I was on with Ammiel Alcalay and Sami Chetrit, a Mizrachi Jew (Moroccan, if I remember correctly). During his talk Chetrit spoke of how–and I am paraphrasing here; I wish I could remember his exact words–the European Zionist Jews colonized the Mizrachi Jews, replacing the Mizrachi narrative with the European Jewish narrative, even to the point of usurping the language(s) Mizrachi Jews had been speaking for centuries, if not millenia, before Israel was founded. (I am not sure if this was a reference to the European-based revival of Hebrew as the Jewish national language or to some other conflict over language.) His statements surprised me in much the same way that reading Lagnado’s books did, because they hinted at a story I did not know, that felt like I should have known it.

Like Lagnado, Chetrit obviously has a perspective, and a bias, and I am in no way informed enough to judge the accuracy of what he said. What I can say is that any Jewish education worth its salt should have as one of its goals making its students that informed, or at least teaching them that they should feel responsible for informing themselves; and that most certainly is not the Jewish education I received. Indeed, the Jewish education I received rendered both Chetrit’s perspective and Lagnado’s story entirely invisible, and it did so not only in the interest of making Israel central to Jewish-American identity, but also to establishing the Zionist narrative of the founding of Israel as the universal Jewish narrative of the founding of Israel. Stories like Chetrit’s and Lagnado’s demonstrate that such universality is a myth. Confronting that myth is important not because it calls into question Israel’s right to exist (it makes me angry that I feel I even have to say that) but because coming to terms with the full complexity of the narrative of Israel’s founding is the only way I know to come to terms with the fact that I, as a Jew–and maybe this applies to concerned people who aren’t Jewish as well–cannot not take a position regarding Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

(I’ve written more about this issue in the series I wrote called What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel. The link will take you to part 4 of the series; there is a list of the other posts in the series at the bottom of that post.)

Lucette Lagnado’s reading at Nassau Community College is scheduled for March 2010, date and time to be announced. For more information, please visit the Creative Writing Project website.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

I am organizing a panel on the translation of non-Western literatures for the Northeast Modern Language Association’s annual conference, which will be held in Montreal, April 7-11. Here is the call for papers. Please send proposals to me at richard.newman at ncc dot edu.

Non-Western Literatures in Translation

The act of literary translation raises by definition the question of how the target culture frames the language and culture of the text to be translated. This issue, often unexamined, can determine not only which texts from which languages are chosen for translation, but also what the relationship between the translation and the original text is understood to be. Nineteenth century British and American translators of classical Iranian poetry, for example, often portrayed themselves quite explicitly as improving on what they understood to be the “oriental” defects of the poets they were working with. This stance finds its roots in British colonial rule of India, where Persian was the language of the Moghul courts, and the idea that, if only the British could understand Persian and the psychology it embodied, they could make themselves more effective colonial rulers. The history of the translation into English of other non-Western literatures–including those we now consider Western, like classical Greek–is fraught with similar kinds of bias, as are contemporary assumptions about the value non-Western literatures hold for us. Keeping in mind the fact that less than 3% of all the books published in the United States in any given year are literary translations, and the fact that publishing at all levels is a business that both creates and responds to its market, this panel seeks to examine the issues confronting the translation of non-Western literatures, from classical to contemporary, into English. While we would like the emphasis to be on languages that are not already commonly translated (Japanese and Chinese, among others), we welcome proposals concerning any non-Western language. We encourage a variety of perspectives–from authors of texts that have been translated (or texts in search of a translation), translators, scholars, publishers–and would prefer to have papers addressing a range of time periods. Topics might include the linguistic and cultural challenges of translating non-Western languages, what we learn from the history of the translation of a given work or body of work, translation success stories, the challenges of publishing literary translations of non-Western languages, or why a given work or body of work deserves more attention–scholarly and otherwise–than it has been given. We also look forward to being surprised by ideas that have not occurred to us.

I am scheduled to teach, for the first time, a class in Asian American Literature starting next month, and I am wondering if people here might have some thoughts on a question that I have been asking myself in terms of what should be on the reading list. I would like to include Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the eerie parallels between the way the beginnings of the 1978-79 revolution are represented and the events that took place in Iran this past June and July after the contested presidential elections (and those parallels are even stronger in the movie). These parallels are important not so much because I want to teach something about Iran today, but because of the way they contextualize the protagonist’s conflicted sense of self after she has spent time outside of Iran, and she experiences herself as not being part of either Iranian culture or the culture to which she has traveled.

