Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution

In Tehran, on September 16, 2022, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, died in the custody of the Morality Police, arrested for violating Iran’s compulsory veiling laws. Despite injuries suggesting she had been beaten, Iranian officials claimed she had died of a heart attack. Women all over Iran, with their brothers, fathers, and supporters, poured into the streets of Iranian cities in the one of largest spontaneous protests since the 1979 Revolution. The protestors’ outrage, along with their chant “Woman Life Freedom,” spread not only among Iranians at home and in the diaspora, but among those concerned with the oppression of women and human rights in countries throughout the world.

Three weeks later, Bänoo Zan, a self-exiled Iranian poet, librettist, translator, teacher, editor, and poetry curator in Toronto, decided to create an anthology of poetry in response to, and in solidarity with, the Woman Life Freedom protests. Zan and Cy Strom, who agreed to be her coeditor, sent out a call for submissions. This anthology is the curated selection of the poems that arrived from all over the world.

Arranged in a thematic and narrative arc, Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution contains both poems originally written in English and others translated from Persian or Dari. The poems in the section “Beginnings” explore, in grim detail, the arrest and death of Amini and, as context, the existing conditions in which girls and women live in Iran. The speaker, in a poem by Laura Sheahen, an American poet who splits her time between between the US and Tunisia, offers a declaration of independence by ironic reference to Pashtun marriage contracts, which allow the husband to beat his new wife as long as he does not break her bones: “The flayed skin gone, / this stays behind: // The flesh was yours // My bones are mine.” The poems in the sections on “Defiance” and “Struggle” speak of strategies Iranian women have used to cope with, and push back against, the forces arrayed against them. “Writing to Survive,” by Diana Woodcock, honors Mahvash Sabet, whose poems, smuggled out of Evin Prison, earned her the PEN 2017 International Writer of Courage award. The speaker in Dana Serea’s “The Rug” offers instruction on how to incorporate pain, grief, and the deaths of individuals and communities into a textile offering and memorial. Other poems offer dark solace:

At dawn,
We are sisters
Who bury the young bones of our dead,
Lay white lilies
On their nameless graves,

Huddle like black sparrows
In the chilling gust. (“The End Without an End”)

Or they express rage, determination and hope:

Upon the ashes
with bricks of justice,
mortar of love,
colors of hope,
we shall build a new citadel.

Unveil your rage, my sister,
unveil the night. (“Veil Not”)

The poems in the “Witness” and “Futures” sections offer stark portrayals of the violent response to the protestors, sometimes turning tropes from classical Persian poetry upside down. Girls weep tears of blood not from desire for their beloved, but because they have been blinded by birdshot. The long curls of women’s hair are not chains to ensnare the lover, but symbols of the open air, freedom, and resistance. The poems offer glimpses of the way women’s lives have been and how they might or will be one day. In Summer Brenner’s terrifying “Beautiful Stranger,” a man “appears on a screen visible from far away and looks directly at me and speaks,”

His soft words whisper like a leaf in the wind, echo like a child’s voice trapped in a well
………He says, If you see this
………He says, It means
………He says, I’ve disappeared.

And yet, here is Mansour Noorbakhsh’s  prose poem, “Make It a Rhyme”:

If you come to see me, never come indifferently. Come like a fire needed for one lost in darkness . . . . What words are they afraid of? My hair is an adverb of kindness. Bring me a light breeze and feet that walk freely. Freedom. A poem knows how to plant it like a seedling. Make it a verse of life. Plant a light. They exploit the twilight. They have stolen my life, and the eyes of many others. But not the freedom of walking in the light breeze of life. Make it a rhyme.

The poems in Woman Life Freedom fuse contemporary detail with the imagery, and sometimes the formal patterns, of Iran’s deep and rich poetic tradition. They form a bridge between voices in exile and protests in Iranian streets. They make up, as Bänoo Zan says in her Afterword, “a self-critical volume as well as a volume of solidarity.” “Fed up with expectations that want me to be an apologist or propagandist for my religion, culture, or country,” she seeks, like many of the poets here, to hold the forces of repression accountable “for crimes committed in our name.” The poems here were born at an important moment in contemporary history, and out of their lines spill the poets’ passion, outrage, individual and collective grief, and an indomitable and universal will to be free.