Bänoo Zan and Cy Storm. <i>Women, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution</i>

The collection is clearly anchored by its editors with the central theme of the loss of human life—particularly the life of someone young—which must be considered a universally acknowledged tragedy and should and must transcend ideological and political debate and has unfortunately not been able to escape both in any work I have ever seen. So, rather than engaging in political analysis of the poem, taking abreast the same stroke (of the pen)—as I never do—, I aim to evaluate the poetic merit of the work based on its existence as an anthology, a concept, emotional resonance, and overall contribution to contemporary literature.What does an anthology contribute to literature? What should stand out most are the poems themselves and how they are chosen to represent a geopolitical expression, theme, or a time period through imagery, metaphor, and all the many literary devices that transform poetics of place, and the mood it inspires, into word, an emotive riddle, an enigma. In most anthologies, we see a chrestomathy of expression in a nation or an era. Here, the anthology revolves around one topic specifically designed to address one agenda: to bring to purview women’s rights in Iran under the rubric of a young woman’s catastrophically untimely death. In this anthology, we see expressions rooted in grief, resistance, love, and memory and far above all the human condition under the auspices of Mahsa Amini’s tragic death. As such, these poems are not merely reactions to a tragic event that was not denied by anyone globally to be so but, rather, are poetic interpretations of experience and emotion that the editors of this work feel deserve to be read and heard (as does any human expression in this reviewer’s opinion).I think an anthology highlights how poetics comes alive, en masse, with any and all things that move the human spirit—good or bad. In terms of women and feminism and all the sub-issues and sub-topics it behooves, I, however, would like to see such macro-anthological expressions to be more inclusive globally. I feel any national women’s movement should treat women at large and not only the women in their nation in their discourse. The pinpointing of a country or an event in a poetic work—as academic works do not fall under that category and can be more detailed—as the end-all be-all approach to treating issues women face in their quotidian routine is simply not objective enough, or even objective. Even when we read the metaphors and expressions here, almost every single image and metaphor can be applied to women in many other places, even in the United States, even in Switzerland: Remember “you say tomato, I say tomāto.” Well, women’s rights are broken in different places in different parts of the world, but one fact remains and that is that it is broken. It has different ailments in different parts of the world, but metaphors in one nation can certainly find their way into images in another. Is it broken because men and women are doomed to fail in their coexistence? Or is it doomed because there is an innate historical DNA, nurtured by avoidance and disregard that make it so? Or maybe we fool ourselves to think that men and women now, out of nowhere, simply understand one another? All are good and logical questions. That which is clear is this: In one nation you can be arrested for breaking the code of law by not veiling; in another, you can be murdered by your father because you said “no” to a chosen husband; in another, you won’t get a coveted job because they fear you are “too moody” for it; and in still another, you cannot inherit (the applies to the whole of Western world, in fact, for centuries and centuries). A poetics should behoove all of the above, and this work does not, but, to be fair, most such works never do, whether in prose or poetry. What it does do is chronicle poetically different expressions, and that alone is a reason to say it fulfills a task as a historiographical collection of poems.The veil, as would be expected, is the central image, the central trope, of this anthology as many of the poems herein allude to it; however, thankfully, even an unprofessional eye, I hope, is not lost to the fact that the veil is not merely a physical phenomenon but one that serves as an image coalescing “an act of covering, an act of covering up.” The VEIL is not what prohibits women; many things do—most vicious of all a calcified patriarchal existence perpetuated by a long history of irreverence to these issues by men and women alike. Painting women’s struggles with one geopolitical brush is quite like saying—“Don’t kill my child, that is bad; as for other people’s children, I am not sure, let’s study it.” Also, again, the veil is far from just being a scarf as I have indicated to my students everywhere: Applying makeup can be construed as a sort of veil—can it not? It covers as does a scarf what is naturally there, and it misrepresents far more than a veil would. This is a matter of X + Y=Z and nothing more, and, once we see how it adds up, we can better address it—poetically and otherwise. So, this anthology only adds to that misunderstanding by its philosophical being (published) while chronicling an event as should be the case for any tragic event.The title, Woman, Life, Freedom, is certainly chosen to leave no doubt where the compilers of the volume stand and who their audience is. The title is that of the chant upon the tragic death of Masha, the exact details of whose tragic death in incarceration are to this day unknown, but certainly an event that resonated globally. Now for the anthology: This anthology is clearly a global one bringing together a motley collection of interpretations of Masha’s death by poets of different nationality. I found the use of imagery to be excellent in some of these poems and less so in some others, but only a few were exhaustingly emulous—but then again that is the case with absolutely all anthologies or works of poetry. There is no reason to name the poet or the poem to which or to whom this comment applies as it is hard, even pathetic, to judge a poem as good or bad in its conceit, but one can certainly judge the language, and I am sure even those I consider to be pedantic and emulous had their reasons: A whole literary school (Bāzgasht) emulated for a whole one hundred. In some of the poems, we see earnest expressions of loss of life come alive with honest poetics; in others, we see hatred for the system in which this tragic loss of life occurred. In all honesty, the latter is not of interest to me because, for me, loss of one life is that of a million and it far supersedes the other agenda and the whodunit rhetoric. Furthermore, it takes away from the poetics and the tragedy of loss, remembrance, and wonder: Human beings everywhere have always erred and will continue to do so and someone innocent will pay the price. It is frustrating, it is sad, but it is what is, and it is the cup of existentialist poison we all have to swallow as have many before us A robin redbreast in a cagePuts all heaven in a rage (William Blake | Auguries of Innocence)Now this is an expression that speaks to all loss, to all injustice, to all the times when we feel the pain of a sibling, a father, a mother, and or child. It does not have to speak to women, to men, to no one—it reeks of the human err, does it not? Malheeurusement! Malheeurusement! Malheeurusement! Or rather “the horror, the horror!”My verdict: Any book that brings together a group of folks who share a creative spirit deserves appreciation, and this work is in that category.