The thing is that Marjane Satrapi is not American, and so nothing about her book represents an Asian-American experience. At the same time, however, it would be foolish, I think, not to see her book as part of Asian-American literature. It exists in American English, is not, by virtue of its content, so easily and narrowly categorized as French literature in translation and it absolutely speaks to an experience that Iranian-Americans share and that others will recognize as part of the Iranian-American experience, even if some of the specifics are slightly different.

Normally, I do not worry so much about categorizing literature like this, but largely because this is the first time I am teaching this course and because I recognize that Asian American literature is an established field of academic study that I have a responsibility to represent accurately in my class, I am wondering about the degree to which assigning a book like Persepolis undermines the notion that a class like this should represent the Asian-American experience and present students with books written by Asian-Americans, even if the Asian-American experience is not, per se, what the book is about.

My own gut feeling as a writer is that the question I am asking sets up a false dichotomy, but I am not Asian-American, am not at all well-versed in the field of Asian American studies and so I don’t want to presume that my gut feeling is accurate–especially since, as I said, this is the first time I am teaching this class. So I am wondering what people here might think.

Whether it’s serendipity or synchronicity, or both, now that there is discussion here on Alas about racism in the publishing industry, I have received the following email from the publisher of my first book of poems, CavanKerry Press.

Dear Friend of CavanKerry:

Decisions about manuscripts received during our Winter 2009 submission period are in the final stage and decisions will be completed soon.

Absent among our finalists are titles by authors of color. We’d like to include a more diverse population of writers — and perhaps you can help.

If you know any writers of color whose work is ready for publication, we’d appreciate your notifying them to submit asap.

Writers must reside in the United States and manuscripts must be in polished state — ready for publication. Writers may submit for one category: New Voices (not yet a published author), Notable Voices or LaurelBooks. Writers should go to www.cavankerrypress.org, for more information and read CKP’s guidelines carefully. We will accept submissions until August 31.

Thanks so much.

Joan

Joan Cusack Handler
CavanKerry Press Ltd.
A not -for-profit literary press serving art and community
6 Horizon Road #2901
Fort Lee, New Jersey 07024
201–670–9065
www.cavankerrypress.org.

CavanKerry has, or will soon, publish some fine writers of color, such as Joseph Legaspi, Ross Gay and January O’Neill. I know the press has published other writers of color, but these three I happen to know about personally. I also know the press is sincere in trying to diversify their list; I was part of a discussion about that subject at one of the annual “summits” the press holds for the people it publishes. CKP makes beautiful, beautiful books–just check out the cover of my book, The Silence Of Men, and they are well worth a try if you are, or someone you know is, a poet of color with a book of poems ready to publish. If you do submit a manuscript, by all means tell CKP that you heard about the opportunity from me.

I think this speaks for itself. Note: I have replaced the YouTube version with the version from NBC’s website.

‘Nuff said.

Two days ago, I received a letter from Milkweed Editions rejecting my second book of poems, which is called All That Struggled In You Not To Drown. In explaining his decision, the editor wrote, “Although I recognize here an original and compelling persona, I felt that the preponderance of first-person poems with an autobiographical slant limited the potential appeal.” In other words, if I understand him correctly, he thinks that the first-person narratives dominating the book will make it hard both to sell and to get a decent level of critical attention. Whether or not that is true, his perception of the manuscript is accurate–it is made up almost entirely of first-person narratives–and, given that accuracy, if he cannot find within his own aesthetic sense and/or his sense of where poetry is these days and/or his sense of the market enough enthusiasm for publishing my book, I think his rejection is a fair and reasonable one. It’s also ironic, because CavanKerry Press, publisher of my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men, rejected All That Struggled In You Not To Drown because there was not enough of an autobiographical slant. “I’ve seen this a lot,” CKP’s publisher told me. “A poet whose first book is deeply personal will often write a second book that is just the opposite. You’ve written a good book; it’s just too impersonal for our list.” This rejection (more irony here) also seems to me to have been fair and reasonable. For while All That Struggled In You Not To Drown is, to me, deeply personal and autobiographical, it possesses and explores those characteristics differently than The Silence Of Men does, and if CKP’s list is slanted towards the kinds of poems that are in The Silence Of Men, then it makes sense that CKP would also reject my second book.

