HOPSCOTCH
By Fatemeh Shams
Translated by Armen Davoudian
Ugly Duckling Presse

In Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Her work, geographically and metaphorically situated between her birthplace in Iran and her current life in exile, evokes a “third space”—a realm of creative liberation and a sanctuary for the play of memories, language, and space. Shams frames this space with tangible metaphors—airports, suitcases, the thresholds of nightclubs—and her poems, like the game of hopscotch itself, leap over borders with a childlike agility, contrasting against the harsh reality of exile. Shams’s poetry invites us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience.

Fatemeh Shams is the author of two books of poetry in Persian and a critical monograph in English on poetry and politics, A Revolution in Rhyme (Oxford UP). When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, 2016), a collection of her poems translated by Dick Davis, won the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award from the Association for Iranian Studies. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry magazine, PBS NewsHour, World Literature Today, and the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, among other venues. She is Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

A Witness for Ezzat
Majid Naficy

“A Witness for Ezzat” is a collection of thirty poems written by Majid Naficy in memory of his wife Ezzat Tabaiyan executed on January 7, 1982 in Evin Prison and buried in the Khavaran Infidle Cemetery in Tehran.

The American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, writes about the poem “A Witness for Ezzat”: 
One of the most powerful poems in the world!!!! Full of love and truth. And sorrow.
You are a great poet, Majid. This has been clear since the first poem of yours I ever heard.  You are truly a great witness.“


Now the first poem of the book called “Marked Treasure”:


“Eight paces from the gate,
Sixteen paces toward the wall
Which scroll speaks of this treasure?

Oh, earth!
If only I could feel your pulse
Or make a jug out of your body.
Alas! I'm not a physician
I'm not a potter
I am only an heir, deprived,
wandering in search of a marked treasure.

Oh, hand that will bury me,
This is the mark of my tomb:
Eight paces from the gate,
Sixteen paces toward the wall
In the Cemetery of the Infidels.”

To buy this book you can use the following link on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D53CY9GG

A Witness for Ezzat:
Poetry Collection:
Naficy, Majid: 9798326487452:
Amazon.com: Books

Aftab website:
www.aftab.pub

Aftab Publication’s emails:
info@aftab.pub
aftab.publication@gmail.com
 

These bizarre-looking clouds form in stable atmospheric eddies

BY JOANNA THOMPSON

Scientific American

Villarrica is one of Chile’s most active volcanoes. Its Mapuche name, Rucapillán, means “house of the spirits,” and looking at it, it’s not hard to see why. But that isn’t some kind of otherworldly smoke ring wreathing Villarrica’s crater—it’s a cloud.

Lenticular clouds form when moist air flows up a mountain, volcano, or other geographic feature. These obstacles act like rocks in a stream, forcing air to travel around them in a stable, eddying pattern. As water-filled air rises into this current, it cools and condenses into visible clouds that drop after pushing over the summit, “sort of creating a wavelike motion,” says Corwin Wright, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Bath in England. The result is a seemingly stationary cloud that hovers over the landscape like a flying saucer or ominous-looking ring of smoke.

In addition to creating clouds that look like an alien invasion, these eddies play a vital role in global wind circulation. For example, they act as speed bumps that help to slow the Southern Hemisphere’s jet stream. “But you don’t normally see them day to day,” Wright says, “because obviously air is transparent.”

Luckily for photographer Francisco Negroni, a lenticular cloud materialized over Villarrica when it was at its most dramatic for this award-winning shot. After the volcano entered a period of activity, Negroni camped at its snowy base for 10 days as he waited for the right moment. He then set up his camera and opened the lens for a full four minutes to capture enough light. That was enough time to track Earth’s rotation, which makes stars appear as streaks of light even as the volcano’s lenticular crown stays put. For Negroni, the shot was more than worth the effort. Photographing volcanoes “is my life,” he says.

