Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) remains the most powerful, the most cogent, and the most earnest attempt to save “World Literature” from its innate pitfalls by forcing it into a direction it simply cannot travel, not by virtue of any will or wherewithal it lacks but simply because of its incurably imperial origin in the European liberal imagination that it can never shed for good. Spivak wisely places the discipline of Comparative Literature and with it “World Literature” next to “Area Studies,” though of this latter mode of knowledge production she has a limited idea available to someone rooted in English and Comparative Literature department and a devout and professed “Europeanist.” Spivak rightly points out the origin of Area Studies in the Cold War but does not see the root of this mode of knowledge production in Orientalism of the classical colonial vintage, which was the subject of Edward Said’s groundbreaking scholarship.17 Spivak then moves to argue for a strategic solidarity between Area Studies as she understands it and “Comparative Literature” as she wishes it to be. “Area Studies,” she points out, “exhibit quality and rigor … combined with openly conservative … politics.”18 She is right on the first point and wrong on the second. She is right that Area Studies still thrive on philological and hermeneutic moves rooted in their Orientalist heritage, but scholars now ghettoized in that field by English department scholars have long since turned the table of power upside down and staged a will to resist power (rather than being subservient to it). She wants the discipline of “Comparative Literature” from which “World Literature” has emerged to “supplement” Area Studies and proposes, “We must take the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropolitan migrant. We cannot dictate a model for this from the offices of the American Comparative Literature Association.”19 As always this is vintage Spivak brilliance—but the issue of literary confidence and aesthetic sensibility is far beyond linguistic competence of the highest degree imaginable to Spivak. Linguistic competence of the sort she envisions, and as in fact she fully recognizes, will never remedy the fundamental flaws of the disciple from its very inception by migrant European literary scholars finding a haven in the United States.
One of the main culprits in domesticating, nativizing, exoticizing, and thereby categorically alienating and deworlding the Shahnameh from itself and its readers is in fact this bizarre phrase of making it accessible to “the Western reader” when translating it into English. Who exactly is this “Western reader” facing a translated Shahnameh? What sort of a creature might that be? The person who is born to the English language or English is her or his primary language of literary, poetic, or scholarly expression? Is an Indian, a first-, second-, or tenth-generation immigrant to Canada, or the United States, an Australian, “a Western reader”? Is the thing called the Western reader a so-called white person alone? Let me speak from experience: Suppose an African-American, a Native-American, a Latino, Asian, Arab, Japanese student at Columbia University starts reading the Shahnameh in English for she or he knows no Persian. Is that student a “Western reader” too? The trouble with this phrase is the potent sign of the racialized encoding of the term “Western reader.” You cannot go around the globe conquering the world, enslaving its inhabitants, stealing its resources, and imposing your language and culture on people and when they speak English back to you (so you understand them), then suddenly this language becomes a “Western language.” English and French and such are not “Western languages” and those who speak them are not the “Western” public. People around the globe have confiscated these languages, very much as a Native American confiscated a Winchester gun from his colonizers and tormentors. That gun is now his—as English, French, or German now belongs to people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These are imperial languages, just as Persian, Arabic, or Ottoman Turkish were also once imperial languages. When we translate the Shahnameh form Persian into English we are translating it from one bygone imperial language into another dominant imperial language. For all we know Chinese might very well be the next dominant global language of our future. Until then we need to remember that the global reach of English has had to do with the British and now the American empire. As such all the subjects or citizens of that or this empire speak, read, write, obey, or defy in it. The translation of an epic from the language of one empire to another kept afar by a long historical distance must keep us aware of two or more worlds that these two languages and empires have historically informed and accompanied.
Some eight centuries before Goethe dreamed of the idea of “World Literature,” and long before the idea became an ideological arm of Euro-American imperial hegemony over the world at large, in a world far away from his imagination, a Persian poet had crafted a world (as all poets often do) that had brought forth the poetic heritage of his bygone ages forward and let them shine on worlds yet to come. The richness and complexity of Ferdowsi’s world predates and overrides the theoretical imaginary of Goethe as the progenitor of all those who have subsequently theorized the idea of “World Literature.” The point of comparison is neither chronological nor spatial, nor indeed exclusive to Persian, Chinese, Indian, or Egyptian literary heritages. It is to mark the competing worlds that enable critical and creative thinking. The world Goethe and his European and American descendants have enabled and theorized is theirs and theirs only—and there solidly to cover up and abort the rise of alternative worlds. That world has nothing to do with other worlds, of which they know very little, and yet they do their best to assimilate backward to theirs. My attempt here is not to superimpose or place one (Persian) world against theirs (Eurocentric). Quite to the contrary. We must dismantle not just Eurocentrism but the very imperial foregrounding of any such One-Worldly arrogance. I wish therefore to make an example of this one world I know well, to point to all the other worlds (Chinese, Indian, Asian, African, Latin American) this outdated Eurocentrism embedded in “World Literature” has consistently and with imperial hubris systematically marginalized, darkened, and overshadowed.