I have a lot of respect for the work that small press editors and publishers do, not just because it is so often un- or underpaid work–which it is, and which is something that any writer who deals with them needs to understand and appreciate–but also because publishing books requires a commitment to understanding, articulating and either implicitly or explicitly defending one’s own aesthetic sense in a highly saturated and competitive marketplace. Especially when it comes to poetry. Sometimes it seems to me that everyone and her or his aunt or uncle in the United States thinks that he or she is a poet whose work the world absolutely must have between the covers of a book or burned onto a CD or DVD. More to the point–at least in my experience–more than a few of the people who think this way haven’t read (or at least write like they haven’t read) a single book of contemporary poetry. To be a small press editor and/or publisher in this kind of environment is to submit oneself to a mind-numbing onslaught of language, which takes a level of commitment that most literary people I know, including myself, cannot and will not make; and that commitment ought to command our respect, even when it means that a given publisher decides not to publish a book we have written.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I think anyone who wants to write poetry should write poetry. The impulse towards poetic expression is a powerful one; witness the way people turn to poetry in times of difficulty, from personal tragedies like the death of a loved one to national tragedies like the September 11th attacks. Moreover, the good that poetry does for the people who write it, and for the people who read it, whatever kind of poetry it is, is not something that can be measured by either the dollars and cents that a publisher commits to putting a book out or the unpaid hours that the poet sweats through trying to make her or his lines bespeak the particular experience he or she wants to communicate. Still, there is a difference–actually, there are probably many differences–between being someone who writes poems and someone who wants to publish books of poetry, not the least of which is that once you decide you want to publish books of poetry, you have made the decision to treat your work as a commodity. You have entered, whether you like it or not, the world of (usually very small) business; and so I have to confess that the letter from Milkweed Editions is one I should never have received. Instead, I should have written to them and withdrawn All That Struggled In You Not To Drown from consideration because a third press had already agreed to publish it.

I didn’t contact Milkweed because I’d allowed my record-keeping to become sloppy and so I’d actually forgotten I’d submitted the book to them; and so I am relieved that Milkweed rejected my book, since it means I do not have to deal with the awkwardness of having to choose between two very fine publishers. The world of small presses is not like the world of commercial publishers, where the bidding war that can result from having more than one editor eager to publish your book can be a very good thing. There is not enough money in the small press world to make such a bidding war possible. I may have only a verbal commitment from the press that has accepted All That Struggled In You Not To Drown–which is why I am not naming that press in this post; our agreement will not be official until I have a contract, and a lot can happen between a handshake and a contract–but precisely because of the aesthetic and other kinds of un- or underpaid editorial commitments I was talking about above, the verbal commitment I have with this press means something to me, and so it is a commitment that I want, all else being equal, to honor. If all goes according to plan, I will be very proud to publish my book with this press, as I would have been proud to publish with Milkweed, or with CavanKerry Press. But here’s the final irony: The press that accepted my book did so for precisely the reasons that Milkweed rejected it, because of “the preponderance of first-person poems with an autobiographical slant,” which the editor feels will help to garner All That Struggled In You Not To Drown some serious critical attention, while at the same time making the book something that people will want to buy. Go figure.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

This moved me:

Here is the copy from the website:

“Stand by Me” On June 24, Iranian Superstar Andy Madadian went into an LA recording studio with Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and American record producers Don Was and John Shanks to record a musical message of worldwide solidarity with the people of Iran. This version of the old Ben E. King classic is not for sale - it was not meant to be on the Billboard charts or even manufactured as a CD…..it’s intended to be downloaded and shared by the Iranian people…to give voice to the sentiment that all people of the world stand together….the handwritten Farsi sign in the video translates to “we are one”. If you know someone in Iran - or someone who knows someone in Iran - please share this link CREDITS: STAND BY ME Andy - Vocals Jon Bon Jovi - Vocals Richie Sambora - Electric Guitar and Vocals John Shanks - Acoustic Guitar Don Was - Bass Patrick Leonard - Keyboards Jeff Rothchild - Drums Tiffany Madadian and Nikki Lund - Background Vocals Produced by Don Was & John Shanks Recorded and Mixed by Jeff Rothchild at Henson Studio C, Hollywood, CA June 24, 2009 Thanks to Faryal Ganjehei Written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller Farsi lyric by Paksima Zakipour Video Edited by Gemma Corfield Mastered by Stephen Marcussen

It feels odd to be promoting myself and my work now, with everything that’s going on Iran, and in the context of everything I’ve been posting, but there is a good interview with me up on the blog More Babel,which is the editor’s blog for the online journal Babel Fruit. I answered questions about translation, classical Iranian literature, my own poetry and more.