JOANNA THOMPSON is an insect enthusiast and former Scientific American intern. She is based in New York City. Follow Thompson on Twitter @jojofoshosho0

5:00 - 6:30 pm: Iranian Poetry in Translation of the Woman Life Freedom Movement

PEN America's Translation Committee co-chair Frieda Afary reads poetry in translation with Sheida Mohamadi, and Majid Naficy, celebrating Iran’s Woman Life Freedom movement.

At Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center

681 Venice Blvd. Venice, CA 90291.

RSVP: https://beyondbaroque.org/2023scpf.html

For the First Anniversary of “Woman, Life, Freedom” Uprising in Iran Kerm Ketab Publication releases its first book in Persian:
Dare to Think and the Jina Revolution
Eighteen Essays by Majid Naficy

A refreshing collection of essays by a highly talented writer and poet who is not afraid of asking hard questions and questioning the mistakes that led to the emergence and continuation of the theocratic regime in Iran. Must-read for anyone who is tired of old cliches and is searching for new answers to deep-seated problems of Iranian society, including the Iranian diaspora.

Janet Afary
Historian, Author and University Professor 

By Hannah Goldfield 

The New Yorker

At dinner recently, an Iranian American friend taught me a term in Farsi: lebos polo khori, which means, essentially, “finest attire” but translates literally to “rice-eating clothes.” We should have been in black tie, considering how much rice was piled on the table in front of us at Nasrin’s Kitchen, a new Persian restaurant in midtown. Nasrin Rejali, an Iranian refugee who moved to Queens, by way of Turkey, in 2016, earned a following with a series of pop-ups—which served traditional dishes from all over her native country—before opening her own place last month.

Several of the plates we ordered came from a section of the menu entitled Chelo Khoresh, or stew with rice. The khoresh-e ghormeh sabzi, a forest-green stew made with tender chunks of beef, fat kidney beans, fried herbs, fenugreek, and sun-dried limes, arrived with a separate platter of rice, the top layer of grains tinged orange with saffron, a small square of crispy tahdig (bottom-of-the-pot rice) as garnish. For a dish called zereshk polo ba morgh, the rice dominated: you could barely see the chicken legs, braised in saffron and tomato, buried beneath basmati adorned with tart barberries, glistening like rubies, shards of pistachio, slivers of almond, saffron oil, and more tahdig.

Rice—along with grilled peppers and tomatoes, raw red onion, and fresh basil—also accompanied the menu’s kebabs: koobideh, made with a combination of ground lamb and beef, and juicy chunks of boneless chicken, marinated in saffron and lemon juice. Rice was wonderful mixed with Rejali’s yogurt dips: the thicker, more sour mast mosir, made with Persian shallots and nigella seeds, and the sweeter mast khiar, with cucumber, raisins, sunflower seeds, dried mint, and dried rose petals. For Rejali’s superlative dolmeh barg mo, which she makes according to her mother’s recipe, rice was wrapped—with yellow split peas, barberries, tarragon, basil, cilantro, and onion—in silky grape leaves, simmered in pomegranate molasses, and served warm >>>

“Mother and Father” is a collection of thirty-six poems written by Majid Naficy divided into two parts “The Mother of Mothers” and “The Father of Fathers” including poems such as “The Signs of My Mother” “In the Spice Bazaar of Isfahan” “Sword at the Ablution Pool” and “Khomeini’s Visit” in which personal is mixed with universal, homeland with exile and past with present and future.

Naomi Shihab Nye, the well-known American poet writes about this collection:

“These poems are magnificent.
I am deeply moved by them.
You are a master of soulful poetry.“

To buy this book in English on Amazon click here

To buy this book in Persian on Lulu Click here

Mohammad Ghobadlou is at grave risk of execution in connection with Iran’s nationwide protests. He has received two death sentences after grossly unfair sham trials, marred by torture-tainted “confessions” and failure to order rigorous mental health assessments despite his mental disability. International law and standards prohibit using the death penalty against people with mental disabilities.

