By Fatemeh Shams
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

In the 1980s, a chain of traumatic events in Iran, from an eight-year war to post-revolution political turmoil, forced hundreds of thousands of people to escape their homeland during a wave of mass imprisonment and executions. The exodus included a substantial number of artists, writers, and academics, targeted for their work and beliefs. Their experience gave rise to an important, and woefully overlooked, canon of exilic Persian literature that offers a nuanced and complex documentation of forced displacement, exilic transnational identity, and the troublesome concept of ‘home.' This essay explores the work of first-generation exiled poets and the ways in which temporal fluctuations of memory and emotion interact with the geographical and corporeal impact of displacement. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of home, migration, and diaspora, the essay challenges ‘home versus exile' as an oppositional binary, offering a broader definition of exile that rearticulates the meaning of home.

1 Navigating Home and Exile

The notion of home assumes an unshakeable complexity for those who lack the option of a safe return to their homeland. From the moment of escape, home collapses into a fragmented reality that shapes and haunts the exilic memory.1 In her foundational book, Introduction to Persian Exile Literature (1998), the Iranian literary scholar Maliheh Tirehgol set the foundation for scholarly investigation in the field of Persian literature. She has painstakingly collected, categorized, and analyzed works of various genres including poetry, fiction, and memoir. In what follows, I will build on Tirehgol's insightful thematic framework of exilic literature while merely focusing on those poets who fled Iran following the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

In the Iranian context, the chaotic establishment of the Islamic Republic in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution ushered in a new era of censorship, control, and a growing population of writers voicing their dissent in response. The literati, previously united around the revolutionary cause, began to grapple with new ideological divisions and contestations, positioning themselves in line with—or as critical of—the new power structure. Intellectuals and writers at large experienced censorship and persecution because of their critical standpoints. While some writers stayed, others fled or were forcibly exiled, settling mostly across Europe and the United States. Thus, the rift deepened into further oppositional binaries: home versus away, creative versus censored, ethical versus unethical, committed versus indifferent, and— perhaps most importantly—belonging versus alienation.

For example, Mohammadali Sepanlou, one of the outspoken members of Iran's Writers Association (1968) was among those poets who chose to stay in Iran at this time. During a conversation with the exiled poet Esmail Nouri ‘Ala, who settled in the United States, Sepanlou declared that the “emigrant poet and writer will rot after a while […] as their process of growth will eventually stop [in exile]” (Nouriala and Sepanlou 1989, p. 40). The prominent Iranian poet Simin Behbahani (1989) also defiantly chose to stay in Iran until her death, despite facing harassment and censorship. She included a sonnet in her bestselling 1980s collection entitled A Line of Speed and Fire, and she dedicated this poem to “those who have remained and those who have left”:

You leave, I shall remain, you leave, I shall remain
By God, I can't separate from homeland […]
The night of exile, though colorful and ornate
What is its worth when I can't be happy there? [ …]
Me and this uneasy corner in the land of rabbles
I won't leave till I plea for their humanity […]
(“You Leave and Let Me Remain”)

For those who fled the country, however, the binary of home versus exile was less clear-cut. Home does indeed, at least in the context of flight and displacement, appear as an oppositional binary. Edward Said also famously reinforced this binary, defining exile as “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home” (Said 2000, p. 173). As we will see in this essay, however, exile poetry interrogates and problematizes the image of home as a native land, revealing the need to recognize the layered complexity of home as a transformative, shifting concept in constant dialogue with geography, space, identity, and time.

In his book Exilic Meditations: Essays on a Displaced Life (2012), Payman Vahhabzadeh notes that “exilic experience is not merely the experience of being cast away, but also the experience of flight” (Vahabzadeh 2012, p. 24). This idea of imposed flight—which is, after all, a corporeal survival mechanism—distinguishes exile from other forms of immigration; it captures the physical movement of being flung out of one's home. As I will later show, the act of escape also complicates home as a place of desire and emotional safety.

The binary of home versus away has been the primary focus of key migration and diaspora theorists for many years. Iain Chambers sets ‘home' against ‘away,' in which the latter is a strange land (Chambers 1994, p. 18). But as Sara Ahmed asserts, a highly nuanced relationship exists between the two. In her important essay “Home and Away,” Ahmed responds to Chambers' oppositional binary by asking if ‘being-athome' already involves a feeling of ‘strangeness':

There is always an encounter with strangeness at stake, even within home: the home does not secure identity by expelling strangers, but requires those strangers to establish relations of proximity and distance within the home, and not just between home and away. The association of home with familiarity, which allows strangeness to be associated with migration (that is, to be located as beyond the walls of home), is problematic (Ahmed 1999, p. 340).

