Tuesday, June 20, 2006
The Silence Of Men & RichardJNewman.com
Last month, CavanKerry Press released my first book of original poems, The Silence Of Men. Next month some time--I hope--Global Scholarly Publications will release my second book of translations, Selections from Saadi's Gulistan. If you would like to learn a little bit more about me and my work, check out my spiffy new website at www.richardjnewman.com.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Epitaph For A Friendship
1.
The thing that struck me most about my friend’s letter was not her protest that I’d given her “far too much credit” for my own development as a writer. She’s said things like that in the past and it is something about which I am sure we will always disagree. “All I ever was,” she wrote, “all I did, was be your friend and listen to you.” As if being present for someone who desperately needs your presence is not a huge thing in and of itself, even if being present is for you a simple and easy thing to do. As if being the first person to take my writing seriously—and she was that person; she saw before anyone else, and almost, I think, before I saw it myself—that writing was what would, what could, keep me whole…as if that were not something I would remember and be eternally grateful for.
My friend was responding to the very emotional inscription I wrote in the copy I sent her of my first published book, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, and it is a kind of deflection I remember well from when we were younger. I was a freshman in college, and I told this friend that I loved her, and I did, and I knew she loved me as well. She refused to acknowledge what I’d said, and then more than a decade later, over a dinner we had because she contacted me again. She’d been married for ten years, and we had not spoken since I walked out of her wedding early, without saying goodbye. I was hurt she was marrying someone else, but I was more hurt that her husband, or at least it appeared that her husband was doing everything he could to keep her from talking to me, and finally couldn’t take it anymore, and so I left. Anyway, at that dinner, she told me that sometimes she wished she’d had the courage to be a little more like me, adventurous, impulsive, that she sometimes regretted the very conservative choices she’d made in her life, and we held hands in that restaurant, briefly, and I felt the same charge run through me that I felt when we sat in the dark in the room in her dormitory where I slept when I visited her at the college she was attending and she danced her fingers up and down the skin of my arm. Her touch was warm and I wanted to bathe in that warmth, to feel it seep inside me, to inhale it, but I was not willing to promise her the future; I wanted to let it happen or not. We were young; we’d be moving from a deep friendship into romance, always a difficult and potentially dangerous move, and I thought it would be better for us to take things one step at a time and not worry yet about whether there was a serious commitment to be made. She wanted that commitment, though, and so we never got together.
Like I said, though, it was not my friend’s demurral that surprised me. What surprised me is that she did not ask me a single question about my life. She told me about her children, commenting that her oldest is now entering “the stage of meeting people who will have a profound effect on her life and her worldview or who become lifelong friends. She has met and become friends with children of my college and high school friends” (some of whom, no doubt, were my high school friends as well, since we’ve known each other since we were in 8th grade). She told me that things with her husband “are well” and that she stopped working three years ago—and good for them that she could afford to do so!—“when all I did was work,” and that she has been “living, volunteering a lot and trying to stay healthy,” which suggests that all the work she was doing had been unhealthy for her in a serious way. But she never once, in this letter that praises my accomplishments as a writer, asks me about my wife or my child. The only reference she makes to my life outside of who I am as a writer and who we were to each other when we were in junior high and high school is this: “…when I received the book I was struck by how different our lives have become, that you have become involved in a whole different world, one so removed from my experience and knowledge. And yet I must say, it is one that I have not looked to be involved in and one that is at odds with my beliefs.”
It’s hard for me to know precisely what my friend is talking about here, but my guess is that she’s talking about the fact that my wife is not Jewish, that she is, in fact, Muslim, and so I have betrayed one of the major tenets of the Jewish community within which we were both educated (the high school we attended together was a yeshiva): Thou shalt not intermarry. What I don’t know is whether the fact that I have intermarried is why my friend does not bother asking me about my life. On the one hand, of course, her reason or reasons don’t matter. Her silence—especially given the fact that the introduction to my book talks very explicitly about my marriage—feels like a rejection. What she wants, what she is willing to talk about is the book, to congratulate me for it, to distance herself from how I feel about the role she played in my development as a writer and to insist that I alone should “please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a survivor, you should that you would have achieved this no matter what.”
It feels, in other words, like she is willing to tell me about herself, but at the same time she wants to make sure to tell me to keep my distance and that makes me very sad. I could flatter myself by thinking that she doesn’t want to get too close, or want me to get too close, because she’s afraid she’ll be tempted to disrupt the very stable and conservative life she has built for herself, but I really do think that would be flattering myself. My sense—and I could be, and I hope I am, wrong—is that she doesn’t want that life to be contaminated. I think she sees in our friendship and how different we have become, and the temptation that I was for her when she was younger and when she reached out to reconnect with me, a danger that lies in wait for her daughter. Most probably I will never know because, most probably, this letter she was written me will be the last I have from her. I plan to send her a copy of my own book of poems, The Silence of Men, which will be published next year, and which is dedicated to her (Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan is dedicated to my wife and son), but I do not expect that she will respond to that. It’s just the feeling I get from the tone of her letter and from her silence about my life. I am sad and it almost feels like I have written here the epitaph of our friendship.
2.
Or maybe I have misread my friend’s letter entirely. Maybe her silence is in response to a silence about her that she heard in the inscription I wrote in my book, and so I need to look to myself and my own feelings to understand what’s going on in her letter. Or maybe she wrote the letter quickly, and so she wasn’t thinking about anything in my life beyond the book that I’d sent her—though it’s also true I sent her a birth announcement when my son was born and she never responded. Or maybe she wrote the letter over a couple of different sittings and put down what came to her mind at the moment without really thinking about the letter as a whole, and so it never occurred to her that she hadn’t asked me about my family and my life. Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, or maybe. I could go on and on making excuses for her, finding reason after reason why I should not trust my intuition that this letter, consciously or not—though I am pretty sure it was conscious and I will tell you why in a minute—was intended to establish, very nicely, but firmly, a distance between my friend and me that I am supposed to understand as signifying the end of the friendship we once had.
