Lives Lost

A Historical Retracing and Poetic Exploration of Saeed Yousef’s Quatrains

By Nilofar Shidmehr

Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow. Saeed Yousef. t r a c e press. $19.95, ISBN 978-1-77525672-4

Introduction

In both form and content, Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow, a new, illustrated, bilingual edition of Saeed Yousef’s ruba’is documenting the 1980s prison massacres in Iran, is a daring and indispensable publication for this fraught moment in time. Emerging from a collaborative process initiated by the activist-intellectual Shahrzad Mojab, this challenging and strangely beautiful book serves to remind both English and Persian speaking readers of the crucial, historically repressed decade of violence that enabled Khomeini’s regime to seize control over the direction of Iran’s popular Revolution. As I write this review, I hear of renewed US-Iranian conflict in the Gulf, while both states are responsible for the incarceration of thousands of prisoners and the death of so many experiencing the global COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the global prison abolitionist movement is growing in strength, drawing important links between national practices of surveillance, repression and incarceration. It is in this context that Shahrzad Mojab asks us to join her in supporting Yousef’s refusal to forget, noting in her informative foreword, the poem’s significance in reminding us “of our collective responsibility to disturb silences and unsettle complicities with regimes of terror.”

To understand the historical significance of Yousef’s poem, we need to revisit the years before and after the popular overthrow of the oppressive Pahlavi monarchy in Iran. In April 1979, following two years of revolutionary resistance led by working class, leftist and religious groups, Ayatollah Khomeini, a charismatic and popular demagogue revered by millions of Iranians established the Islamic Republic of Iran. Khomeini was able to achieve this victory with the support of religious followers recruited in mosques and with strong ties to merchants in the Bazaar. Nonetheless, the early years of his Islamic regime were full of tension, resistance, and sometimes violence, as revolutionary groups, including the Fedayeen (Fedayeen-e-Khalq), the MEK (Mujahedeen-e-Khalq), Tudeh and other smaller groups and factions struggled to seize control over the direction of a Revolution that they too had fought to achieve. 

Not surprisingly, when Saddam instigated the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, Khomeini called it “ne’mat” or “blessing” as his regime took advantage of the population’s wartime fears to increase its repression of all political opposition, to imprison those it considered enemies, and to consolidate its absolute power. In 1981, a street protest organized by the MEK as a show of strength resulted in a massacre. In disarray, MEK’s leaders fled to Iraq where Saddam allowed them to settle and build an army, which, alongside Saddam’s forces, attacked Iran a few months later. Perceiving this as betrayal, the Iranian population rallied around the Islamic regime even as it accelerated its repression of dissent with a strategy of mass arrests, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and the threat of execution. When a ceasefire and UN resolutions finally brought the Iran-Iraq war to an end, the regime rushed to empty out its overfull prisons in the brutal summer of 1988 by summarily executing over five thousand political prisoners. In the span of only two months, through death and through fear, the regime succeeded in silencing all political opposition to its specific interpretation of Iran’s popular Revolution. 

Historical Retracing: Past and Present

Like many others escaping the purge of political activists, writers, poets, and intellectuals in Iran, Saeed Yousef also fled Iran in 1983 and sought exile in Europe. There he wrote a series of ruba’is about the atrocities of the 1980s based on first-hand news that leaked out from Iranian prisons over the years, and testimonies from friends and eye-witnesses who had survived the 1988 massacre.  In 1994, he gathered this series under the title Jan Bakhtigan bi buyi Fardai naw. By linking the quatrains, and by employing satire and a kind of Brechtian distancing, he modernized the classical Persian form that had been made famous by Omar Khayyam to document intimate and brutal moments of state violence. Although Yousef’s ruba’is circulated in oral and written form among exiled friends and comrades, the book did not appear in print until 2003, when Noghteh, a left-wing Iranian exile press, published it in a slim paper volume, illustrated by the famous Iranian satirical artist Ardeshir Mohasses. 

Seventeen years have now passed since the 2003 publication of Yousef’s poem. During this period, Iran’s Islamic regime has succeeded in suppressing 2009’s Green Revolution (Iran’s largest popular movement since the 1979 Revolution), along with other uprisings. The most recent took place in December 2019, led by protestors and workers from small, impoverished provinces and disfranchised and destitute suburbs. It was brutally crushed by Iran’s military and paramilitary forces.