Diaspora theorist Avtar Brah further deepens this subjective relationship with home when she writes:

Home is intrinsically linked with the way in which processes of inclusion or exclusion operate and are subjectively experienced under given circumstances. It is centrally about our political and personal struggles over the social regulation of 'belonging' (Brah 2003, p. 178).

For Ahmed, along with Brah, “home is a matter, at least in part, of affect and feeling – as the presence or absence of particular feelings” (S. Mallett 2004, p. 79). Brah usefully differentiates between the home where one lives and the home of one's origin:

Where is home? On the one hand, ‘home' is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense, it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of ‘origin.' On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of locality, its sounds, and smells (Brah 1996, p. 192).

Home bears similar mythic qualities in the collective imagination of exiled poets. It begins as a place of no return; the desire for return creates feelings of defeat and loss. As the poets move through phases of exile, however, home continues to haunt their exilic memory by evolving through sensory associations and encounters with place, sound, and smell. My analysis of the poems will draw on Ahmed's and Brah's Homes Unbound: Home in Persian Exile Poetry 11 reflections on home to illustrate a progression of home as a concept in the exilic psyche during different stages of their journey, from first flight to displacement and the desire for homing. I argue that the process of estrangement for many exiled poets of 1980s′ Iran started at home and in the aftermath of the revolution, prior to exile. The subjective experience of fleeing home is intimately intertwined with home itself, as it begins to feel increasingly less like home for many of these poets whose ideological leftist leanings led to their persecution.

‘Homing desire,' as Brah argues, is not identical to a desire for a ‘homeland' (Brah 1996, p. 192). We will see that, even in the case of those exiled poets who show a strong yearning for return, home embodies a mixed geography in the process of resettlement. In order to feel at home, exiled poets often contemplate their desires, fantasies, and memories by drawing on sensory associations between their past and present homes; though they are well aware that their dream of returning home can hardly, or perhaps never, be realized. As the poems discussed in this paper will demonstrate, through both utopian and dystopian motifs, the exilic state is far more complex than lines on maps and closed borders. It is not a fixed state; it is a mercurial journey, both linear and circular. It demands the question: if exile is a feeling, a state of existence, more than a label or a category, is it possible to feel ‘out of place' and ‘at home' at the same time?

2 Fleeing Home

Home, for those who leave it due to circumstances over which they have no control, remains forever unfinished, partial, and fragmentary. When escape becomes inevitable, home sheds its image as a wholesome place and becomes closely intertwined with estrangement and insecurity. In poems of forced flight, a clear division exists between home as a place that one leaves behind and exile as an unknown destination. Borders dividing home and exile are often portrayed with vivid clarity. Varying natural landscapes, such as rivers, mountains, villages, and seas, come into play to create a clear dividing line between home and away. But such a division does not necessarily imply an emotional binary relationship between home and exile. In other words, home does not inherently encompass feelings of emotional safety or nostalgic yearnings. It becomes, rather, a more ambivalent, even alienating, place. In the wake of the revolution, the Iranian poet Jaleh Esfahani returned to Iran after 30 years of life in exile (in Azerbaijan and the Soviet Union) only to leave again after a short period of incarceration due to her links with the communist Tudeh Party. Although she later published exilic poems with the theme of nostalgia for home, in her poem “Crossing the River” (1989), she reflects on the experience of forced flight and depicts home as a “demolished route” behind her that inherently precludes return:

I think of the bewildering fate of someone
with no path on her back
and no other solution
but to cross the river
in this flooding night.

Save me from bitter temptations of choosing
Between escaping evil
Or being destroyed by it.
Dark cry of flood and this raging river
There is no other path,
But crossing the river
Crossing the river […]
(“Crossing the River”)

The binary here consists not of ‘home' or ‘away,' but of the choice to “escape” or “being destroyed.” The river becomes both a physical and symbolic border which must be crossed with “no other solution” at hand. Even if she stays on the ‘evil' bank (home), she is already estranged from her place of origin. The protagonist locates the “path” not on a map, but on her back, evoking the embodied experience of forced displacement and carrying a burden.