TAKE ACTION:

Please take action as-soon-as possible. This Urgent Action expires on March 17, 2023.

Write a letter in your own words or using the sample below as a guide to the government official listed below. You can also email, fax, call or Tweet them.

Click here to let us know the actions you took on Urgent Action 6.23. It’s important to report because we share the total number with the officials we are trying to persuade and the people we are trying to help.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Head of judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei
c/o Embassy of Iran to the European Union
Avenue Franklin Roosevelt No. 15, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium

H.E. Majid Takht Ravanchi
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran
622 Third Avenue, 34th Floor
New York, NY 10017
Phone: 212 687-2020 I Fax: 212 867 7086
Email: iran@un.int , Majidravanchi@mfa.gov.ir
Twitter: @Iran_UN , @TakhtRavanchi
Salutation: Dear Ambassador

SAMPLE LETTER

Mohammad Ghobadlou, a 22-year-old with a long-term mental disability, is at risk of execution. He has received two death sentences in relation to the death of an official which the authorities allege resulted from Mohammad Ghobadlou running over him with a car during a protest in Robat Karim, Tehran province, on 22 September 2022. The first sentence was issued by a Revolutionary Court for “corruption on earth” on 16 November 2022 and upheld by the Supreme Court on 24 December 2022. A request for judicial review remains pending. The second one was issued by Criminal Court One in Tehran province for “murder” on 24 December 2022 and an appeal is pending before the Supreme Court. Both sentences would amount to an arbitrary deprivation of his right to life as they followed flagrant violations of fair trial guarantees.

He was denied access to a lawyer throughout the investigation phase which lasted about a month. According to information obtained by Amnesty International, during this period, the authorities repeatedly beat him and withheld his bipolar medication, to force him to “confess” that he deliberately ran over several officials with a car to cause death. A forensic report dated 20 October 2022 confirms that while in custody, he sustained bruising and injuries. His independently chosen lawyer was not allowed to represent him at his trial before the Revolutionary Court, which consisted of two brief sessions on 29 October and 15 November. The authorities placed him in solitary confinement between the two sessions, denied him access to his family and lawyers and continued to withhold his medication, which exacerbated his vulnerability. The trial before Criminal Court One in Tehran province also consisted of two brief sessions on 4 and 10 December 2022. Mohammad Ghobadlou was the denied the right to an adequate defence as his independently chosen lawyer was denied access to material evidence.

Another serious violation is the authorities’ failure to order independent rigorous mental health assessments even though his mental capacity to control his conduct is at issue. International law and standards prohibit the use of the death penalty against people with disabilities. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty without exception, regardless of the nature of the crime or the characteristics of the offender.

I urge you to immediately quash the convictions and death sentences of Mohammad Ghobadlou and grant him a fair retrial without recourse to the death penalty, consistent with international law and standards prohibiting the imposition of the death penalty on people with mental disabilities, excluding coerced “confessions”, and providing for the special needs relating to his disability. I further urge you to ensure that he has prompt and appropriate mental health treatment and regular access to his family and lawyers. An independent and impartial investigation into his allegations of torture and other ill-treatment must be conducted and all those suspected of criminal responsibility must be held accountable. In addition, immediately establish an official moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.

Yours sincerely,

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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CONTACT US: uan@aiusa.org

By Calvin Tomkins

The New Yorker

For the first eight years of her life as an artist, Tala Madani, who was born in Tehran, painted only men, and not to their credit. “Caked,” in 2005, shows a brawny, nearly featureless oaf in a black undershirt smashing a cake in another oaf’s face. Next came a series of small paintings of men with plants growing out of their crotch—one of them tends to his foliage with a watering can. In 2011, she painted several men whose testicles hung from their chin, and a man in spirited conversation with his vital organs, which have been removed and placed in a comfortable chair. A series of 2015 paintings present men whose colossal, fire-hose penises take on lives of their own. None of these images suggest animosity toward the male species. The harmless dopes in Madani’s early work gave way to middle-aged, potbellied, bearded losers, whose weird plights make us laugh. Madani is that rarity in art, a wildly imaginative innovator with a gift for caricature and visual satire, and her first great subject was the absurdity of machismo. “I do think machismo is healthy and alive everywhere, and I was having fun upending it,” she told me last summer, when we began a number of conversations. “You know, you want it to grow bigger, so why not water it?”

