Posts filed under 'protest literature'

Poetry and Resistance in Iran

Words that are spoken are forgotten, and treatises lie unopened on the shelf, while lines of poetry live forever.

Since 2022, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement has made historic advances in fighting for the rights of Iranian girls and women. With protests that have ripped all across the world, the demonstrations have continued Iran’s long tradition of fusing literature with politics, showing that where people and ideas go, poetry soon follows. Here, Cy Strom, co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution (open for submissions!)discusses the texts, songs, and slogans that make up the fabric of contemporary revolution.

The Iranian revolution that began in September 2022 responded to no political manifesto. Instead, it flared up to an unforgettable line of people’s poetry: “Zan, Zandeghi, Azadi!” This is how “Woman, Life, Freedom” sounds in Persian.

In Kurdish, the language in which this slogan was first spoken, its words are “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî.” That is what Mahsa Jina Amini—the Iranian-Kurdish woman whose brutal death catalyzed the protests—would have heard. Protestors in Iran continue to pay respect to the slogan’s origins when they chant both the Kurdish and Persian words, even when Kurdish is not their mother tongue. In both languages, the words of this slogan are balanced and graceful, the rhythms assertive. It is people’s poetry.

The slogan was first circulated among the women militia fighters in Rojava, the western Kurdish lands by the Syrian-Turkish border, and spread through the writings of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Activists and protestors in the streets have now taken these three words as the name for this first ever feminist revolution, and a statement of the best in hopes and ideals for all people everywhere.

Within days of its outbreak, Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution also found its anthem. Amidst Persian-language reworkings of the World War II partisan song “Bella Ciao” (which kept its wildly incongruous Italian refrain) and the 1970s Chilean insurgent march “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido,” a string of found poetry began to sound out in Iran, artfully arranged and set to music by singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour. The people in the streets quickly taught themselves to sing this winding melody, which begins as a murmur but gathers force until a last intake of breath pushes out the words: “Azadi! Azadi!” Freedom. Hajipour assembled the lyrics to this song, which he called “Baraye” (“For” or “For the Sake Of”), from people’s tweets. Some of these were political slogans, some were complaints, some were sweet dreams: “For a dance in the alley. . . For the dreams of the dumpster kids. . . For the jailed beautiful minds. . . For the tranquilizers and insomnia.” The song is said to have gained forty million views in forty-eight hours, and it earned Hajipour six days in prison with the threat of more to come. In February 2023, “Baraye” also earned the first ever Grammy awarded for the best song for social change. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary festivals and publications from Bulgaria and Hong Kong!

This week, our editors from around the world report on literary celebrations in Bulgaria and historical archives of Chinese literature in Hong Kong. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Plovdiv, one of Bulgaria’s oldest cities and the European Capital of Culture for 2019, recently hosted the twentieth anniversary edition of its renowned literary festival: Пловдив чете (“Plovdiv Reads”). For twenty years, the month of June has seen both established and up-and-coming authors sit side by side, trying to unravel the mysteries of the written word. Among the most notable participants this year were Zdravka Evtimova, winner of the Chudomir National Award; the writer and translator Chavdar Tsvenov; the literary historian Cleo Protohristova; the critic Boris Minkov, known for his masterful editorial skills; the publisher Svetlozar Zhelev, who takes pleasure in mediating literary friendships; and the experimental writer Rene Karabash.

Over the course of approximately two weeks, the various hosts and their audiences reviewed some of the best that contemporary Bulgarian fiction has to offer. However, the festivities weren’t restricted to the local literary stars, but also included prominent international guests such as the Ukrainian novelist Haska Shyyan—who commented on her new book in light of the dreadful developments in Ukraine that have shaken the world over the past few months. Another event of note was the special talk devoted to the twentieth-century Bulgarian poet and translator Atanas Dalchev, and the relatively unfamiliar circumstances surrounding his life in Thessaloniki and Istanbul.

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F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (and the verse as an explosion, the book as an island)

We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.

The new poetry anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry is the second work published in isolarii, as series of “island books,” released every two months by subscription. Edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse (with forewords by Eileen Myles and Amia Srinivasan), the groundbreaking collection features the work of twelve feminist Russian women and members of F pis’mo. As well as co-editing this anthology, Galina Rymbu is a famed Russian poet, whose own work was published by Asymptote in 2016 and whose poems are included in F Letter. Rymbu formed the F pis’mo poetry collective with other feminist and LGBTQ poets in 2017 in order to use language as a form of political protest. F pis’mo‘s work has since inspired a new generation of Russian poets to challenge patriarchal society by giving voice to their own personal experience through poetry. In this essay, Asymptotes editor-at-large for Central America, José García Escobar, speaks with Galina Rymbu as well as other F Letter poets, translators, and editors to discuss the collective’s work.

Saint Petersburg. January 2, 2017. Poetess Galina Rymbu was in her house, waiting for a knock on her door. Hopefully several. Galina had sent out an invitation to everyone interested in talking about feminism in literature.