This lack of choice often characterizes moments of flight and forced departure; the crippling sense that home is already a strange land. Having chosen to live in a self-imposed exile in the United States, the leftist poet Nader Naderpour moved to Paris only a year after the revolution. He “left Iran carrying a single suitcase of clothing, copies of his books, and a partial manuscript for a new collection” (Mafie 2001, n.p.). In a poem written upon his arrival in France, Naderpour likens the disruption of home in the aftermath of the revolution to the eruption of a natural disaster that “devoured everyone” and “changed everything”:

That earthquake which shook home
one night changed everything
It burnt the sleeping world like a flame
and tainted the ashes of dawn by blood
That earthquake shattered colorful glasses
It took them off the hearts, threw them into dust
It covered faces of women and colors of flowers
behind the masks of grudge
It shook the cradle of death
and became a grave that devoured everyone
(“Earthquake”)

The earthquake motif returns us, as much of exilic poetry does, to the idea that an exile is uprooted not only from their home; they are uprooted from the earth and the land, and they consider death as a possible dwelling. In his poem “Qezelkand,”2 the leftist poet-activist Saeed Yousef, who fled to Germany in 1983, invites himself to take a final glance at the ground before having to flee:

A few remaining steps to the mountain peak
buried deep in snow
Turn half-way round
Look back down for just a moment
You might catch a glimpse of a small spot down there
Qezelkand
Last station in the beloved homeland …

Dung smoke
the smell of pickled meat
neighing horses
dogs barking
A picture of the ‘Āqā' on the wall
and ‘The Hope of Islam'
two Kalashnikovs in a corner
an ancient rifle under the mattress
the Peshmerga with a cup of steaming tea
Qezelkand
Last station in the beloved homeland …
(“Qezelkand”)

Yousef depicts the irreversible flight taken by so many who journeyed into exile during the 1980s. Those who belonged to leftist groups, such as the guerilla Fadai fighters, mostly smuggled themselves out of the country with the help of the Kurdish Peshmergas, who played an instrumental role in helping opposition groups cross borders throughout the 1980s. Yousef's realistic rendering of his flight poignantly documents the risks and doubts of his final departure. A Proustian, soothing portrait of nature and food sits in unsettling contrast with the hidden presence of guns under cushions and the confident presence of the Peshmerga fighter.

For Yousef, and for many other likeminded intellectuals and activists who participated in the revolution, home was soon recast as a place of ideological defeat and alienation. Yousef's indirect verbal references to Hosein Ali Montazeri's picture4 on the walls of rural homes allude to the hegemonic pressure that followed revolutionary zeal. According to Saeed Yousef, “Peshmerga fighters often hung pictures of the Islamic Republic's officials so that they could operate against the government undercover.”5 The image of the Peshmerga drinking hot tea sparks hopes for the victory of a defeated cause. The recurring refrain of the poem, however, serves as a reminder of the fading image of home.

The conversational tone of the final lines, which could also be read as an inner monologue, echoes the bodily alienation felt both at home and in relation to it. A slight hesitation that delays the flight could potentially lead to death. The body of the poet, knee-deep in snow, evinces the precarity experienced by the fleeing body at home. No longer a protective force, home rejects the body by carrying it to the verge of death by freezing and by exposing it to the “sword of wind.” With every step forward, “Qezelkand” and home fade and sink into exilic memory.

But
Don't hesitate on that fearful slope
doubt will undermine your feet
Wipe away your sadness
swallow your tears
If not
the wind will swipe you with
its mighty force
Come forward, push on
your head bursting with memories of home

Qezelkand
Last stop …
(“Qezelkand”)

While for Yousef, home represents a mixture of antagonism and allure until the final moments, for the exiled poet Javad Tale‘i, landscapes of home offer a brutal metaphor for his flight. In a poem entitled “In the Frozen Dawn” (1986), written after his arrival in Darmstadt in Germany, Tale‘i portrays a different escape path through the sea:

We were coming
From fields of lies
From lands of lead
From borders of suffering
     And territories of terror
          – without sail and paddle
               suspended on driftwoods
                   in the storm –
At a time when the moon crawled into seclusion
We took off on the waves.
– where is the destination?
Like the ballad of the sailors
our song was landing on the waves:
– destination is any small island
safe from the harm of hyenas.