Why do I think it was conscious? Listen again to how she closed the letter: “please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a survivor, you should that you would have achieved this no matter what.”
I am a survivor. What she is referring to is the fact that I am a survivor of child sexual abuse, something I told her about when we met for the dinner I wrote about above. I wanted her to understand why I’d reacted so strongly against her decision first not to become my girlfriend and, second, to get married to someone other than me. If you know anything about the psychology of survivors it’s a pretty conventional narrative: I felt myself to be dirty and unworthy of love and yet my friend clearly loved me—whether she loved me only as a friend or as something more is beside the point—and so when she rejected me, I took it as a sign that I was, truly, unworthy. I felt ashamed and enraged, and while the none of the myriad narrative threads that make up a person’s life story can ultimately be reduced to a single cause and effect, I know that this feeling of unworthiness has an awful lot to do with the choices I’ve made in terms of the women in my life—but that is grist for the mill of another piece of writing.
My friend was shocked when I told her that I’d been sexually abused, and I could see in her eyes both the compassion she felt for me and how much she wished she had known what was going on at the time, but here’s the thing: In her letter, she feels the need to remind me that I am a survivor, that I shouldn’t forget—as survivors are wont to do—to take credit for what I have accomplished. What I intended as an honest acknowledgment of how important she was to me as a friend and as the first real supporter of my writing, in other words, she understood as an expression of an insecurity and inferiority borne of having been sexually abused. This hurts. It feels patronizing and it feels, again, like rejection, but this time I am not ashamed and I am not angry. I am only, deeply, sad. I have missed this friend a lot over the years. I have missed the way we used to talk and the way we would sometimes go out for ice cream and French fries, a habit of eating she introduced me to where the saltiness of the fries provided a wonderful balance to the sweetness of the sundaes we’d just eaten.
Most of all, I suppose, I have missed the chance we had after she got back in touch with me to reconnect on a more permanent level, as individuals, as couples and, once my son was born, as families. We told ourselves we were going to try, but we also—I still think reasonably—told ourselves that we wanted first to meet a couple of times, just the two of us, to talk out our unfinished business. My friend’s husband had a problem with this, though—or at least that’s what she told me. He resented the time away from home that her meeting me for an occasional dinner would mean, and when she told me about this, she connected it to the feelings he had about me when they first started dating and then became engaged. He was jealous. Looking back, I suppose I don’t blame him: She and I had been friends long before they started going out, and maybe he knew—because maybe she told him—that I had tried to become her boyfriend; and then once they became engaged, I gave him good reason to resent me: they were either living together, or he was often at her place, or she was often at his—I don’t remember which—but when I would call to talk to her, as I still did, hoping secretly that they would eventually break up, and he answered the phone, I refused to acknowledge him, even though I knew him. He’d been a year ahead of us in high school. Without saying his name or asking how he was, I simply asked if my friend was there. It must have felt to him as if I was trying to tell him that, as far as I was concerned, he didn’t exist.
Anyway, my friend connected her husband’s problems with our seeing each other to what had happened ten years earlier, and even though I could understand why he’d felt the way he did back them, it seemed to me that if he was still having those problems with me then there must be other, larger issues at stake between him and my friend and I didn’t want to get involved with that. I told her this in a letter to which, as I remember, she never responded, and that—except for the birth announcement—was the last time we communicated before I sent her my book. And I will not be surprised if the dedication in next book I send her will be the last thing I say to her ever again.
3.
I am mourning my friendship with this woman and yet I am also haunted by the fact that I could be wrong about all this, and that haunting, oddly enough, is what makes the saddest of all.
The thing that struck me most about my friend’s letter was not her protest that I’d given her “far too much credit” for my own development as a writer. She’s said things like that in the past and it is something about which I am sure we will always disagree. “All I ever was,” she wrote, “all I did, was be your friend and listen to you.” As if being present for someone who desperately needs your presence is not a huge thing in and of itself, even if being present is for you a simple and easy thing to do. As if being the first person to take my writing seriously—and she was that person; she saw before anyone else, and almost, I think, before I saw it myself—that writing was what would, what could, keep me whole…as if that were not something I would remember and be eternally grateful for.
My friend was responding to the very emotional inscription I wrote in the copy I sent her of my first published book, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, and it is a kind of deflection I remember well from when we were younger. I was a freshman in college, and I told this friend that I loved her, and I did, and I knew she loved me as well. She refused to acknowledge what I’d said, and then more than a decade later, over a dinner we had because she contacted me again. She’d been married for ten years, and we had not spoken since I walked out of her wedding early, without saying goodbye. I was hurt she was marrying someone else, but I was more hurt that her husband, or at least it appeared that her husband was doing everything he could to keep her from talking to me, and finally couldn’t take it anymore, and so I left. Anyway, at that dinner, she told me that sometimes she wished she’d had the courage to be a little more like me, adventurous, impulsive, that she sometimes regretted the very conservative choices she’d made in her life, and we held hands in that restaurant, briefly, and I felt the same charge run through me that I felt when we sat in the dark in the room in her dormitory where I slept when I visited her at the college she was attending and she danced her fingers up and down the skin of my arm. Her touch was warm and I wanted to bathe in that warmth, to feel it seep inside me, to inhale it, but I was not willing to promise her the future; I wanted to let it happen or not. We were young; we’d be moving from a deep friendship into romance, always a difficult and potentially dangerous move, and I thought it would be better for us to take things one step at a time and not worry yet about whether there was a serious commitment to be made. She wanted that commitment, though, and so we never got together.