However, despite this show of force, it is now apparent to observers that Iran’s Islamic regime is weakening and is rapidly losing its original grassroots base and legitimacy. Members of the middle class, who once believed that the country’s situation could be rectified, have grown increasingly disillusioned. Mistrust of the reformists is now widespread and the general population is disgruntled, especially since the Rouhani administration’s deceptive cover-up of the attack on Ukrainian Flight 752 has become known. Iranians, in both Iran and the diaspora, continue to grieve the loss of 176 lives on that flight, to endure the impact of US sanctions and the ongoing threat of conflict between the US and Iran, and now, grapple, along with the rest of the world, with the trauma and devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The New Edition: Poetic and Aesthetics Retracing 

Re-appearing within this transformed historical context, Saeed Yousef’s poem, now translated into English in a bilingual, powerfully illustrated edition, offers new and older generations of English and Persian-speaking readers a fresh opportunity to encounter these vivid documentary-like vignettes of a historical massacre. 

Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow is a beautiful object, covered in thick yet fragile uncoated paper with an evocative cover that expands a fragment from the vivid pen and ink drawings that illustrate each ruba’i – reproduced from Ava Raha’s original scroll, inspired by Yousef’s poem. The book’s spare yet careful architecture moves us through an informative and passionate forward by Professor Shahrzad Mojab of the Univeristy of Toronto, past affecting notes from the translator Ahad Bahadori and the artist Ava Raha, on towards the doorway to the poem. As we enter, we begin to encounter, one by one, each of Yousef’s ruba’is rendered in Persian above its accompanying English-language translation. Ava Raha’s vivid watercolour and ink illustrations, surrounded by white space, punctuate each ruba’i as we turn the page. The images, reproduced from Raha’s original scroll, are bright, surreal and oddly hopeful even as they visually represent the violent histories documented in Yousef’s poem.  In this way, Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow quietly invites the reader to share, along with the poet, scholar, artist and translator, their committed remembrance of the lives lost in the Islamic regime’s forty-one years of life – and with this remembering, to re-member the dead. 

As each dramatic and vivid visual and textual image follows the next, the white space that surrounds them seems to create an opening towards the endless whiteness of pages, inviting the book’s readers to step out, alongside the writer, translator and artist, into blank space, to search for something that is yet to come.  

This peripatetic, reflexive movement resembles some of the qualities of the Persian ruba’i. Composed of four lines and marked by specific rhythms and rhymes, the ruba’i might be better known in English through Fitzgerald’s somewhat controversial translations or re-makings of Omar Khayyam’s poetry. In Khayyam’s Persian-language ruba’is, the speaker is recognizable as a free-thinking, self-reflective witness who passes through the world, constantly moving from scene to scene, noticing the passage of time and the mortality of all human beings – whether kings or paupers. The architectural structure of Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow echoes this poetic form as we, alongside Yousef’s witness/narrator, step into each scene, and as each image by Raha enables us to reflect on such witnessing, before we move out, collectively from the intensity of each image into the infinite openings of blank space.

The traditionally ironic, distanced voice of the narrator of the ruba’i is powerfully utilized by the multiple voices that narrate Yousef’s poem. Generally, the first part of a ruba’i describes a situation in language that is precise and accessible. As in the Japanese haiku, this primary movement is followed by a short pause – a moment of reflection – caused by the revelation of some simple, even obvious truth, which is usually captured in an ironic remark that makes the truth an idea that provokes shock and an inner awakening for the narrator. This ironic line inserts a line of flight and departure from straightforward description and, as a result, generates the possibility of reconfiguring the situation being described. 

Yousef’s poem both resonates and innovates within this traditional form. Each of these serialized ruba’i bears witness to the scene of a specific crime. Although the poet-narrator records each scene as an independent observer, not a character, the observer’s identification with what is being depicted often becomes so intense that boundaries between observer and victim appear to blur. As atrocities unfold before his very eyes, the observer’s words, both reflective and reflexive, also express the victim’s pain, anger and resistance. However, the intensity of such witnessing/experiencing is halted momentarily, by the narrator’s departure from the scene. 

