The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  From the political to the literary, from the scholarly to the hermeneutic, the Shahnameh emerged more than any other text as the locus classicus and the master signifier of Iranian claims to state-sponsored, Eurocentric, “modernity,” or, alternatively, to militant Islamism. The Shahnameh was the subject of learned conferences and symposia, printed and illustrated, narrated and recited, staged and filmed, glossed and annotated, critically edited and taught at all levels of school, high school, and college curricula. The Shahnameh became the primary poetic disposition of a nationalist modernity, integral to the machinery of making modern subjects suitable for a modern nation-state, with a prolonged monarchical history and character. If the Pahlavis emphasized the monarchic traits of the text, the Islamic Republic celebrated the Shi’i identity of its author. Reading the Shahnameh was thus trapped inside two diametrically juxtaposed hermeneutic circles, pulled and pushed to serve the ideological agenda of two opposing states. Predicated on both these abuses, and when it comes to the treatment of the Shahnameh over the past century, we witness a fundamental failure of a monarchic adaptation of the Shahnameh under the Pahlavis as the modus operandi of their legitimacy, as indeed their refusal to be co-opted by the triumphant Shi’ism of an Islamic Republic that is at odds with their own epistemic paradox.

  That paradox has a wider frame of reference, far beyond any national space or political territoriality. Allow me to share a more specific example that may clarify this point further. My habitual joy at teaching my own children the Shahnameh stories has taught me a much different location for when the Persian epic comes alive with unpredictable zest and energy. Once I took a children’s version of the Shahnameh written in simple English prose to Jamaica while vacationing with my younger children Chelgis and Golchin. They were still in elementary school and reading these stories of the Shahnameh and summarizing them in an “illustrated manuscript,” as it were, we made as part of their summer activities. They soon began reading the stories of the Shahnameh, discussing them between themselves, acting them out, writing summaries of the stories in their own handwriting in their notebooks, and illustrating each story with their crayons. As I watched them learn and illustrate the Shahnameh, it occurred to me that today as we read the Persian epic the book is no longer even related to the domain of original intentions and destinations and certainly beyond being either triumphalist or defeatist. It operates in an entirely different register and therefore resonates in uncharted territories. It is, at this point, an epic of ennobling loss. I was conscious of teaching my children something on a Caribbean island that no longer was, had nothing to do with their material surroundings as American children born to immigrant parents, and yet did so without any sense of regret. I did so with a sense of achieving something for them ennobling in having been forever lost, letting them partake in the dramatic relics of something fleeting, something allegorically historical but effectively poetic beyond their adopted homeland where they were born and being raised. That contemporary “reception” of the Shahnameh among ordinary Iranians in and out of their homeland, teaching the Persian epic to future generations, is as relevant as when it is used and abused for or against any ruling state ideology. The Shahnameh has entered a transnational public sphere far beyond the control or even intentions of state building.

  The three atemporal components of the Shahnameh, I remember thinking to myself as my children took a break from drawing Rostam and his Rakhsh and went swimming in the pool, have by now become almost entirely allegorical. The mythic, heroic, and the historical are now all fused together. We no longer care to remember where or when one ends and others begin. It seems to me that it is that sense of ennobling loss and nostalgia, embedded in the tragic totality of the epic, that is now definitive to the very idea of “homeland” even (or particularly) when you are in it. We have all become deeply textual, literary, in our sense of the tragic loss that has been coterminous with our notion of “nationhood,” so far as the Shahnameh has had anything to do with that sense of a homeland. Iran is therefore a floating signifier, a mere allegory for what we think once was but in effect could never have been, for the poetics of its allusions rooted in the Persian epic undercuts its historicity. No state, no ideology, no political movement could ever have control over that interface between the Shahnameh and its readers. What was the Shahnameh to my children on that Caribbean island, or to any other children born to parents who have known, loved, and cherished the Shahnameh, children being born and raised in New York, going to public schools with other children mostly from Latin-American or African-American heritage? What were Rostam and Tahmineh to them or they to those bygone heroes? How could they have related even to their own, Shahnameh-inspired, names, beyond the allegorical relics of a homeland, rooted in textual evidence, reminiscent of a distant epic of a bygone age neither they nor their parents could ever completely fathom? Here, the Shahnameh had become a metaphor, far beyond its own subconscious.