Like I said, though, it was not my friend’s demurral that surprised me. What surprised me is that she did not ask me a single question about my life. She told me about her children, commenting that her oldest is now entering “the stage of meeting people who will have a profound effect on her life and her worldview or who become lifelong friends. She has met and become friends with children of my college and high school friends” (some of whom, no doubt, were my high school friends as well, since we’ve known each other since we were in 8th grade). She told me that things with her husband “are well” and that she stopped working three years ago—and good for them that she could afford to do so!—“when all I did was work,” and that she has been “living, volunteering a lot and trying to stay healthy,” which suggests that all the work she was doing had been unhealthy for her in a serious way. But she never once, in this letter that praises my accomplishments as a writer, asks me about my wife or my child. The only reference she makes to my life outside of who I am as a writer and who we were to each other when we were in junior high and high school is this: “…when I received the book I was struck by how different our lives have become, that you have become involved in a whole different world, one so removed from my experience and knowledge. And yet I must say, it is one that I have not looked to be involved in and one that is at odds with my beliefs.”
It’s hard for me to know precisely what my friend is talking about here, but my guess is that she’s talking about the fact that my wife is not Jewish, that she is, in fact, Muslim, and so I have betrayed one of the major tenets of the Jewish community within which we were both educated (the high school we attended together was a yeshiva): Thou shalt not intermarry. What I don’t know is whether the fact that I have intermarried is why my friend does not bother asking me about my life. On the one hand, of course, her reason or reasons don’t matter. Her silence—especially given the fact that the introduction to my book talks very explicitly about my marriage—feels like a rejection. What she wants, what she is willing to talk about is the book, to congratulate me for it, to distance herself from how I feel about the role she played in my development as a writer and to insist that I alone should “please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a survivor, you should that you would have achieved this no matter what.”
It feels, in other words, like she is willing to tell me about herself, but at the same time she wants to make sure to tell me to keep my distance and that makes me very sad. I could flatter myself by thinking that she doesn’t want to get too close, or want me to get too close, because she’s afraid she’ll be tempted to disrupt the very stable and conservative life she has built for herself, but I really do think that would be flattering myself. My sense—and I could be, and I hope I am, wrong—is that she doesn’t want that life to be contaminated. I think she sees in our friendship and how different we have become, and the temptation that I was for her when she was younger and when she reached out to reconnect with me, a danger that lies in wait for her daughter. Most probably I will never know because, most probably, this letter she was written me will be the last I have from her. I plan to send her a copy of my own book of poems, The Silence of Men, which will be published next year, and which is dedicated to her (Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan is dedicated to my wife and son), but I do not expect that she will respond to that. It’s just the feeling I get from the tone of her letter and from her silence about my life. I am sad and it almost feels like I have written here the epitaph of our friendship.
2.
Or maybe I have misread my friend’s letter entirely. Maybe her silence is in response to a silence about her that she heard in the inscription I wrote in my book, and so I need to look to myself and my own feelings to understand what’s going on in her letter. Or maybe she wrote the letter quickly, and so she wasn’t thinking about anything in my life beyond the book that I’d sent her—though it’s also true I sent her a birth announcement when my son was born and she never responded. Or maybe she wrote the letter over a couple of different sittings and put down what came to her mind at the moment without really thinking about the letter as a whole, and so it never occurred to her that she hadn’t asked me about my family and my life. Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, or maybe. I could go on and on making excuses for her, finding reason after reason why I should not trust my intuition that this letter, consciously or not—though I am pretty sure it was conscious and I will tell you why in a minute—was intended to establish, very nicely, but firmly, a distance between my friend and me that I am supposed to understand as signifying the end of the friendship we once had.
Why do I think it was conscious? Listen again to how she closed the letter: “please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a survivor, you should that you would have achieved this no matter what.”
I am a survivor. What she is referring to is the fact that I am a survivor of child sexual abuse, something I told her about when we met for the dinner I wrote about above. I wanted her to understand why I’d reacted so strongly against her decision first not to become my girlfriend and, second, to get married to someone other than me. If you know anything about the psychology of survivors it’s a pretty conventional narrative: I felt myself to be dirty and unworthy of love and yet my friend clearly loved me—whether she loved me only as a friend or as something more is beside the point—and so when she rejected me, I took it as a sign that I was, truly, unworthy. I felt ashamed and enraged, and while the none of the myriad narrative threads that make up a person’s life story can ultimately be reduced to a single cause and effect, I know that this feeling of unworthiness has an awful lot to do with the choices I’ve made in terms of the women in my life—but that is grist for the mill of another piece of writing.
My friend was shocked when I told her that I’d been sexually abused, and I could see in her eyes both the compassion she felt for me and how much she wished she had known what was going on at the time, but here’s the thing: In her letter, she feels the need to remind me that I am a survivor, that I shouldn’t forget—as survivors are wont to do—to take credit for what I have accomplished. What I intended as an honest acknowledgment of how important she was to me as a friend and as the first real supporter of my writing, in other words, she understood as an expression of an insecurity and inferiority borne of having been sexually abused. This hurts. It feels patronizing and it feels, again, like rejection, but this time I am not ashamed and I am not angry. I am only, deeply, sad. I have missed this friend a lot over the years. I have missed the way we used to talk and the way we would sometimes go out for ice cream and French fries, a habit of eating she introduced me to where the saltiness of the fries provided a wonderful balance to the sweetness of the sundaes we’d just eaten.
Most of all, I suppose, I have missed the chance we had after she got back in touch with me to reconnect on a more permanent level, as individuals, as couples and, once my son was born, as families. We told ourselves we were going to try, but we also—I still think reasonably—told ourselves that we wanted first to meet a couple of times, just the two of us, to talk out our unfinished business. My friend’s husband had a problem with this, though—or at least that’s what she told me. He resented the time away from home that her meeting me for an occasional dinner would mean, and when she told me about this, she connected it to the feelings he had about me when they first started dating and then became engaged. He was jealous. Looking back, I suppose I don’t blame him: She and I had been friends long before they started going out, and maybe he knew—because maybe she told him—that I had tried to become her boyfriend; and then once they became engaged, I gave him good reason to resent me: they were either living together, or he was often at her place, or she was often at his—I don’t remember which—but when I would call to talk to her, as I still did, hoping secretly that they would eventually break up, and he answered the phone, I refused to acknowledge him, even though I knew him. He’d been a year ahead of us in high school. Without saying his name or asking how he was, I simply asked if my friend was there. It must have felt to him as if I was trying to tell him that, as far as I was concerned, he didn’t exist.
