Ali Alizadeh: On Contemporary Poetry in Iran

Ali Alzadeh

Ali Alizadeh is an award-winning Iranian-born Australian poet. He migrated to Australia after living through the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, and is a writer of poetry, criticism and plays. The major themes of his works are history, dissent and the dilemmas of religion and spirituality. He holds a PhD in writing from Deakin University Melbourne, and this is his second book. He is currently living and teaching writing in China.

On Contemporary Poetry in Iran

The aesthetics and politics of contemporary Iranian poetry were transformed by the collapse of the Shah’s regime. Prior to that point almost all poets — modernists and traditionalists, secularists and Islamists, socialists and nationalists — had joined the revolution against the unpopular US-backed monarchy. With the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, however, this unity disintegrated almost immediately, with one result being the diversity of discourses and the urgency and vibrancy found in much of today’s Iranian poetry.

The initial bifurcation occurred between the supporters of the Ayatollah (such as the traditionalist Shahriar) and the progressive left (such as the modernist Ahmad Shamlu). This chasm emerged in the works of feminist poets as well; Tahereh Saffarzadeh, for example, reinvented herself as an anti-Western Muslim, while Partow Nooriala migrated to the United States after her feminist publishing house was shut down by the regime. More recently, in a graphic demonstration of the regime’s attitude towards anti-Islamist poets, the Nobel Prize for Literature favourite, Simin Behbahani, was assaulted by the Revolutionary Guards during an International Women’s Day rally in Tehran.

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This is not to suggest that there are only two kinds of poetry being produced in Iran and in the ever-widening Iranian diasporas, one that is pro-Islamic Republic, one that is opposed to it. There actually exists no unity or uniformity among the verse being produced in what is sometimes naively seen as a homogenously ‘Islamic’ or ‘radical’ society. Furthermore, with the introduction and rapid proliferation of the Internet, the country’s younger poets have forged new approaches beyond the established ideological or artistic blocs of the past. The grand narratives of Iranian culture — Persian nationalism, Islam, Sufism, patriarchy, anti-Imperialism, etc — may persist; but contemporary Iranian poetry is characterised by disagreements, dissent, and resistance.

See Simin Behbahani
See Alireza Behnam
See Tahereh Saffarzadeh