There was night, wave, storm
and sleep was stealing from us
our shattered companions
and water was stealing from us
our shattered friends.

In the frozen dawn
from thousands of us
only a scattered set of bones and wounds reached the shore
A wake of vultures.
(“In the Frozen Dawn”)

As places that require crossing, Esfahani's river and Tale‘i's sea evoke the perils and suspension of that first flight, tapping into the established semiotics of myth, in which bodies of water separate life and death, home and away. The fixed topologies of fields and territories destroyed by the storm in this poem resonate with Naderpour's earthquake motif. The loss of home is absolute and irrevocable—no choice remains but to leave and to survive the consequences of forced departure.

In his depiction of home and exile, Tale‘i reflects on what it means to exist after the catastrophe – the moral and ideological collapse of the homeland. In this constant movement of fleeing bodies, suspended on driftwood, exile and home are both completely de-romanticized. Fleeing bodies, clinging to flotsam, point to a precarious state of existence that emerges after the cut. It resonates with Marcia Sá Calvancante Schuback's definition of exile as “postcondition” or “post-existence.” As she notes, “in the expression ‘post-existence,' the question of what it means to exist after a certain event – after a separation, a cut, a catastrophe, a disaster, or after a trauma, is less central than the sense of existing as ‘afterness' itself” (Schuback 2017, p. 177). Tale'i's poem describes such a condition, where the fleeing subjects are “constantly separated, but also always near to that which it has also been separated from without return” (Ibid). In the poem, post-existence is characterized by a proximity to destruction and death at the hands of an unforgiving natural world that steals shattered bodies. Images of the ocean, sailboat, paddle, and driftwood embody the precarity and liminality of this post-existence, imbuing any notion of home with an unsettling transience. No fixed destination exists here, just as Esfahani's narrator had “no path on her back.” In their “afterness,” these suspended fleeing subjects experience “a condition of a disquieted and stressed nearness to a faraway” (Ibid). For Tale'i the hope of reaching “any small island,” the vision of Chambers' “strange land,” suggests that a new home, free of “hyenas,” can only exist imaginatively in the exile's mind.

The poems explored here ask us to locate the boundaries of exile. Does exile begin before one leaves? Ahmed is correct in her assertion that being ‘at home' does not equate feeling ‘at home.' Because of accruing crises, estrangement begins long before the flight. As a result, home becomes an inherently polemical and complicated place – of earth and earthquakes, of fields and lies. The light has gone–the moon of Tale‘i's poem has “crawled into seclusion” and Esfahani talks of “the flooded night.”

Home is a last glance at the ground and the brutal cold of the mountains at the border, which numbs the fleeing body to death. The memento mori of home can be found in the missing bodies in the sea and the “bones scattered on the shore” awaiting vultures. Through all these images, we see the spatial disruption of home as a feature of post-existence, and the partial fragmentation of self that follows.

3 Displaced Home

For many exiled Iranian poets—who were initially drawn into the revolution as a crucial moment of change—coming to terms with the displacement that followed their forced flight felt like an impossible, even unethical, Brechtian exile. The experience of fleeing dangerous homes in search of safety was riddled with guilt and shame. Exile, as a punishment forced on a human being by other human beings, evolved into a punishment of the self, and became “like death but without death's ultimate mercy,” as Said (2000, p. 174) describes it. To be alive and in exile meant carrying an unbearable feeling of shame, as described in these lines by Shadab Vajdi, whose collective “us” exhales the homeland, accompanied by the survivors' guilt:

Shame on us
For breathing away from that land burnt in tears
For moving on a ground
Away from that land drawn in blood
(“Untitled”)

The memory of the absent ‘other' triggers shame and guilt. As Derrida notes, memory is always a “memory of the other” (Derrida 1992, p. 143). The sorrow (deuil) of that which is lost or absent remains at the core of memory. The act of remembering what has been abandoned and rendered strange can be placed side-by-side with what could appear or feel as such in the present. For poets living in exile, recalling and honoring comrades and companions who were executed, imprisoned, or simply left behind became a mechanism for remembering home. Jalal Sarfaraz's poem “It Was Rough and Bitter,” written in honor of his executed friend and poet Saeed Soltanpour, dwells on this Derridean sense of memory which centers around loss and sorrow:

In the brown frame
The gypsy woman plays guitar
pulling my heart.
I avidly swallow the smoke.
With shaky hands I touch my body
The geese fly away in an uproar.
In my daily feverish being
red roses open their lips.