Madani, who turned forty-one in December, left Iran with her mother and moved to this country in 1994, when she was twelve, and she now lives with her husband and their two children in Los Angeles, where her first major museum show in the United States is on view (until February 19th), at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I went through the show with her in October, enjoying her candid, funny, and often self-deprecating comments on individual works and on the exhibition itself. “I wanted all these images, but I kept wondering whether the works would look better if there were fewer of them,” she said. “It’s supposed to be this great event, to show your work, but what does that mean? Looking is the thing, not showing.” Her doubts had largely subsided by the time I arrived, and her high-spirited, ebullient personality was in full flower. She radiated energy—talking rapidly, laughing often, and using both hands to rake back her abundant, shoulder-length dark hair. I asked her about the show’s title, “Biscuits,” which appears, in her cursive handwriting, on the catalogue’s cover and on the wall at the entrance to the exhibition. “My kids were around one day when we were installing, and they were saying ‘biscuits’ over and over,” she said. (Her daughter, Imra, is seven; Imra’s brother, Roshan, is four.) “The show’s title is non-threatening in the way I want the paintings to be, and, you know—it’s biscuits, everything is O.K. I’m really happy with it.”

Madani is acutely aware that her exhibition coincides with the political crisis in Iran, which erupted in September when a twenty-two-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested for wearing her head scarf improperly. Madani’s feelings for the country of her birth are heartfelt and complex. “The disappointment and pain that I feel for the failures of the Iran government to simply do what is needed to serve the population of Iran is too deep,” she told me. She follows the situation in Iran closely via the Internet, news outlets, Telegram, and the comments of Iranians on the street who are calling for change. She also posts information every day on her own Instagram account, which has more than twenty-one thousand followers. Privately, she longs to connect more directly with the people there.

The two curators who installed “Biscuits,” Rebecca Lowery, an associate curator at moca, and Ali Subotnick, an independent curator who has seen Madani’s career develop from the outset, both told me that Madani had been a fiercely active collaborator. “She was very hands-on,” Lowery said. “Maybe a little more so than other artists. We had disagreements at times, which were healthy and productive and sometimes frustrating.” “Everything was a negotiation,” Subotnick recalled. “She’s tenacious, persistent, and so, so curious.” The exhibition opens with “The New Landscape,” a fifteen-foot-wide image of a nude male figure lying face down, with his legs splayed out on both sides. The man’s testicles are where they’re supposed to be, and are clearly visible to us and to the five much smaller people whom Madani has placed in the foreground, holding up offerings as though to a deity. In spite of the testicles, she said, some viewers read the image as feminine—maybe because of all the Mother Nature references in art—and this makes her wonder if she should do it over. Madani often repaints an image, with changes. The first version of this painting, in 2017, was several feet wider. Its owner did not respond to moca’s requests to borrow it, so Madani painted another, which she made slightly smaller, to fit the space.

There are a hundred and thirty-six works in the show. Some are small, less than two feet square; these tend to be lushly painted, with thick impasto and bravura brushwork. The larger ones are more thinly painted, and more abstract. Since 2007, Madani has made brief, stop-motion animations, and many of them are also on view, a few on monitors in galleries of paintings and the rest in a room of their own. The exhibition is not hung chronologically—a wise decision, because Madani’s work is not sequential. What interests her, she told an interviewer, is “art that excavates from the psyche, not the frontal lobe, not the intellectual, not the speakable, but the unspeakable.” I was reminded of this comment in a gallery where several of her “Pussy” paintings were on view. “Abstract Pussy” (2013) shows a prepubescent girl in a striped skirt, sitting on the ground with her knees pulled up and her legs apart, and four minuscule, presumably male figures who have crawled in for a closer look at her exposed vagina. (She is not wearing underpants.) Why is this image funny? I’m not sure, but it is. The girl is guileless, and the tiny men are clueless—for them, this appears to be an educational experience, not a sexual one >>>