Anyway, my friend connected her husband’s problems with our seeing each other to what had happened ten years earlier, and even though I could understand why he’d felt the way he did back them, it seemed to me that if he was still having those problems with me then there must be other, larger issues at stake between him and my friend and I didn’t want to get involved with that. I told her this in a letter to which, as I remember, she never responded, and that—except for the birth announcement—was the last time we communicated before I sent her my book. And I will not be surprised if the dedication in next book I send her will be the last thing I say to her ever again.
3.
I am mourning my friendship with this woman and yet I am also haunted by the fact that I could be wrong about all this, and that haunting, oddly enough, is what makes the saddest of all.
Friday, December 23, 2005
Jerome W. Clinton’s In The Dragon’s Claws: The Story of Rostam & Esfandiyar from the Persian Book of Kings, translation, empire and the war in Iraq
My original intention after first reading Jerome W. Clinton’s In The Dragon’s Claws: The Story of Rostam & Esfandiyar from the Persian Book of Kings (Mage Publishers, 1999), a clear, readable and in places compellingly rendered translation, was to post a comment in response to David Koehn’s post on the other blog where I post, The Great American Pinup, on Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China, translated by Jeanne Larsen and published by BOA Editions. I have decided instead, for reasons that are implied in the title and that will become obvious as you read, to make this into its own post on the blog, but let me start where my thinking about all this began, with this quote from David’s post:
"Larsen’s collection does not provide the Chinese as companion for her translations. Some of her translations carry that awkwardness that comes from searching for the English equivalent of what is a traditional Chinese mode of expression. At those moments I’d like to have had the characters available to me so I might decide for myself if her effort was an attempt to be literal, to be modern or otherwise."
As I understand this, what David wants is to have the original Chinese poems so that he can think critically about moments in Larsen’s book where he felt not so much that the translations were unsuccessful—he does not use that word and so I don’t want to put it in his mouth—but rather where the translator’s hand was made visible by her inability to channel seamlessly into English a “traditional Chinese mode of expression.” It sounds almost like there were some poems in which he felt he was looking at a knitted garment that someone was wearing inside out so that all the stitching was visible and what he wanted was to be able to examine the pattern from which the garment was produced so he could determine what the other side looked like, or, rather, what it was supposed to look like, or could look like, depending on how that original pattern was read. This is not, I know a seamless metaphor—pardon the pun—since you could always ask the person wearing the sweater to take it off and turn it right side out, something that does not quite have a parallel when talking about literary translation, but it allows me to talk about my reading of Clinton’s translation in a way that gets at the question of formal choices in translation from a slightly different angle.
Because David can read Chinese, he can in some sense ask the translator to turn the sweater right side out by asking to see the original poem. Or maybe it’s more accurate to see the original poem as the pattern from which the translator knits the translation. I’m not sure—though I will say that trying to come up with metaphors that capture something of the essence of what literary translators and their translations do has become something of a hobby of mine—but what I am sure of is that, because I do not read Persian, even if Mage Publishers had put the original side-by-side with Jerome Clinton’s translation, I could not have made the comparison between Clinton’s translation and the original that David says he would like to have been able to make between Larsen’s work and the original Chinese.
Yet this is a comparison I would dearly love to make because my reason for reading In The Dragon’s Claws is that I am preparing to make my own translation of parts of the Shahnameh. So, being able to think critically, in the way that David is talking about, about the choices other translators have made would be a big help. Here, for example, is a passage from Clinton’s version of the prologue:
The garden’s filled with roses; hyacinths
And tulips cover all the mountain slopes.
The nightingale laments throughout the glade
While the rosebud preens herself at his distress.
Since clouds are sending down their wind and rain,
I wonder why narcissus is so sad?
The nightingale wakes through the darkest night.
He laughs at wind and rain that set the rose
To trembling in fear. Snug in his perch
Within the rose, he sings his song. Meanwhile
The cloud roars like a lion, as though he were
The lover, not the rose. Winds tear his robe
To shreds. Fires flash within the thunderhead,
Fierce proofs of heaven’s passion for the earth—
a love it offers here before the sun. (29-30)
I admire Clinton’s ability to stick with the blank verse he has chosen as his form—and there are a great many passages in the book that are wonderfully rendered—but I feel an awkwardness here, one that repeats itself throughout the book, an artificial quality in the language and a way in which the form and the content end up working against each other. In the following lines, for example, ending the second line on the verb “were” takes the emphasis off the word “he,” where it seems to me it belongs:
…Meanwhile
The cloud roars like a lion, as though he were
The lover, not the rose.
There are moments like this throughout the book, but while they do not happen so frequently as to detract from the power of the story being told, they happen often enough to make me wonder about the relationship between Clinton’s formal choices and the form of the original.
I decided that I will not be translating the Shahnameh into blank verse before I read Clinton’s book. I have lived with blank verse now for two years in my translations of Saadi, and it is a form, frankly, that I am tired of, but reading In The Dragon’s Claws convinced me I’d made the right decision. Instead, when I begin my work on the Shahnameh, I will be working in Anglo-Saxon verse, a form that has its own relationship to epic narrative (think Beowulf) and that I want to explore with the Shahnameh because it feels to me like Anglo-Saxon verse will help me avoid what I felt was the way that Clinton’s adherence both to a very strict blank verse line and a very simple and straightforward language sanitized the story of Rostam and Esfandiyar, robbing the conflict between these two men of much of its drama. Over the long haul of more than a hundred pages, in other words, at least to my ear, Clinton’s verse clicks through its iambic pentameter too mechanically to carry the full emotional resonance of the narrative. As well, the iambic pentameter itself feels in places more like a schema over which the language of the translation has been laid, rather than a form that grew organically out of the translator’s relationship to the poem.