  At home or abroad, in Persian or any other language, the Shahnameh today offers its readers a sense of literary wholeness otherwise lacking in lived reality. The more the world around the Shahnameh becomes increasingly fragmented, the more wholesome appears the open-ended horizons of the Persian epic. The sense of nostalgic loss, of wishing for a totemic totality, is what holds the tragic tenacity of the Shahnameh together today. The Shahnameh is the full constellation of Iranian metahistorical memory, wrapped inside a volume in a nutshell. You enter the text and you need not exit it ever to learn that full and unfolding, but ultimately unattainable, history. It is not that people don’t realize that much of the Shahnameh is just stories and not histories. But the poetic fusion of the two adjacent realms leaves no room for anything else. The Shahnameh makes the poetic act inaugural. It has its own temporality, spatiality, locality. It is not European modern. It is Persian presence. To our historical consciousness, to our worldly presence, to the fact that we exist it asserts itself. As a poetic act, the sense of transience, of fate, of tragedy and triumph, becomes coterminous with the moment when we enter, embrace, and dwell in the Shahnameh. The Persian epic can never be fully owned, for it owns its reader at the moment of any and all encounters. The epic has long and tiresome passages, especially in the historical section. But the dramatic power of its poetic openings, its mythical sections and heroic deeds never lose sight of the rest that it chooses to narrate. It narrates an eternity in the here and now.

  Once in the course of a class presentation on the Shahnameh illustrations through the ages a student became visibly shaken by the sudden realization that in every frame of a painting the whole epic dwelled. A simple sense of wonder and awe I witnessed in another student when I shared with my class the contemporary poet Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales’s poem “Akhar-e Shahnameh” (The end of the Shahnameh). The fact that more than a thousand years after its composition the Persian epic could still elicit such powerful emotional resonances seemed unreal, uncanny to him. I have had similar senses of tragic totality when listening to the recitations of Mahmoud Darwish of his own poetry, declaring the triumphant tragedy of his own people. For all I know Darwish had no knowledge of Ferdowsi, never perhaps even read the Shahnameh, even in its Arabic translation. But the sense of the fragility of fate evident in Darwish’s poetry is decidedly epic. That I know for a fact for I know from our own example in Iran when reading poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Nazem Hekmat, Pablo Neruda, or Vladimir Mayakovsky we read them with a sense of revolutionary epic. We read them with a sense of enabling fragility of time and space, both ours and not ours. Our own towering national poet, Ahmad Shamlou, once said some nonsensical gibberish about the Shahnameh to provoke people. Little did he know or cared to know how our active memories of the Shahnameh were the foregrounding of our reading of his own poetry, or that in time his own sense of the tragic sense of our futurity, his nostalgia for our future, as it were, was instrumental in helping us read the Shahnameh more purposefully in our own time. Now put all those poets I named together—Darwish from Pal
estine, Faiz from Pakistan, Hekmat from Turkey, Neruda from Chile, and Mayakovsky from Russia—and all of them provoked by our reading of the Persian epic and ask yourself if “World Literature” has any inkling of this world literature.

  All of this is to say that the text of the Shahnameh has historically and narratively defied any and all kinds of political abuse—the intention of the text (as Umberto Eco would say) defying the intention of an imperial or anti-imperial, monarchical or antimonarchical, reading. Because of its inherently tragic disposition, which is always predicated on a moral paradox, and the fact that it is the epic of the conquerors in the language of the vanquished, the Shahnameh has a built-in narrative resistance to political or even literary abuse that ultimately disabuses itself for posterity. The intention of the text itself was resistant to the intention of all such abusive readings, and the Shahnameh remained defiant, conspiring with the intention of its author to agitate alternative readerships. Three epic narratives in twentieth-century Persian poetry, cinema, and literature borrowed from the central trauma of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and worked against its abusive adaptation by the Pahlavi monarchy for imperial nationalism: first was Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales’s epic poem “Chavoshi,” where the central tragic trauma and narrative paradox of the Shahnameh informed its modern dispensations in another epic poem “Khan-e Hashtom va Adamak” (1968); second was Amir Naderi’s film Tangsir (1973); and third of course was the magisterial epic of Mahmoud Dolatabadi Kelidar (1977–1984)—all three of them entirely predicated on the Shahnameh and its tragic disposition (although Naderi’s cinematic proclivity toward John Ford overrides his Kurosawa disposition). The masculinist disposition of all three narratives is then effectively countered by Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun (1969), which radically compromises the phallocentric disposition of the epic altogether.