Can the postcolonial world have an epic of its own—not an epic of triumph or defeat, of which two exclusive choices the triumphalist imperialism of “World Literature” is particularly fond—but an epic of resistance and resilience, an epic in which we can read the trials and tribulations of the very condition of our coloniality? Can this epic be a relic of the past recast in the hopes of our future? I have read and proposed reading the Persian epic as a postcolonial epic, a “world text” not of the First, Second, or Third World but of worldliness of an entirely different sort, of the postcolonial world liberated from its First World theorizations, the sort that habitually consolidates and confirms the global configuration of power, of an unjust and cruel “world system.” Can we read the Shahnameh as a world text that has survived empires to come here to speak of bygone and defeated imperial hubris to the empire that thinks itself triumphant, exceptional, everlasting? Could White theorists of the First World (thus self-designated) perhaps stop expecting Brown theorists to bring their “national literatures” to their attention so they can grace and bless them with their “distant reading” for they are too busy theorizing “World Literature” to bother with their own close readings?
The Shahnameh stories are today liberated from their courtly contexts and their abusive manhandling in the course of colonial nation building. The monarchy and the Islamic Republic that came near it over the past century had little to no impact on or use for its subversive poetics. That monarchy collapsed and this Islamic Republic is categorically alien to it—caught up in the paradox of its own abusive power with a fallacious claim on Shi’ism. The text is now freed from the golden chains of all those exquisite courtly illustrations and gaudy conferences alike and thematically renewed in the tradition of its “coffeehouse paintings,” the sustained aesthetics that saw it dwell in the emerging public spheres of its immediate habitat, where real people gathered and told themselves Shahna
meh stories. From those coffeehouse paintings, a renewed public pact is now evident between those ancient stories and our thinking postcolonial truth against power. The Persian epic has been the trusted companion of millions of human beings through the thick and thin of their colonial encounters with European modernity. It is now rich and reflective of the hopes and aspirations, sufferings and dreams of those very people.
Could we perhaps consider the Persian epic as a world text by virtue of having endured multiple empires before it was literally dismembered into scattered pages of its former glories—and in the scars of that dismemberment it carries the marks of its postcolonial worldliness? If so, could we then think of the Shahnameh as textual evidence of the multiple nations that have known and lived it to come to terms with their postcolonial truth and realities? Read in this light, suddenly the Shahnameh has things to teach a world that shares its sustained history of imperil domination and colonial abuse. The world on which “World Literature” is theorized is the same world that has conquered, colonized, and ravaged this planet. That world, that brutalized, denied, denigrated, and vilified world, cannot, could not possibly, be part of this “World Literature,” by definition. Any claim to the contrary is a sad practical joke.
When Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, said, “At whatever level we study it … decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution,”20 this is also what he meant: that the very conception of “the world” in which we live will have to change. For it is impossible to imagine that other “species” of humanity without decoupling it from the colonial commentary on capitalist modernity that conceived of this “World Literature” to begin with. What made “World Literature” possible, the normative imaginary that considered the world its property, made it impossible for any non-European text to be part of it without denying its own worldly habitat. Europe mapped itself against the world—from its mineral and material resources to its cheap slave labor to its cultures and civilizations it termed, defined, museumized, and cannibalized. The postcolonial world must claim its own epics and narratives, the truths of its own historical whereabouts. Unless and until the entirety of the “World Literature” project is categorically dismantled, from A to Z, from top to bottom, and its textual evidence disassembled and put on an equal footing with all other worldly texts, there is no hope for a world literature with a global claim to emerge. The Shahnameh as an allegory of itself, as an indexical reference to itself, is an allusion to that possibility.
REWORLDING THE SHAHNAMEH
Let me now be more specific and ask in what particular sense can we then argue the Shahnameh is integral to the idea of not “world” but in fact a “worldly literature,” not to plead to be admitted into the pantheon of what Western European or North American literary theorists falsely claim and call “World Literature” but to mark the worldliness of literatures they so subjected to an epistemic violence when they enshrined them into their idea of “World Literature”? First and foremost, I have argued that the historical and textual experiences of the Persian epic must today be placed in its contemporary worldly context. The Shahnameh is the poetic embodiment of successive worlds it has encountered and now actively remembers. This remembrance must be defetishized and placed in conversation with the real world in which it now lives. The abuse of the Persian epic by postcolonial states to fake legitimacy cannot be the deadpan destiny of the Shahnameh. The fate of the Shahnameh cannot be talismanic, reduced to its symbolic significance, thus bereft of its organic encounter with the world in which it now lives. The creative adaptation of its stories or the critical edition of its finest prints are all necessary but not sufficient. Of all its varied expressions in our time I will point to one particularly powerful poetic encounter with it in an epic poetic narrative by Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales (1929–1990) as singularly significant evidence of how it has emerged to mark its postcolonial fate as a piece of modern epic, world text, or worldly text, or through a decidedly and self-consciously positing on the colonial site. This among many other similar encounters have made the Shahnameh worldly to its current and immediate content. It is in a poem like “Khan-e Hashtom” (The eighth trial, 1967) that the Shahnameh has extended its presence into a critical transnational public sphere fully aware of its postcolonial fate.