You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with empire, President Bush and the war in Iraq, and I will be getting there soon, I promise, but I want to make sure to say, first, that nothing I have said till now should take away from Jerome Clinton’s accomplishment, which has been to render one of the more important stories from the Shahnameh into accessible, enjoyable and at times truly moving English, and if you are interested in Persian literature, or in epic literature in general, In The Dragon’s Claws is a great place to start. The second thing I want to say is actually two things—and this will get us to contemporary politics—and they are my reasons for choosing Anglo-Saxon verse as the form in which I will work on the Shahnameh in English.
To begin with, Anglo-Saxon and Persian poetry are both written in hemistiches, and while I will not be so arrogant as to suggest that I will be able to make, or even be trying to make, the hemistiches in English correspond to those in the original, this formal correspondence gives me a kind of infrastructure on which to build out the rest of my thinking in terms of the formal choices I will make. Second, and in many ways more importantly, the warrior-talk that fills In The Dragon’s Claws reminds me a whole lot more of the warrior-talk in Beowulf than of anything I know that’s been written in blank verse. Here are the first lines of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king. (3)
And here, in Jerome Clinton’s words, is Queen Katayun’s description of Rostam:
This warrior is an elephant in strength
And sets Niles of blood to flowing on the earth.
He tore the White Div’s heart right from his chest
And drives the sun from its own path. He slew
Hamavaran’s bright moon, Queen Sudabeh.
Yet none dared challenge him with a word. (40)
The stories of Beowulf and In The Dragon’s Claws are very different, as are the focal points of these two passages, but what I want you to notice here is that each partakes of a very traditionally male dominant warrior ethic. More to the point, this warrior ethic is one of the mainstays of the empires ruled by the men in the stories. Shield Sheafson is a good king because he was able to make the others clans submit to him, and the kings of Iran, within the world of the Shahnameh—though you don’t know this from the quote I have given you—have been able to rule largely because Rostam has been there to defend them on the battlefield.
The rulers of Iran are themselves warriors, of course, and when Esfandiyar—whose father, Goshtasp, is shah—meets Rostam on the battlefield, what we witness is a struggle between titans, a battle to the death between two men who not only have never been defeated, but whose victories surpass those of all other warriors. Indeed, it is the circumstance that pits these two men against each other in a fight that neither of them wants and that each recognizes not to be in his best interest that led me to see a connection between their story and the story of George W. Bush’s administration, its pursuit of empire and, specifically, the war in Iraq. First, though, there are some things you need to understand about the world view in the Shahnameh. This is from Jerome Clinton’s introduction to In The Dragon’s Claws:
"In the world of the Shahnameh, humankind seems to have existed before the first shah but as an undifferentiated species. The formation of human society required the shaping presence of a divinely appointed ruler. Other shahs…provided human society with those gifts—fires, tools, agriculture and the various crafts—that raise men and women above the level of beasts. In other traditions, these gifts that distinguish and sustain human society are gifts from the gods. In the Shahnameh it is Iran’s shahs who provide them, or, rather, it is through them [the shahs] that Yazdan, the sole god of pre-Islamic Iranian religious belief, gives them [the gifts] to mankind." (11-12)
Logically, then, “the focus of the tales” in the Shahnameh “is the life of the royal court [and, therefore,] one finds little mention…of the life of ordinary people such as farmers, shepherds or craftsmen” (10). More to the point, “the theme that underlies [the entire epic] is that God prefers Iran to other nations and sustains it through the institution of the shah. So long as His chosen shah sits upon the throne, Iran will endure” (12).
Perhaps you already sense some of the parallels to contemporary politics in the United States, but let me draw them out for you. The current Bush administration, along with its neo-conservative ideologues, is the first US government in a very long time to advocate openly for the pursuit of empire as a legitimate and desirable foreign policy goal. More to the point, they do so in terms that resemble the world view of the Shahnameh as explained above in the quote from Clinton’s introduction. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of The National Security Strategy of the United States, published by the Bush administration in 2002 (page numbers refer to a PDF version of the document that I have but that I have been unable to find a link to):
"The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages." (3)
The United States, of course, according to this document, is the standard bearer of freedom. We are the one nation strong enough to promote it, protect it and to remove from power all who oppose it. The rest of the document is an explanation of how the Bush administration intends to bring, in Jerome Clinton’s words, “these gifts that distinguish and sustain human society” to the rest of the world; and just as the rulers of the Shahnameh are placed on the throne by their god, so too the Bush administration and the religious right argue that there is a special relationship between the United States and the god of the evangelical Christianity that is Bush’s professed faith. Unlike the Bush administration, however, and many of its supporters, who seem to believe in the inherent righteousness—political, moral, ethical, take your pick—of almost everything that has been done in pursuit of this empire, Ferdowsi, the author of the Shahnameh, is not so naïve about how empire works, recognizing that there are good kings and bad, and that sometimes the logic of empire, especially of a divinely appointed empire, can compel otherwise smart and essentially good people to act against their own best interests.
Shah Goshtasp, Esfandiyar’s father, came to power by removing the rightful ruler of Iran, Esfandiyar’s grandfather, from the throne. As might be expected of one who seized power in this way, Goshtasp tends to be insecure about his rule and sees in the motivations not only of those who are against him, but also of those who help him, as Esfandiyar does, the same desire for power that led him to seize the throne from his father. When the story of In The Dragon’s Claws opens, Esfandiyar is in a drunken rage, complaining to his mother that despite his completion of every task that Goshtasp has set for him, Goshtasp has failed to keep his promise and make Esfandiyar the king. Esfandiyar goes one step further, however, and in his drunkenness threatens to unseat Goshtasp if Goshtasp fails to honor this promise. Word of Esfandiyar’s threat reaches Goshtasp and Goshtasp immediately begins to plot Esfandiyar’s demise. (It is important to understand that Esfandiyar would never actually have carried out his threat; he is too loyal, honest and obedient a man for that. He said what he said when he was drunk, and when he realized what he’d said he was ashamed of himself.)