  What we have here is a will to resist power and not a will to power—all evident in such recent adaptations of the Persian epic as Loris Tjeknavorian’s opera Rostam and Sohrab (2003), the Iranian rapper Taham’s video clip “Rostam & Sohrab,”13 Behrouz Gharibpour’s puppet opera Rostam Sohrab, (2004),14 and Hamid Motebassem’s operetta Simurgh (2009).15 As a poetic constellation of enduring master signifiers, the Shahnameh is the locus classicus of assigning meaning to the world. If Moretti’s Modern Epic is offered as a European will to power, we can see in these adaptations of the Shahnameh a defiant will to resist power. To the degree that the Shahnameh was abused against the subconscious of the text, it has effectively dodged, as it were, and surfaced in its oppositional renditions in Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales and others.

  Among the most potent oppositional readings of the Shahnameh is Bahram Beiza’i’s Sohrab-Koshi (Sohrabicide, 2007), a play that marks a critical turn to Ferdowsi’s epic by arguably the most eminent playwright in contemporary Iran.16 Bahram Beiza’i (b. 1938) is a towering figure in Iranian performing arts, both as a playwright and as a filmmaker.17 He updates the tragic encounter between Rostam and Sohrab, turning the classic story into a timely commentary on the nature of violence, power, and retrograde traditions. Some in Iran interpreted Beiza’i’s reading of the story as a criticism of the encounter between Tradition (Rostam) and Modernity (Sohrab). Others read it as an allusion to Sohrab A’rabi, a young man who was murdered in the course of the Green Movement in Iran.18 Beiza’i composed his play in decidedly archaic prose to give it an archetypal air of authenticity. The play is a dramatic adaptation of Ferdowsi’s text with a potently political twist to its timely resonances. The result is a performing diagnosis of the classical text that everyone thought they knew, but Beiza’i gave it a different urgency. He stages it as a flashback but in effect it flashes forward to bring the old story to life. In interviews, Beiza’i began speculating about the character of Sohrab and interpreted his name or the mythic origin of his maternal origins creatively. The result is a timely twist to the classical story that it brought the Persian epic to meet the most urgent questions of the time.

  Could Iranians, as a people, or the Afghans, the Tajiks, the Indians, or any other people who have been narratively touched by the Shahnameh, have had any other history than the one they have lived, with the Shahnameh as the defining moment of their historic consciousness? Isn’t Bahram Beiza’i’s Sohrabicide or Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales’s “Khan-e Hashtom” the exegetic bookend of the Shahnameh in enclosing and encoding a quintessentially tragic sense of history? Are we not as a people, and isn’t our entire history, a mere commentary on the text of the Shahnameh? Can we ever escape its ennobling sense of tragedy, which graces and sacrifices us at one and the same time, doomed always to be defeated by a hidden fate narrated into an epic of triumph at the time of defeat, triumphant only at the time of defeat—a quintessentially Shi’i disposition written into a historical consciousness of epic proportions, or, put differently, a Shahnameh leitmotif coagulated as our inevitable choice of a public religion? Isn’t the story of Imam Hossein, as the defining trauma of Shi’ism, just another apocryphal Shahnameh story that has not made it into any critical edition for it has made it into our collective consciousness as our public religion? Look at the streets of Iran today and see the names of young men and women murdered by order of a Zahhak or a Yazid (take your pick) but ultimately at the hand of their own father: Sohrab A’rabi, Ashkan Sohrabi, Neda Aqa Soltan, Kianush Asa, Taraneh Mousavi, Mostafa Ghanian, Hossein Akhtar Zand, Ramin Ghahremani, Mas’ud Hashemzadeh, Behzad Mohajer, Amir Javadi Langerudi, Mohsen Ruholamini, Farzad Kamangar …

