Ahmad Shamloo's poetry was introduced to me an Iranian friend and I was immediately attracted to it: I saw both Pablo Neruda and Ananda Pramoedya Toer in his words. The words are powerful in the context that Shamloo lived and died in Iran.
(at the only Persian restaurant, possibly in all of the Caribbean, in La Habana, Cuba, there is a portrait of Shamloo and I had a book by him when i sat down for a meal there)
Shamlou's poetry is complex, yet his imagery, which contributes significantly to the intensity of his poems, is accessible. As the base, he uses the traditional imagery familiar to his Iranian audience through the works of Persian masters like Hafez and Omar Khayyám. For infrastructure and impact, he uses a kind of everyday imagery in which personified oxymoronic elements are spiked with an unreal combination of the abstract and the concrete thus far unprecedented in Persian poetry, which distressed some of the admirers of more traditional poetry.
(from Wiki)
Karaj, Shamloo and his poems, Iranian popular music all arrived congruously into my life when I was least expecting it. THANK YOU.
This morning, I was sitting at a Cuban Cafe in Miami, not too far from where I stay while I am in Miami and was reading Shamloo..
I opened the book to a poem called ALONE
..this stanza caught my attention..
To your men, I prefer murderers
To your women, I prefer prostitutes.
In the wake of a God who would opent he doors of his paradise to your kind,
I would be happier with eternal damnation.
Sitting among the virtuous and sleeping among the untouched girls,
in such a paradise: let this be your cheap gift!
My heart suddenly jolted itself, the face of the FIrst Rebel of the America, the Taino Warrior HATUEY appeared in my mind.
(from Wiki). The story of Hatuey is well known to all Cuban children in the island.
Bartolomé de Las Casas later attributed the following speech to Hatuey which was addressed against Christianity. He showed the Taíno of Caobana a basket of gold and jewels, saying:
- Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea... They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break...
The Taíno chiefs in Cuba did not respond to Hatuey's message, and few joined him to fight. Hatuey resorted to guerrilla tactics against the Spaniards, and was able to confine them for a time. He and his fighters were able to kill at least eight Spanish soldiers. Eventually, using mastiffs and torturing the Native people for information, the Spaniards succeeded in capturing him. On February 2, 1512, he was tied to a stake and burned alive at Yara, near the present-day City of Bayamo.
Before he was burned, a priest asked Hatuey if he would accept Jesus and go to heaven. Las Casas recalled the reaction of the chief:
- [Hatuey], thinking a little, asked the religious man if Spaniards went to heaven. The religious man answered yes... The chief then said without further thought that he did not want to go there but to hell so as not to be where they were and where he would not see such cruel people. This is the name and honor that God and our faith have earned.
- Same cruelty, same oppression and a few resisting it, in Cuba of 16th Century and also the modern societies of Muslim Middle East.
- Old Religions interchangeably practicing cruelty over the centuries and the new religions are corporate culture, capitalism without heart or any belief that puts the welfare of the individual before that of the humanity.
- All rebels suffer, whether it was the primary rebel Hatuey or Shamlou in the late 20th century or young women fighting for the planet..
- I will quote this line from Shamloo from the same poem , to tell the new oppressors of the land
- With you, I have never shared any bond.