It was difficult and bitter to accept.

My friend, this is your blood, dispersing
every moment on the ground, doors, walls
This pomegranate garden
is your blood.
The blood that scratches my heart
and fills up this ruby cup with every open vein …

It was difficult and bitter to accept.

My friend this is you, waking up
in the depth of my sorrow.
(“It Was Rough and Bitter”)

The term best suited to describing the purgatorial nature of displacement is “Bidarkojā” (‘nowhereland'), coined by pioneering exiled poet Esmail Khoi (1938–2021), a non-place that embodies the exile's ambivalent existence away from home. As Eric Nakhjavani notes in his introduction to Khoi's poems, “bidarkoja” becomes a “permanent purgatory” poised between the lands of home and exile (Nakhjavani 1999, p. XIX; original emphasis). Furthermore, the expression evokes the European term ‘no man's land' for the dead space between trenches. In a poem entitled “What of Homeland I Have in My Suitcase” (1993), Khoi reflects on his perpetual sense of displacement somewhere between the homeland, from which he has been estranged, and his home in exile, which has never really felt like home. Addressing old friends who detested him for leaving his homeland, he asks:

What have I done?
My lord!
What have I done?
What happened
that I weigh so much on your godly patience?
Where and when in your world does someone like me stand?
What have I done?
My lord!
What have I done?
That even friends fuel the fire to burn my soul
In the inferno of my nowhereland?!
(“What of Homeland I Have in My Suitcase”)

The sense of betrayal by friends sometimes takes on a more fatalistic tone in exile poems. For Naderpour, exile translates into an ongoing negotiation with fate often accompanied by a sense of subjugation akin to the dehumanizing experience of slavery, which represents the complete lack of autonomy over one's existence:6

I was the old slave of heavens
my neck shackled with the chain of misery
I did not give up my home to the enemy
Fate banished me from my home.
(“Earthquake”)

Taghdir (fate), used by Naderpour here, is interchangeable with Sarnevesht (destiny) in Esfahani's poem “Crossing the River.” Exile is, indeed, a feeling of both destiny and fate, and its relentless interrogation by the poet-narrator turns into a mode of resistance in which not accepting the present allows the movement of the exilic subject in-between two worlds: one that is lost, and another that is moving towards uncertainty.

Psychological mechanisms that aim to process rupture are naturally complicated and conflicting. Feelings of anger and fear of not being at home are in tension with the feeling of relief of being saved from its dangers. Longing for return is contradicted by the reluctance to return to things as they were. Haunted by dreams of home as a simultaneously wholesome and unjust place makes home a conflicting source of emotions, a shattered place in the poet's mind, as they can no longer be fully there or fully here.

Writing therefore becomes the only home, as Adorno reminds us in his Minima Moralia (1952), a place for the poet to express such fluctuations. Writing after the “earthquake” of initial flight, Naderpour regards his adopted home a place of punishment, offering no solace or light:

Now perching on the wings of the West
I no longer see light in the future
my inner sunshine no longer is my guide
I have fled home
Punished by the enraged world
in this night of exile
Far away from home
I see my own soil, my land
Without my faded footprints
(Ibid.)

Naderpour experiences exile as a constant nightscape rather than as a movement from darkness towards light. The flight has not ended – he is still perching “on the wings of the West” – but terror has given way to pathos and grief. The “soil” from which he was banished is still there, but his footprints are not.

While Naderpour seems to have woefully accepted his fate, the poet Bahram Bayrami, in his poem “Take Me to My Home,” has not:

Take me to my home
take me to my home
where small turtledoves sing noble songs,
brave and candid,
and on the path filled with arrows of death
they turn into eagles
and take our message to the rooftops
take me to the home where in its ponderous dawns,
proud tormented stars
turn into sunshine before firing squads,
still hoping to see the night of torture, collapsing.
take me to my home
take me to my home
where in its raging grudge,
pillars of oppression mounted in blood
will be crushed by the desolate oppressed.
(“Take Me to My Home”)

Exile has not dispossessed the narrator of the revolutionary spirit that forced him to flee. Home may be a brutal and broken place of “firing squads,” “oppression,” and “blood,” but it remains ‘home'; he still holds hope for transformation. The bird motif takes on a special significance when applied to the definition of exile as flight. Rather than the doves (of peace) flying away, he wants them to stay and turn into eagles.