The most politically potent poem of Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales’s on a Shahnameh theme is his masterpiece “Khan-e Hashtom.”21 In this landmark poem, Akhavan summons his legendary command over Persian epic poetry to bring Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh forward to visit his contemporary issues.
Yadam amad han …
Oh I just remembered:
I was telling you this that night too—
It was so bitterly cold.
The narrator proceeds to tell the story of how during one bitterly cold evening he had found refuge in a warm and cozy coffeehouse where a master naqqal was the center of everyone’s attention. The naqqal looks, acts, speaks, and carries himself like a Khorasan nobleman, dressed and presented in a manner that invokes the image of Ferdowsi. Akhavan sets the stage so we have a sense of the cold winter outside, a warm gathering inside, with the naqqal in total command of his audience. Then he tells his audience how Ferdowsi has already narrated the “Seven Tasks of Rostam,” and now,
I recite the Eighth Trial,
I whose name is Mas!
“Mas” here stands for Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales, placing himself directly in the line of Ferdowsi, and it is in that line that he begins to tell his story as the continuation of the Persian epic poet’s:
This is the story, yes, it is the story of pain,
This is not just any old poem,
This is the measure of love and hate,
The measure of manhood and cowardice,
This is no abstract nonsensical verse—
This is a rugged rug of misfortune,
Soaking with the blood of Sohrabs and many Seyavashes—and
It’s like a blanket over the coffin of Takhti22 …
Yes, I am the narrator, the narrator am I:
Let me repeat as I have repeated only too many times:
I am the narrator of forgotten stories,
An owl sitting on the ruins of the cursed land of history—
An owl on the roof of this Ruinousville,
The turtledove cooing on top of these destroyed palaces.
The mirror of history, the narrator tells us, is broken, but by some sort of strange magic the image in the broken mirror appears unbroken. The master naqqal, Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales’s own self-projection, now stands in the middle of the crowd, pointing with his fist and mace toward “the West” with hatred, and toward “the East” with contempt. What follows is an agony, a pain, a deeply rooted cry for freedom from the depth of the ditch into which Rostam was cast by his own brother and murdered. Here Akhavan turns the sense of tragedy in many Shahnameh stories into a contemporary lamentation against treachery and treason, tyrannical backwardness from inside and colonial domination from abroad. Rostam, now poetically resurrected into a contemporary defeated hero, is deep inside the ditch, full of poisonous daggers and arrows, with his brother looking over him with treacherous satisfaction.
Now that pole of confidence and hope for Iranshahr,
That champion of fearsome battles,
The towering hero,
The son of the Ancient Zal, world champion,
That Master and Rider of the matchless Rakhsh,23
The hero whose name when calling for a rival to fight
Would make the pillars of the world tremble in fear,
The hero who had no rival in combat,
That superior warrior, that old champion triumphing over lions,
He who upon his Rakhsh looked like a mountain upon a mountain,
A thicket of lions in armor,
He from whose lips—
Just like a key to the lock of a treasure
house full of pearls—
The Smile would never fade away,
Be it a day of peace and he committed to love,
Or a day of war determined to fight …
Yes, now Tahamtan and his valiant Rakhsh
Were lost in the depth of this poisonous ditch full of daggers,
The Hero of the Seven Trials was now trapped in the maw of the Eighth.
The telling of this Eighth Trial brings to a timely height the epic narrative of the Shahnameh, makes it real, palpable, contemporary. Akhavan’s epic language echoes Ferdowsi’s, mirrors his sentiments, updates his heroic diction. Akhavan’s “Eighth Trial” is the epitome of the postcolonial moment when the fate of the nation with a solid command over Ferdowsi’s legacy remembers its epic heroes and summons them to address its contemporary predicaments.
The sequel to “The Eighth Trial” is “Adamak” (The little man, 1968) that follows soon after its prequel poem and depicts the selfsame coffeehouse on a winter night crowded with an equally enthusiastic crowd, although this time gathering around not a master naqqal but a television set. Akhavan’s denunciation of the television set here becomes emblematic of his condemnation of modernity and machine, made powerful and poignant by his prominent contemporary public intellectual Jalal Al-Ahmad in his classical text Gharbzadeghi (Westoxication, 1962). This sequel poem is the epitome of the moment when Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is brought to bear on an epochal condemnation of colonial modernity, albeit with a deep sense of nostalgia.
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