Goshtasp’s plan is quite ingenious. He accuses Rostam, who has been a true friend of Iran’s rulers, of “hold[ing] himself subordinate to none” and of being too proud to “stoop to mention Shah Goshtasp.” He charges Esfandiyar with going to Rostam’s kingdom, Zabolestan, and shackling Rostam, and bringing the hero back to the Persian court on foot, a humiliation he knows that Rostam is unlikely to allow himself to suffer. What Goshtasp hopes—because he has learned that Esfandiyar is fated to die by Rostam’s hand—is that Rostam will fight rather than submit and that this task he has set his son will seal Esfandiyar’s fate.
The shah’s charges against Rostam are trumped up and Esfandiyar knows it, and he knows as well that it is his life his father is really after, not Rostam’s humiliation, and he tells his father so:
…“O shah of all the world,” he said,
“Turn back from this. Your purpose here is not
Rostam or Zal. You seek Esfandiyar.
You would not yield your place to any man,
And so you’d have me vanish from the earth.
Let the crown and throne of all the Kays be yours,
And mine a single corner of the world.
I’ll be your loyal servant there as well
And humbly bow my head to your command.”
Esfandiyar means it. He is not seeking the throne, and he would be willing to sit in a corner of the world and bow his head to the shah’s command, but Goshtasp believes none of it and he sends his son off the bring Rostam back. Esfandiyar, bound as he is both by a religious duty to obey a divinely appointed shah and by a filial duty not to be a disobedient son, has no choice but to obey. To do otherwise would, in fact, brand him as a traitor and a threat to the world order. So, he takes his own sons and some other men with him to Zabolestan to confront Rostam.
It is possible, at this point, to find any number of parallels between the story of Esfandiyar and Rostam and the Bush administration’s war on terror, not so much in the plot points of the narratives, but in the values the narratives espouse and in the fact that these values are held in the context of imperial ambitions, among them:
What put me in mind specifically of the war in Iraq, though, were the various exchanges between Esfandiyar and Rostam leading up to their final battle. Not only do they smack of the shock and awe rhetoric with which the Bush Administration tried to intimidate the Iraqi forces leading up to the invasion of Iraq, with each man retelling his exploits on the battlefield in a way clearly intended to instill fear in the other, but, and more importantly, Rostam’s attempts to talk Esfandiyar out of what he is trying to do and Esfandiyar’s single-minded adherence to both to his father and his nation reminded me very strongly of the debate going on between President Bush and his supporters and those who have suggested it is time for the US to find a way to get our forces out of Iraq. Here is Rostam puzzling out for himself the politics of Shah Goshtasp’s charge to his son:
“Whether I let him bind my legs and arms,”
He thought, “or boldly choose to do him harm,
Both actions lead to evil and disgrace.
To set such harmful precedents is wrong.
His shackles will disgrace my name, and Shah
Goshtasp will do me harm at last. Throughout
The world, whoever has the power of speech
Will never weary or reproaching me.
‘Rostam was beaten by a single youth,
Who entered Kabol, bound his arms and brought
Him to Iran.’ My name will be disgraced.
No scent or hue or Rostam will survive.
And if he’s slain upon the battlefield,
His death will shame in all royal eyes.
‘He slew the youthful shah,’ they’ll say, ‘because
His speech to him was impolite and harsh.’
For this, when I am dead, I will be cursed
By all, and called an infidel. If I,
Instead, am killed by him, Zabol itself
Will lose all name and fame. No one will speak
Of it with pride.”
And here is what Rostam says to Esfandiyar:
“The years you’ve lived are few. You do not see
The shah’s malicious tricks. Your heart is pure,
And you know nothing of the world. Meanwhile,
The shah in secret plots your death. Goshtasp
Will never weary of the crown and throne.
They’re in his stars. That’s why he sends you off
Adventuring around the world and thrusts
You into each new crisis he stirs up. He searched
The earth from end to end, his clever mind
As sharp as any ax or adz, to find
Some hero who had never turned aside
From bloody strife and who was strong enough
To do you harm. All this so this high throne
And crown would stay within his grasp. It wouldBe right for us to curse the throne. Should we,To serve his purpose make the earth our bed?”
Rostam goes on to beg Esfandiyar not to do what he has come to do, and Esfandiyar offers this reply:
“I will not disobey the shah’s command,
Not for a crown or throne. I find in him
Whatever’s good or evil in this world.
My hell and heaven are contained in him.”
Esfandiyar will not budge and so the two men have no choice but to fight, but don’t their positions sound very, very familiar? Rostam argues, not unlike many on the left who think we never should have invaded Iraq, that because the shah’s motives for sending Esfandiyar are suspect (read here inaccurate, bad or purposely manipulated intelligence; our need to control Mideast oil, etc.), that Esfandiyar can and should back out of this mission. More to the point, Rostam argues that doing so in response to those suspect motives is an honorable thing to do. Esfandiyar, on the other hand, not unlike many on the right, insists that he can do no such thing, that his allegiance is to a higher calling (read here: the spread of democracy, national pride, the need to support our troops now that we’re in Iraq, etc.) than whether or not his father’s motives are pure.
The value in seeing this parallel between classical Iranian literature and contemporary politics, however, is not that the Shahanmeh provides any justification for one side or the other in today’s ongoing debates over Iraq or the war on terror or any other Bush administration’ policies. Not only is the world of the Shahnameh too far removed from our own, but also, as a work of literature, it is more an exploration of issues than it is an argument for one side or the other. Indeed, it is this kind of exploration, the willingness on the part of both parties fully to explore the consequences of their positions, that is missing from our current debate and that works of literature like the Shahanmeh can provide.