“We thought that only a few people would come,” she writes, from her house in Lviv, Ukraine, where she has lived since 2018.

In the end, more than forty people crammed inside Galina’s tiny kitchen.

“Some were standing, some were sitting on the floor.”

Not only poets and writers went. Activists, artists, and theatergoers were there as well. Galina says that there were no feminist literary communities in Russia at the time. It is a country where the work of heterosexual, cisgender male authors sits, untouched, at the forefront, and where women and LGBTQ authors are often ignored. Galina describes Russia’s literary community as conservative and patriarchal.

“During that first meeting, we said that we didn’t want to be locked in our small circle of ‘feminist literature,’” she says. “We wanted to change literature to make it more gender-sensitive.”

In Russia, according to Galina, only artists working for the state receive financial support. They work under a set of rules, naturally. Don’t write about the LGBTQ community, don’t write about the occupation of Crimea and Donbas, cooperate with Putin’s regime, for example. Poets, writers, musicians, and film and theatre directors who abide by these rules have access to public platforms, large publishing houses, and galleries. These spaces must also follow the rules. Galina says that censorship is everywhere—in the media, television, literary, and film festivals—and compares it to Kafka’s Der Process. Those outside the cultural circuit of Russia’s state, like Galina, resort to independent publishing, where there’s no censorship, but also no visibility—much like Russian writers did before 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The existence of these artists is a political act. Their work is often, and by definition, dissident.

“It was impossible for us to remain feminist poets and express our views only in the space of political activism,” Galina says. “We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.”

And thus, F pis’mo was born. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2020

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Winter 2020 issue!

Asymptote celebrates its ninth anniversary with the Winter 2020 issue, featuring new work from thirty-one countries and twenty-two languages (including three new ones: Kurmanci, Old Scots, and Serbo-Croatian)! To help you navigate through such an abundance, our blog editors reveal their favorite pieces below:

Each issue of Asymptote brings with it a utopian vision—that many nations (thirty-one, in this case) may share a page, with each literature distinct but gathered in communion, resulting in a chorus that somehow does not subjugate any single voice. As always, I am astounded by the way one is allowed to travel along the cartography of these collected texts, and how vividly they summon the worlds available in their language.

For a while now I’ve been entertaining the thought that the first step to harnessing language (if there is such a thing) is to distrust it, and so was stopped short by the first line of Eduardo Lalo’s “Unbelieve/Unwrite”:

Unbelieve. Unbelieving the world means questioning the structures that sustain it.

And a couple lines on:

Unbelieving so that writing will wash ashore, like a gift.

These writings are the result of a great loss that causes one to take solace in nothingness, and seems particularly resonant today in the age in which traditional anchors—nationality, religion, family, certainty in our survival as a species—are quickly being drained of their staying power. Arriving in the aftermath of Puerto Rico’s devastation, Lalo seeks to dismantle our reliance on infrastructures both physical and psychological, while simultaneously being brilliantly aware of life’s unassailable fullness. Lalo continuously returns to the art of writing as a source of stability and control, and in doing so affirms the act of writing as a way of approaching the world, absolving the art of its mystery but instilling it with conviction. It is bleak and somehow victorious. READ MORE…

Zeinab Hefny’s A Pillow for Your Love: Confronting the Shiite-Sunni Conflict

Hefny boldly punctures Saudi biases with a taboo-shattering love story.

This is the second in our series of essays highlighting women writers from Yemen, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia who have never been translated into English before. One of Asymptote’s core goals is to provide a platform for work from regions generally underrepresented in translation. Yemen, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia have long been marginalized in the realm of translations from Arabic to English. The contributors have chosen to focus on women writers because they face greater hardships in getting published. The latest essay focuses on the firebrand Saudi writer, Zeinab Hefny.

A dominant conflict in Arab society is the one between the Shiite and Sunni sects of Islam. This conflict has led to extreme violence against the Shiites, from political marginalization in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, genocide by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, to confiscation of property, captivity of women and bombing by ISIS. Recently, a military alliance led by Saudi Arabia struck Shiite targets in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the region, that left hundreds dead and wounded. Despite these atrocities, very few Arab writers have discussed the Shiites’ daily suffering and the violation of their political rights.

However, one who has stood up to condemn this racist sectarianism is the Sunni Saudi writer Zeinab Hefny. She plays an important role as an activist-writer who touches on multiple Saudi taboos—social, sexual, and religious—from the Shiite-Sunni issue to women’s rights.

Zefny’s novel, A Pillow for Your Love (2011), is a worthy addition to the canon of dauntless Arab literature attempting to expose the cultural, political, social and religious crises in Arab society that few Arab writers have confronted out of fear of prosecution. In the novel, Hefny discusses religious anathemas in the Arab community. She highlights the plight of the Shiite sect in the predominantly Sunni Saudi society. READ MORE…

Huda al-Attas: A Writer Who Speaks for the Women of Yemen

In her stories, Al-Attas documents Arab women’s lives in general and Yemeni women’s lives in particular.