In many poems in the exilic canon, and in several discussed here, the poet commands a dialogue, either with the reader or with the people (both the oppressed and the oppressors) back home. This dialogue explains why writers find a constant home on the page, a space to make real all the conversations they cannot have.

Forced disconnection heightens the need to connect, to negate the isolation and strangeness that Saeed Yousef's poem “Outside” or “Overseas” poignantly evokes:

How are you in the foreign land?
How would I say this?
Like a derailed train
Headed to the oasis
What are you doing in the foreign land?
How would I say this?
Every day I take my musical instrument
And play slightly more discordant tunes
How do you see the foreign land?
How could I say this?
Something is outside me; you understand?
Outside me
How do you perceive yourself?
A foreigner
A foreigner without a doubt.
(“Foreigner”)

Here is a perfect manifestation of Saidean exile as an “unhealable rift” (Said 2000, 137). The definition of ‘rift' is an opening made by splitting, cleaving; a fissure; cleft; an open space or clear interval; a geological fault. If exile begins with flight, it doesn't necessarily end with Tale‘i's small island becoming safe from harm. Yousef's fleeing subject does not cross the waves in Talei's sea to reach a safe small island. It remains forever in the waters with no real bank or shore. Foreignness and displacement become an integral part of Yousef's exilic identity.

If the poems in the ‘flight' section raised the question of where exile begins, the poems about post-flight displacement force us to ask where it ends. In Khoi's bidarkoja? With Vajdi's survivors' guilt? With Naderpour's fatalistic melancholy, or Bayrami's spirited plea? In Yousef's poem, exile is portrayed as a never-ending journey filled with a continuous feeling of displacement and foreignness. In these poems, the true punishment of exile lies not in banishment but in the suspension that follows. As far as home as a fixed territory is concerned, exile has no beginning and no end.

4 Homing

Beyond the stages of flight and strangeness, the exilic canon reflects on home as a psychic internalized space. Its poetic discourse, which has emerged from the poets' transnational encounters with the world, expands on the word ‘home' to incorporate homing desire. Home, like love or desire, can be experienced as a sensory, felt concept. This has been celebrated by a number of exiled poets for whom flight and later displacement evolve into a more phenomenological experience in which a ‘true home' is inhabited from within. In Said's view, for an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment occur against the memory of things in the other environment. Home becomes forged with memory, and as Ahmed asserts, it is “the impossibility of return that binds them together” (Ahmed 1999, p. 343).

While the emotional or cognitive complexity of exile doesn't wane, and the physical separation from one's homeland continues to bring pain, these poets suggest that a reconciliation of sorts can be found by connecting home with memory and sensory experience – by inhabiting the rift, rather than trying to heal or overcome it. In her study of exile literature in the Hispanic tradition, Sophia A. McClennen writes:

Exiles exemplify the ways in which the physical borders of a nation do not always have ultimate significance […] for them borders are both more and less important. They are more important because they now acutely define ‘inside and ‘outside,' ‘native' and ‘alien.' They are less important because culture is experienced as something displaced from territorial space (McClennen 2004, p. 25).

In his poem “Coastal Path,” Majid Naficy draws on a set of sensory associations to link lost fragments of home to his coastal town in exile. Strolling between Venice and Santa Monica harbors, Naficy records his own voice to provide a portrait of the shifting psychogeography (complete with footnotes, explaining the relevance of each place along the way) of being neither here nor there, but rather in-between:

Setting off with a small voice recorder
I come from the place of oblivion
which opens its path
through sand and fog
Neglecting the lifeguard's lodge
It takes me behind the tall clay walls of Bagh-e Behesht
where God wears a skullcap
and waters dusty cedars
and rubs his kind ice cubes
against my childhood's warm cheeks.
I pass through the scent of grass
and reach Kooleh Parcheh
I stand by the circle of snake charmers
a man rubs his hand along my back
I keep my bicycle in the middle
and turn down the corners of my mouth behind my imaginary moustache
under his sharp black beard, he laughs at me
Half-naked girls
skating
on my afternoon masturbations
The blue city listens
The path twists
followers of Hare Krishna
seated on a bench
murmuring their hymns
showing the path to salvation
I shout: hey! Abbas!
Do you still read Dialectic Materialism?
And I pass
Seagulls draw a cross
Smelly corpse of a kite
Bald grass
A rainy funeral home
Sand
And bridge's yawning
Sound of a foot from atop
Darkness reaching the light
And the coastal path
Reaches another oasis
I stop the voice recorder
and press
the return buttons
(“Coastal Path”)