At the end of In The Dragon’s Claws, Rostam kills Esfandiyar and, as Rostam predicted, he is shamed as a result; Esfandiyar comes out as the “good guy” and the one with the greatest reward because he has left a good name behind him and will carry that good name into the next world. As for Shah Goshtasp, who is the only one in the story who has gotten what he wants, once the cynicism of his motives is revealed, his people turn against him. And all of that is in keeping with the structural principles that organize the world in the Shahnameh, and all of that cannot help but feel unjust. According to Clinton, that injustice is precisely what Ferdowsi, the author of the Shahnameh wanted his readers to ponder:
"I believe that questioning God’s wisdom in choosing and supporting Goshtasp as shah is precisely what Ferdowsi wishes us to do. He is no revolutionary. He accepts monarchy as the system that God has chosen to order human society. But in this magnificent and painful tale he has chosen to reveal to us the dark and shadowy side of that system. A bad monarch can be the enemy of all that is most admirable, and peace and security have been won here at a price that may be too heavy for society to bear." (23)
If only those who so single-mindedly support the war on terror and the war in Iraq would, even if only in a similarly non-revolutionary way, ask the same kinds of questions about how President Bush and his associates want to achieve peace and security. I probably would not agree with much of what they would come up with as an answer, but the questioning itself would be a welcome change from the rhetoric that now dominates our discourse on the subject.
"Larsen’s collection does not provide the Chinese as companion for her translations. Some of her translations carry that awkwardness that comes from searching for the English equivalent of what is a traditional Chinese mode of expression. At those moments I’d like to have had the characters available to me so I might decide for myself if her effort was an attempt to be literal, to be modern or otherwise."
As I understand this, what David wants is to have the original Chinese poems so that he can think critically about moments in Larsen’s book where he felt not so much that the translations were unsuccessful—he does not use that word and so I don’t want to put it in his mouth—but rather where the translator’s hand was made visible by her inability to channel seamlessly into English a “traditional Chinese mode of expression.” It sounds almost like there were some poems in which he felt he was looking at a knitted garment that someone was wearing inside out so that all the stitching was visible and what he wanted was to be able to examine the pattern from which the garment was produced so he could determine what the other side looked like, or, rather, what it was supposed to look like, or could look like, depending on how that original pattern was read. This is not, I know a seamless metaphor—pardon the pun—since you could always ask the person wearing the sweater to take it off and turn it right side out, something that does not quite have a parallel when talking about literary translation, but it allows me to talk about my reading of Clinton’s translation in a way that gets at the question of formal choices in translation from a slightly different angle.
Because David can read Chinese, he can in some sense ask the translator to turn the sweater right side out by asking to see the original poem. Or maybe it’s more accurate to see the original poem as the pattern from which the translator knits the translation. I’m not sure—though I will say that trying to come up with metaphors that capture something of the essence of what literary translators and their translations do has become something of a hobby of mine—but what I am sure of is that, because I do not read Persian, even if Mage Publishers had put the original side-by-side with Jerome Clinton’s translation, I could not have made the comparison between Clinton’s translation and the original that David says he would like to have been able to make between Larsen’s work and the original Chinese.
Yet this is a comparison I would dearly love to make because my reason for reading In The Dragon’s Claws is that I am preparing to make my own translation of parts of the Shahnameh. So, being able to think critically, in the way that David is talking about, about the choices other translators have made would be a big help. Here, for example, is a passage from Clinton’s version of the prologue:
The garden’s filled with roses; hyacinths
And tulips cover all the mountain slopes.
The nightingale laments throughout the glade
While the rosebud preens herself at his distress.
Since clouds are sending down their wind and rain,
I wonder why narcissus is so sad?
The nightingale wakes through the darkest night.
He laughs at wind and rain that set the rose
To trembling in fear. Snug in his perch
Within the rose, he sings his song. Meanwhile
The cloud roars like a lion, as though he were
The lover, not the rose. Winds tear his robe
To shreds. Fires flash within the thunderhead,
Fierce proofs of heaven’s passion for the earth—
a love it offers here before the sun. (29-30)
I admire Clinton’s ability to stick with the blank verse he has chosen as his form—and there are a great many passages in the book that are wonderfully rendered—but I feel an awkwardness here, one that repeats itself throughout the book, an artificial quality in the language and a way in which the form and the content end up working against each other. In the following lines, for example, ending the second line on the verb “were” takes the emphasis off the word “he,” where it seems to me it belongs:
…Meanwhile
The cloud roars like a lion, as though he were
The lover, not the rose.
There are moments like this throughout the book, but while they do not happen so frequently as to detract from the power of the story being told, they happen often enough to make me wonder about the relationship between Clinton’s formal choices and the form of the original.
I decided that I will not be translating the Shahnameh into blank verse before I read Clinton’s book. I have lived with blank verse now for two years in my translations of Saadi, and it is a form, frankly, that I am tired of, but reading In The Dragon’s Claws convinced me I’d made the right decision. Instead, when I begin my work on the Shahnameh, I will be working in Anglo-Saxon verse, a form that has its own relationship to epic narrative (think Beowulf) and that I want to explore with the Shahnameh because it feels to me like Anglo-Saxon verse will help me avoid what I felt was the way that Clinton’s adherence both to a very strict blank verse line and a very simple and straightforward language sanitized the story of Rostam and Esfandiyar, robbing the conflict between these two men of much of its drama. Over the long haul of more than a hundred pages, in other words, at least to my ear, Clinton’s verse clicks through its iambic pentameter too mechanically to carry the full emotional resonance of the narrative. As well, the iambic pentameter itself feels in places more like a schema over which the language of the translation has been laid, rather than a form that grew organically out of the translator’s relationship to the poem.
You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with empire, President Bush and the war in Iraq, and I will be getting there soon, I promise, but I want to make sure to say, first, that nothing I have said till now should take away from Jerome Clinton’s accomplishment, which has been to render one of the more important stories from the Shahnameh into accessible, enjoyable and at times truly moving English, and if you are interested in Persian literature, or in epic literature in general, In The Dragon’s Claws is a great place to start. The second thing I want to say is actually two things—and this will get us to contemporary politics—and they are my reasons for choosing Anglo-Saxon verse as the form in which I will work on the Shahnameh in English.