Parichehr Kazemi
PhD Candidate, University of Oregon

The Conversation

Images of unveiled Iranian women and adolescent girls standing atop police cars or flipping off the ayatollah’s picture have become signature demonstrations of dissent in the past few months of protest in Iran.

In fact, among the Iranian protest photos selected for inclusion in Time magazine’s list of the “Top 100 Photos of 2022” are one of women running from military police brigades and another of an unveiled woman standing on a car with hands raised.

As a scholar studying the use of images in political movements, I find Iranian protest photos powerful and engaging because they play on several elements of defiance. They draw on a longer history of Iranian women taking and sharing photos and videos of actions considered illegal, such as singing and dancing to protest gender oppression.

Pictures in past Iranian movements

Iranian women did not stage mass public demonstrations against restrictions on their freedoms for nearly three decades following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when protests against compulsory hijab laws were brutally crushed by the Islamic regime.

In the 2009 Iranian Green Movement against election fraud, however, women played a major role. Images of one young female protester, Neda Agha-Soltan, who was fatally shot by security forces during the protest, went viral, catalyzing millions of Iranians to join the protests.

In subsequent protests, visuals have been at the heart of women’s efforts to mobilize against the Islamic Republic. In 2014, women began recording themselves walking, cycling, dancing and singing in public unveiled, under the banner of the “My Stealthy Freedom” movement. Started by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist based in New York, the movement protested the forced wearing of the hijab and other restrictive laws by showing women breaking them.

Walking in busy city streets unveiled, riding a bike in parks where such activities are banned for women and joining dance circles in town squares were among the ways in which Iranian women protested oppressive laws and practices.

Four years later, what came to be known as the “Girls of Revolution Street,” protests started with one woman, Vida Movahed, standing atop a utility box on Tehran’s Revolution Street to wave her headscarf on a stick like a flag. Soon, others joined Movahed by repeating her action in other public spaces in Iran.

Images showing dozens of people protesting mandatory veiling in this way were widely shared on social media and later picked up by global news networks, bringing international attention to women’s resistance efforts in Iran.

The use of images by protesters has been a central practice of resistance in other protests around the world as well. During the Arab Spring, a series of protests against the ruling regimes that spread across the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2010s, images played an important role in mobilizing peopleinto joining the movement.

A photo of a woman dragged by government forces in the streets of Egypt with her body exposed persuaded many to protest against what was a clear bypass the state-controlled news networks to show the world what was happening on the ground.

What such a resistance means

Iranian women have been protesting the Islamic Republic’s sexist policies and showing the world what freedom and gender identity mean to them through their bodily expressions.

Images of women freely riding a bike or sitting with a member of the opposite sex while unveiled are ways of protesting through the everyday acts that women are barred from under the Islamic Republic. Through their widespread participation in these actions, women have shown a solidarity.

As it is difficult for the Islamic Republic to suppress this kind of protest, it often responds by arresting key activists who can be identified and imprisoning them for several years. In 2019, one activist associated with this form of protest, Yasaman Aryani, was sentenced to a 16-year jail term after a video surfaced of her handing out flowers in the Tehran metro unveiled.

Images of Iranian women engaged in defiant acts make their daily oppression visible. Scholar Mona Lilja describes these protests in terms of “resisting bodies” that speak in ways that are not always apparent at the outset of a demonstration or public act of defiance. Emotions, symbolic actions and women’s engagements with the spaces in which they protest combine to form the meaning of resistance we associate with these pictures.

Today’s protest pictures build on past resistance efforts and build on a tradition of resisting the Iranian government.