Iran – The BeZine

Tehran, March 8, 1979 – Women demand a government based on gender equality
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Since September 2022, protests by the longstanding women’s movement in Iran have been violently repressed by Iran’s government and complicit police forces. Among many incidents, hundreds of girls in Iranian schools have been targets of chemical attacks. Increasing rates of executions have emboldened solidarity across entire families to continue the protests for gender equality and the social, political, and economic changes possible with expanded civil rights for women. Journalists and artists have been documenting the local events as they occur. Because the Persian women’s movement is an international network of people who live in communities and work for institutions around the world, events in Iran have effects everywhere. International solidarity is turning into responsive international action.

If poetry has a role in social change for social justice, then surely the next several months will be time for literary publishers, poetry event organizers, and readers, to undertake that role on an international scale. Poems must be made available and accessibly distributed for that to happen.

Bänoo Zan, an Iranian-Canadian poet living in exile, and Cy Strom, an award-winning editor from Toronto, have a call for poetry submissions for an anthology with the Toronto publisher Guernica Editions, to be titled Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution. Submissions are currently open, and the deadline is March 15, 2024.

Demonstrators opposed to the Iranian regime hold a candlelight vigil to pay tribute to those who have died protesting the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who was killed in police custody after allegedly violating the country’s hijab rules, outside the White House on Saturday. (Bonnie Cash/Getty Images)
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Submittable page.

Along with the call for submissions, Guernica and others are reaching out for further funding to this project for social change.

Women Life Freedom GoFundMe page.

All day yesterday visitors were flying to the original 2017 posting of these poems at The Poet by Day. It’s not hard to guess what is driving interest in them. Here the poems are again for all to read and ponder along with a word from Bernie: “Trump promised to end endless wars, but this action puts us on the path to another one,” Sanders declared Thursday . . . He . . . framed it as a moment of moral gravity akin to the run-up to the Iraq War, not least because so much of the present conflict with Iran stems from the fateful intervention that began in 2003.” MORE Huffington Post

Lebanese-American poet, Khalil Gibran (1883-1931) public domain illustration

Pity The Nation
Khalil Gibran, 1933, “The Garden of the Prophet”

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

American poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919), photo credit voxtheory under CC BY-SA 2.0 license

“PITY THE NATION”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (After Khalil Gibran) 2007

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!