This essay is the first of a series of three which will highlight three women writers from Yemen, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia who never before have been translated into English. The series was catalyzed by Asymptote’s call this past winter for a Special Feature for the Spring Issue dedicated to literature from the countries covered by Trump’s travel ban on certain predominantly Muslim countries. One of Asymptote’s core goals is to provide a platform for work from regions generally underrepresented in translation. Yemen, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia have long been marginalized in the realm of translations from Arabic to English. The contributors have chosen to focus on women writers because they tend to face greater hardships in getting published, particularly in Saudi Arabia.

Yemeni writer and journalist Huda al-Attas, born in 1971, is a pioneer of women’s short-story writing in Yemen and other Arab countries. Al-Attas has been writing for more than two decades. She was born in Hudarmut, in southern Yemen, and was raised in Aden with her brothers by her mother. Her family members are her biggest fans and greatest supporters. As a journalist, she is a regular Yemeni newspaper columnist. Her short stories have been published in Yemen and all over the Arab world.

Al-Attas has a broad fan base, consisting of not only conservative middle-aged literary readers but also a new generation of young, liberal readers. Contrary to stereotypes about the Arab world, Yemeni culture has been hospitable to writers, male and female alike. Interestingly, Al-Attas’s Yemeni audience can be divided into two parts: a liberal, secular audience that desires progressive change and a conservative audience that does not believe in women’s rights and even goes so far as to believe that a woman could not be the author of such daring work.

Well regarded by writers around the Arab world, Al-Attas is known as a liberal advocate of human rights and equality between people. She was well known before the Arab Spring as a bold writer who shed light on religious, social, sexual, and political taboos in a conservative society that shackles both men’s and women’s rights and prevent progress. Her personal bearing is as daring as her literary work: for example, pictures of her not wearing a scarf (a breaking of taboo in her culture) appear frequently in newspapers. She has received awards from many different Arab countries, such as Yemen and UAE. Her collections of short stories include Obsessed Spirit…Obsessed Body (hājisrūḥwahājisjasad, 1995), Because She (li’annaha, 2001), and Lightning Training to Be Light (bariqyatadarrabalada’, 2003). Her work has been translated into many languages. Topics that she addresses include incest, patriarchal ownership of women’s bodies, child brides, child begging, child labor, and khat addiction, to name a few. She explores these topics through innovative literary techniques that are as liberating as her subject matter.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Your literary updates for the turn of the year from Brazil, India, Mexico, and more!

Before we jump into our weekly world news tours of 2017, here at the blog we wanted to look back at the waning days of 2016 and give the literary achievements that closed such an eventful year their full due. There is already so much we’re looking forward to in the year ahead, but no piece of writing or writer exists in a vacuum; each new publication, reading, and translation takes from and makes space within the existing cultural consciousness. To be able to understand the developments in the literary scenes around the world this year, we have to see the full scope of 2016’s progress. Luckily, Asymptote has eyes and ears in every hemisphere!  

First stop on the map: India, where we check in with our first contributor this week, PhD student of postcolonial literature Tanushree Vachharajani:

2016 saw a huge uprising across India for Dalit rights. The suicide of Hyderabad PhD student Rohit Vemula in January 2016 and the assault of a Dalit family of cow skinners in Una, Gujarat in June 2016 have led to a resurgence of Dalit identity in social and literary fields, along with much dissent and unrest about the government’s attitude towards lower castes. The Gujarat Dalit Sahitya Akademi in Ahmedabad issued a special edition of their literary journal Hayati, on Dalit pride this fall under the editorship of Dr. Mohan Parmar. Also in September, under the editorship of Manoj Parmar, literary journal Dalit Chetna published a special edition on Dalit oppression, featuring works written by Dalit as well as non-Dalit writers.

The well-documented human rights violations continue to inspire a flood of responses. For the first time last month, Delhi saw a literary festival dedicated entirely to Dalit protest literature, offering a platform for Dalit regional literature and its translations into English, French, and Spanish to increase accessibility and broaden the demographic of its readers.

Dalit literature is also no longer in the realm of the purely literary. Inspired by the death of Rohit Vemula, three young activists from Mumbai—Nayantara Bhatkal, Prem Ayyathurai, and Shrujuna Shridhar—have set up the unofficially titled Dalit Panther Project for which phone numbers were collected on December 6, Babasaheb Ambedkar’s death anniversary. Through the popular social messaging app WhatsApp, they will transmit four videos on the origins and legacy of the Dalit Panther literary movement. The videos were shot at the homes of Dalit Panther supporters, and are in Hindi. The creators are also looking to bring out a full-length feature film on the subject this year.

Hearteningly, the Dalit community is pushing back strongly against abuse of any members of the lower castes. From threatening a sanitation strike to bringing Dalit literature into mainstream circles and creating inclusive literary institutions and awards, Dalit protest movements across India only seem to be getting stronger as the New Year begins.

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