One thing I said that I happen to like:

I also discovered that the most popular contemporary translations of classical Iranian poetry into English–those of Rumi by Coleman Barks and of Hafez by Daniel Ladinksi–were more concerned with spiritualizing the texts and writers they were translating than in rendering any but the most tenuous connection between their translations and the original texts, not to mention the culture in which those original texts were written and where they are still very much a living literature. It’s not that I think all translation must hew to a particular line in relation to the original text; nor do I think that either my personal dislike for Barks’ and Ladinsky’s work (neither moves me) or my objections to their motives and methods (about which more below) means that their work is bad in some absolute moral sense–though it does seem to me that it is false advertising to call Ladinsky’s work translations and that it would be more appropriate to call them “writings after Hafez,” or “versions of/improvisations on Hafez,” or some such thing. Rather, it’s that, given both the history of the translation of classical Iranian literature into English and my personal connection to that literature through my wife, my son and the many Iranian friends I have, I feel very strongly the degree to which past translations, including those of Barks and Ladinsky, have been very explicitly invested in misrepresenting Iran, its culture, its literature and, ultimately, its history. More to the point, this misrepresentation was not the misrepresentation of which all translation is guilty by definition; it was an almost willful–and sometimes fully willful–misrepresentation that grew out of the political or spiritual, non-literary agenda of the translator.

More Babel: Talking With Richard Jeffrey Newman.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

But I decided that, since the Iranian government has shut down just about every outlet by which people there could get there stories out, and since the Iranian government is trying so hard not only to take control of how events in Iran are shaped, but also to hide what is going on there–check out this article in particular–that it is more important to bear witness when we can and watching this video will be nothing if it is not bearing witness: not to sentimentalize the man being tortured in this video in the way that Neda has been sentimentalized, but because if we do not bear witness, then the people who perpetrated and the people who gave license to the perpetrators for this kind of thing will have won. (I will add that an Iranian friend of mine points out that the thugs in the video are speaking a language other than Persian.)

I will say it again: This video is very, very, very, very disturbing, and if you have triggers it will likely pull all of them.

ETA: This clip from The Daily Show is also worth watching:

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

From The Huffington Post: 4:05 PM ET — Thanks to President Obama. The National Iranian American Council republishes a letter from an “ordinary Tehrani.”

Dear friend, if you have any contacts within the American Administration, please send them this message on behalf of us, ordinary Iranians in Iran (whose interests and concerns are very different from those of the exiled Iranians in the United States and in Europe who do not yet understand the mentality here and who have been cut off from the Iranian society for too long). Tell your contacts in the Administration that their point of view regarding Iran is by far the best position that an American Government has ever taken. We appreciate this and thank the President.

During the last two or three decades not one American president had “understood” Iran. All of them got caught in the traps of the mollahs, despite themselves having to play the bad cop .. but this time the intelligent president has decided not to join in their game, bravo.

It is normal that he is criticized vividly by most of the Los Angeles Iranians (and by most Republicans): since a long time they have been asking for just one thing : that America attack Iran and change the regime so that they get their possessions and their former jobs and privileges back, without wanting to know what today’s young Iranian wants here and now. It makes me think of the Cubans in Florida … they don’t consider the interests of their country but only what is due to them.

via Iran Updates (VIDEO): Live-Blogging The Uprising.

[The following is a guest post from Ali Alizadeh, Researcher at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University who has asked bloggers to post this to their blogs.]

This piece is copyright-free. Please distrbute widely.

Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they are still effective outside the country. This is mainly due to thirty years of isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the West which has turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for outsiders. In this piece I will try to confront some of the mystifications and misunderstandings produced by the international media in the last week.

In the first scenario the international media, claiming impartiality, insisted that the reformists provide hard objective evidence in support of their claim that the June 12 election has been rigged. But despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed obvious facts due to their lack of familiarity with the socio-historical context. Although the reformists could not possibly offer any figures or documents, because the whole show was single-handedly run by Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with Iran’s recent history could easily see what was wrong with this picture.

It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station, something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities: Musavi got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad; Karroubi’s total vote was less than the number of people active in his campaign; Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand between the third and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes were totally forgotten and only hastily added to the count when reformists pointed this out; and finally the ratio between all candidates’ votes remained almost constant in all these four stages of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1 percent respectively).

Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in Iran’s elections has always benefitted the opposition and not the incumbent, because it is rational to assume that those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the representative of the status quo, allegedly received 10 million votes more than what he got in the previous election.

Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory is the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the whole of country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100 leading political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many other reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the streets…But if all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17 people who were shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves should persuade all those “objective-minded” observers.