  ANOTHER WORLD TEXT

  The Shahnameh becomes a “modern epic” not because it was composed during the course of European colonial modernity, which it was not, but because it was literally and figuratively dismembered in the selfsame tumultuous history, aggressively fragmented into folio pages and into the scattered registers of the original. What made European colonial modernity possible made the textual totality of the Shahnameh impossible. That fragmentation of the Persian epic in and of itself turned it into an allegory of itself, a metaphor for the collective consciousness and the agential defiance it had harbored during its entire history. In other words, the Shahnameh became a “modern epic” and a “world text” by virtue of and at the moment that it was dismembered, disjointed, and catapulted from its imperial territories onto fragmented nations. That very fragmentation, however, has also allegorized the Shahnameh, made it into a powerful parable of postcolonial nations, from which traumatic experience it has emerged to reclaim the world in which it now finds itself. Nativist nationalism has been chiefly responsible for destroying the imperial provenance of the Shahnameh. This linguistic nationalism has categorically deworlded the worldly text, nativized, nationalized, denatured it, from which weak perspective Shahnameh scholars are now pleading to be accepted into the hall of fame of “World Literature.” That is the worst kind of “World Literature” from its very inception. It was and it is a sham. It has robbed the world and its creative forces to claim and call itself “World Literature.” The whole Eurocentric idea of “World Literature” needs to be categorically dismantled and texts like the Shahnameh restored to this and not their lost worlds, by making them speak to the fragmented realities of a colonially ravaged world.

  Franco Moretti’s identification of a number of modern epics as the literary, poetic, and operatic master narratives that reflect the European will to power posits a very tempting question to the Shahnameh as the epic drama of a people entirely outside the purview of his considerations and today located entirely in the postcolonial shadow of his imperial imagining. How can the contemporary reception of the Shahnameh be read in light of the Iranian encounter with colonial modernity—namely, at the receiving end of what Moretti considers the European will to dominate the world and its corresponding literary will to formal inventiveness? The opposing site of that European will to dominate has of course been the universal and variegated will to resist that domination by any means necessary, including literary and artistic. How has the postcolonial reception of the Shahnameh in the course of this Eu
ropean colonial modernity fared in the course of that global encounter?

  To the texts Moretti has selected as modern epics, he attributes “the cognitive metaphor of the world text,” which he is perfectly entitled to do. However, his world, the world he theorizes, is not our world, meaning the world at large from Asia and Africa to Latin America and Oceania. His world is Europe and his world is Eurocentric. Our world is neither European nor Eurocentric. But more important, we, the rest, no longer wish to be called non-European. We are not “non-European.” Non-Europeans authenticated Europe, nativized themselves and the worldliness of their own arts, literature, and culture. We are altogether liberated from Europe and look at literary theorists like Moretti quite fondly as colleagues and friends, though we see them as incurably provincial in their Eurocentrism.

  Moretti’s notion of “modern epics” or “world texts” has, however, a crucial insight into how they work when he says these texts “reveal a kind of antagonism between the noun and the adjective: a discrepancy between the totalizing will of the epic and the subdivided reality of the modern world.” How beautiful is that insight, and how sad it makes me to see its author so utterly indifferent to the world he inhabits but does not know by reducing it to his Eurocentric imagination. “The totalizing will of the epic” is precisely what was violently destroyed in the Shahnameh when one of its most precious copies was torn into pieces precisely by the “subdivided reality of the modern world” between the colonizers and the colonized. Texts like the Shahnameh have multiple lives, and their fragmentation in the course of colonial modernity is precisely what Moretti so accurately calls “the totalizing will of the epic and the subdivided reality of the modern world.” That subdivision is actually fragmentary and allegorical, as indeed that “totalizing will of the epic” is uniquely Virgilian and as such entirely inapplicable to epics like the Shahnameh, whose internal logic and polyvocal rhetoric prevent them from any such totalizing will. In the Shahnameh the heroic and the historical are intertwined and predicated on the mythical—a fact that is absent in the Virgilian epic and as a result does not enter into Hegel’s conception of epic, which is at the root of Moretti’s reading of the “modern epic” or “world text.” It is not that Moretti does not know an epic like the Shahnameh. It is the fact that his “world system” is so completely closed ever to get to know it that is the issue.