In the traditional ruba’i, each time the narrator/witness pauses in the poem, it is because something important, though mundane, has arrested their attention and made them linger so as to reflect on both the object and on mortality itself. However, as a free person, and as someone whose essence is to be constantly on the move, the narrator must leave each scene or ruba’i, chanting something like, “Do not let anything arrest you in a fixed position, whether it is wealth or status or beauty, because nothing lasts in this world. As we are all mortals, let us live freely and happily. Let us move forward toward our future, towards ‘death’, even though it is unknown to us and will remain unknown to us until the end.” The speaker of the traditional ruba’i is able to overcome the angst of the world only through unceasing motion. This restlessness is enacted, over and over again, in Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow as Yousef’s poet-witness leaves scenes of torture or execution to step urgently forward into blank space to overcome the angst and violence of prison, torture and death, only through the unceasing and persistent pressure of movement. 

Yousef’s descriptions of the torture or murder of political prisoners are striking in their brevity, starkness, and precision – suggesting the short time the poet has, as witness, to pause at each scene of violence before needing to depart to observe another such moment. However, even with this brevity, one can at least sketch out the viciousness of each crime. Each brief description is followed by a heart-stopping moment of shock and reflection before irony emerges out of shock to reveal what the Jewish philosopher Hannah Ardent has called “the banality of evil.” In most cases, the fourth line of Yousef’s ruba’i contains the sharp, ironic remark, often proclaimed by the character who is being tortured or murdered, as in this quatrain: 

I saw a corpse fallen in Evin’s courtyard

A booted thug kicked her in the head

The corpse announced, in the language of her condition:

Wait, soon like me, you’ll meet your end.

The ruba’i has a specific rhythm which distinguishes it from other quatrains such as “do-beyti.” In one of the last poems of his collection, Yousef ironically inserts a popular Arabic phrase meaning  “There is no power but from Allah” (attributed to the Prophet’s hadith) into his Persian-language ruba’i. 

They declare there is no compulsion in religion

I burst into laughter at such gross deception

If there were compulsion, what else would they do?

All might, all power, from Allah comes!

By setting the fourth line apart from the first three lines, Yousef creates a Brechtian distancing or “alienating” effect. The last line, therefore, becomes a counter-declaration to the declaration stated in the first line and challenges its truth. Showing that the regime has actually forced religion upon the Iranian people, the fourth line also challenges God, or more precisely the God under whose name religion has been beaten into people by sheer force. 

This collection of ruba’is, in its first appearance, and again, in this new bilingual illustrated edition from Trace Press – a Toronto-based press focused on global literatures – thus challenges not only the secretive murderers and torturers who work for the Islamic regime, but also shines a moving torchlight on the whole apparatus of murder and terror. It show us the ways in which the Islamic Republic of Iran has covered up crimes committed over forty-one years in power, with a strategy of systematic concealment, lies, and deception. Mojab’s foreword reminds us that the Western media, as well as Western leftists, also played a role in this deliberate silencing and concealment of the massacres of the 1980s. 

Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow connects the past and the present of Iran. It allows us, as readers, to connect the 1980’s massacre of Iranian political prisoners to the repression of protesters in 2009 and 2019, alongside the downing of the Ukrainian airplane in Tehran – bringing these disparate events together as moving parts of the same larger tragedy. This large canvas is frameless. It is surrounded by white space. Having drawn the readers’ gaze inside, towards the centre of its large canvas in order to witness and respond reflexively to the violence depicted there, the book then invites us all to move outwards, into a new, as yet unmarked page, so that we may, together, search for something new – perhaps a more just and vibrant tomorrow for Iran, and for ourselves.

Nilofar Shidmehr, Ph.D., MFA, is the author of two collections of short fiction and four books of poetry in English and Farsi. She also co-translated with Ali Azarang Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye into Farsi. Her first poetry book in English, Shirin and Salt Man, was nominated for a British Columbia Book-Prize and her latest fiction book has received several positive reviews. She was the 2019-2020 Writer-in-Residence at McMaster University and Hamilton Public Library. Dr. Shidmehr teaches in the Liberal Arts Program and Adults 55+ program at Simon Fraser University.