In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days, the international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role of internet and its social networking (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc). This implied that millions of illiterate conservative villagers have voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is mostly limited to educated middle classes in North Tehran. While this simplified image is more compatible with media’s comfortable position towards Iran in the last 30 years, it is far from reality. The recent political history of Iran does not confirm this image. For example, Khatami’s victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack of any economic promises and his focus instead on liberal civic demands, was made possible by the polarization of society into people and state. Khatami could win only by embracing people from all different classes and groups, villagers and urban people alike.

There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing an important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and the effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media. First of all, it is the existence of a strong political determination, combined with people becoming deprived of basic means of communication, which has led the movement to creatively test every other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the night of election, his frequent request to talk to people on the state TV has been rejected, his official website is often blocked and his physical contact with his supporters has been kept minimum by keeping him in house arrest (with the exception of his appearance on the over a million march on June 15).

Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.

What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy of our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left) and the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist rhetoric (his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the first to congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.

While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people into identity groups with different demands (women, students, intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be heard and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity, emphasized by Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the rallies of the past few days, is constituted by political intuition, creativity and recollection of the ‘79 revolution (no wonder that people so quickly reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in the abstention from violence in their silent demonstrations). Musavi’s ‘people’ is also easily, but strongly, distinguished from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous masses dependent on state charity. Musavi’s people, as the collective appearing in the rallies, is made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).

History will prove who the real participants of this movement are but once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?

* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on Iran’s revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about?”

You really should read this op-ed piece the NY Times, especially given the maybe-the-election-wasn’t-stolen-rhetoric coming from some sectors here in the US. An excerpt:

For instance, some American analysts assert that the demonstrations are taking place only in the sections of Tehran — in the north, around the university and Azadi Square — where the educated and well-off reside. Of course, those neighborhoods were home to the well-to-do … 30 years ago. The notion that these areas represent “the nice part of town” will come as a surprise to their residents, who endure the noise, congestion and pollution of living in the center of a megalopolis.

People who haven’t visited a city in decades are bound to give out bad directions. But their descriptions of where the protests are taking place, and why, also draw on pernicious myths of an iron correlation between religion and class, between location and voting tendency, in Iran.

This false geography imagines South Tehran and the countryside as home only to the poor, those natural allies of political Islam, while North Tehran embodies unbridled gharbzadegi (translated as “Weststruckness” or “Westernitis”) and is populated by people addicted to the Internet and vacations in Paris. It is as if political Islam withers north of Vanak Square and the only residents to be found are “liberals” who voted for the opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

We must not assume that the engagement of members of society with their religion is uniform or that religious devotion equals automatic loyalty to a particular brand of politics. To do so is certainly to deny Iran’s poor the capacity to think for themselves, to deny that the politics of the past four years may have made their lives worse — and plays right into Mr. Ahmadinejad’s dubious claim to be the most authentic representative of the 1979 revolution. Mr. Moussavi was, let’s not forget, a favored son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a member of Iran’s original cohort of revolutionaries, and he remains a firm believer in the revolution and the framework of the Islamic Republic.

But the United States seems able to view our country only through anxieties left over from the 1979 revolution. In the “how did we lose Iran?” assessments after the overthrow of the shah, many American intelligence agents and policy makers decided that their great mistake was to spend too much time canoodling with the royal family and intellectual elites of the capital. Commentators now are worried that, by siding with the opposition today, the United States will once again fall into the trap of backing the losing side.

But the fact is, Tehran is not the Iranian anomaly it was 30 years ago. It has become more like the rest of the country. Internal migration, not just to Tehran but to other major cities, has accelerated, driven in part by the growth of universities in places like Isfahan, Tabriz, Mashad and Shiraz, and now nearly 70 percent of Iranians live in cities. The much vaunted rural vote represents not a decisive bloc for Mr. Ahmadinejad but a minimum, one that was easily swamped by the increased turnout of city dwellers, who normally sit elections out.

And, of course, Iran in 2009 — better yet, Iran on June 12, 2009 — is not the same as Iran in 1979. Just as Tehran’s neighborhoods cannot be fixed in time, the cultural lives of Iranians have greatly changed in the past 30 years. The postrevolutionary period has seen the expansion of education, the entry of women into the work force in large numbers, and changing patterns of marriage and even of divorce. These have all shaped Iranian society. The pseudo-sociology peddled by so many in the West would easily dissolve with a week’s visit.

The “transparency” of this rhetoric speaks, I think, for itself.
Khamenei addresses Iran

Here, too. And he even manages to get the “Evil Zionists” in there.

ETA: A transcript in English of the entire speech is here