While he refers to his hometown as “a place of oblivion,” it must be noted that the literal translation from the Persian naboodangah carries a more nuanced meaning: ‘a place of non-being.' The poem abounds with images of being and non-being, of life and death colliding, echoing the Stygian notion of a purgatorial journey between the two, while the contrast between the poet's childhood innocence and his arousal at “half-naked girls skating” suggests a further boundary has been crossed, that from child to adult self.

Delving further, we find another interesting dichotomy in the depiction of two paths to salvation: the hymns of the Hare Krishnas, contrasted with the memory of his Marxist friend, Abbas, and Stalin's Dialectic Materialism. The contrast creates a symbolic bond between the poet's past and present homes. Belonging to the Marxist group of exiled poets who fled Iran in the aftermath of the revolution, Naficy reflects on home as a place of clashing ideologies where an inherent tension between being and believing exists. Here, on the harbor, he freely walks, believes, and remembers the cost that he once paid for his political views. We are reminded here, of Khoi's assertion that his homeland was the murderer of his beliefs.

The flow of memories comes to an abrupt end when the voice recorder stops playing, but as the final line affirms, both the tape and the memories can be rewound and replayed. He can return to the remembered home in his mind. By grafting the remembered map of his hometown Isfahan onto the actual map of his new home in the US, Naficy inhabits both places at the same time. If Esfahani's river divides ‘here' from ‘there,' Nafisi offers a bridge that is at once embodied and oneiric. The bridge alone makes crossing possible, without drowning, or trying to swim. Khoi even went a step further and tried to create a homeland in words—a travelling homeland that could fit inside the baggage of the wandering exile. Although, as we saw earlier, Khoi's exile remained repugnant to him until the end of his life, he created an image of homeland in his poems which is neither settled, rooted, nor stagnant.

In your superior position
you speak of homeland
saying it can't be placed in a suitcase
that it can't be taken away
when someone leaves.

And so what?
What must homeland be to fit in a suitcase bigger than your imagination?!
Blessed is the love of homeland that's larger than life
My lord!
Blessed is the love of homeland that can't be taken away from us
by an enemy's hatred
or a friend's reproach.
(“What of Homeland I Have in My Suitcase?”)

In her article “Home Is Where the Text Is: Exile, Homeland, and Jewish American Writing,” Brooke Fredericksen writes: “one can change lives in writing, one can give hope to what might otherwise be tragedy. The power of writing is the power of the creative imagination to change the world, at least the fictional world” (Fredericksen 1992, p. 42). For exiled Iranian poets, too, writing became the only home where they could settle. Their continued existence on the page allowed them not only to survive but to thrive, and to reimagine home in unconventional ways, not only on the map, but within the global diversity that extends beyond geographical borders. Like many Jewish writers who fled Nazi Germany and tried to create a homeland within words, the Iranian exiled literati of the 1980s insisted on reconstructing the shards of their abandoned home to create a new home that could serve as a grounding force on the page of their imagination.

In his essay “Space, Identity, and Bilingual Poetry: Rethinking Iranian Emigration Poetry,” Peyman Vahhabzadeh observes that “one of the most interesting facets of exile poetry lies in the fact that underlying ideals are always oppositional […] in this category, political ideas constitute the dynamism of the poem” (Vahhabzadeh 1996, p. 42). In this “oppositional” self-positioning, I add to Vahhabzadeh's insightful observation that it is precisely the articulation of marginality that, paradoxically, offers exile poetry a greater resonance for those who identify with the poets' exilic status and worldview. Delving into layered articulations of ‘home' and ‘away' in this corpus of poetry gives way to new conversations between Persian exile poetry and world exile literature. Exile poems represent and reproduce a counterculture of home and belonging – an internal reevaluation of and commitment to survival and resistance – that, while originating in their unique history and experience of displacement, also reach a wider, cross-cultural audience.

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