To begin with, Anglo-Saxon and Persian poetry are both written in hemistiches, and while I will not be so arrogant as to suggest that I will be able to make, or even be trying to make, the hemistiches in English correspond to those in the original, this formal correspondence gives me a kind of infrastructure on which to build out the rest of my thinking in terms of the formal choices I will make. Second, and in many ways more importantly, the warrior-talk that fills In The Dragon’s Claws reminds me a whole lot more of the warrior-talk in Beowulf than of anything I know that’s been written in blank verse. Here are the first lines of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king. (3)
And here, in Jerome Clinton’s words, is Queen Katayun’s description of Rostam:
This warrior is an elephant in strength
And sets Niles of blood to flowing on the earth.
He tore the White Div’s heart right from his chest
And drives the sun from its own path. He slew
Hamavaran’s bright moon, Queen Sudabeh.
Yet none dared challenge him with a word. (40)
The stories of Beowulf and In The Dragon’s Claws are very different, as are the focal points of these two passages, but what I want you to notice here is that each partakes of a very traditionally male dominant warrior ethic. More to the point, this warrior ethic is one of the mainstays of the empires ruled by the men in the stories. Shield Sheafson is a good king because he was able to make the others clans submit to him, and the kings of Iran, within the world of the Shahnameh—though you don’t know this from the quote I have given you—have been able to rule largely because Rostam has been there to defend them on the battlefield.
The rulers of Iran are themselves warriors, of course, and when Esfandiyar—whose father, Goshtasp, is shah—meets Rostam on the battlefield, what we witness is a struggle between titans, a battle to the death between two men who not only have never been defeated, but whose victories surpass those of all other warriors. Indeed, it is the circumstance that pits these two men against each other in a fight that neither of them wants and that each recognizes not to be in his best interest that led me to see a connection between their story and the story of George W. Bush’s administration, its pursuit of empire and, specifically, the war in Iraq. First, though, there are some things you need to understand about the world view in the Shahnameh. This is from Jerome Clinton’s introduction to In The Dragon’s Claws:
"In the world of the Shahnameh, humankind seems to have existed before the first shah but as an undifferentiated species. The formation of human society required the shaping presence of a divinely appointed ruler. Other shahs…provided human society with those gifts—fires, tools, agriculture and the various crafts—that raise men and women above the level of beasts. In other traditions, these gifts that distinguish and sustain human society are gifts from the gods. In the Shahnameh it is Iran’s shahs who provide them, or, rather, it is through them [the shahs] that Yazdan, the sole god of pre-Islamic Iranian religious belief, gives them [the gifts] to mankind." (11-12)
Logically, then, “the focus of the tales” in the Shahnameh “is the life of the royal court [and, therefore,] one finds little mention…of the life of ordinary people such as farmers, shepherds or craftsmen” (10). More to the point, “the theme that underlies [the entire epic] is that God prefers Iran to other nations and sustains it through the institution of the shah. So long as His chosen shah sits upon the throne, Iran will endure” (12).
Perhaps you already sense some of the parallels to contemporary politics in the United States, but let me draw them out for you. The current Bush administration, along with its neo-conservative ideologues, is the first US government in a very long time to advocate openly for the pursuit of empire as a legitimate and desirable foreign policy goal. More to the point, they do so in terms that resemble the world view of the Shahnameh as explained above in the quote from Clinton’s introduction. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of The National Security Strategy of the United States, published by the Bush administration in 2002 (page numbers refer to a PDF version of the document that I have but that I have been unable to find a link to):
"The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages." (3)
The United States, of course, according to this document, is the standard bearer of freedom. We are the one nation strong enough to promote it, protect it and to remove from power all who oppose it. The rest of the document is an explanation of how the Bush administration intends to bring, in Jerome Clinton’s words, “these gifts that distinguish and sustain human society” to the rest of the world; and just as the rulers of the Shahnameh are placed on the throne by their god, so too the Bush administration and the religious right argue that there is a special relationship between the United States and the god of the evangelical Christianity that is Bush’s professed faith. Unlike the Bush administration, however, and many of its supporters, who seem to believe in the inherent righteousness—political, moral, ethical, take your pick—of almost everything that has been done in pursuit of this empire, Ferdowsi, the author of the Shahnameh, is not so naïve about how empire works, recognizing that there are good kings and bad, and that sometimes the logic of empire, especially of a divinely appointed empire, can compel otherwise smart and essentially good people to act against their own best interests.
Shah Goshtasp, Esfandiyar’s father, came to power by removing the rightful ruler of Iran, Esfandiyar’s grandfather, from the throne. As might be expected of one who seized power in this way, Goshtasp tends to be insecure about his rule and sees in the motivations not only of those who are against him, but also of those who help him, as Esfandiyar does, the same desire for power that led him to seize the throne from his father. When the story of In The Dragon’s Claws opens, Esfandiyar is in a drunken rage, complaining to his mother that despite his completion of every task that Goshtasp has set for him, Goshtasp has failed to keep his promise and make Esfandiyar the king. Esfandiyar goes one step further, however, and in his drunkenness threatens to unseat Goshtasp if Goshtasp fails to honor this promise. Word of Esfandiyar’s threat reaches Goshtasp and Goshtasp immediately begins to plot Esfandiyar’s demise. (It is important to understand that Esfandiyar would never actually have carried out his threat; he is too loyal, honest and obedient a man for that. He said what he said when he was drunk, and when he realized what he’d said he was ashamed of himself.)
Goshtasp’s plan is quite ingenious. He accuses Rostam, who has been a true friend of Iran’s rulers, of “hold[ing] himself subordinate to none” and of being too proud to “stoop to mention Shah Goshtasp.” He charges Esfandiyar with going to Rostam’s kingdom, Zabolestan, and shackling Rostam, and bringing the hero back to the Persian court on foot, a humiliation he knows that Rostam is unlikely to allow himself to suffer. What Goshtasp hopes—because he has learned that Esfandiyar is fated to die by Rostam’s hand—is that Rostam will fight rather than submit and that this task he has set his son will seal Esfandiyar’s fate.
The shah’s charges against Rostam are trumped up and Esfandiyar knows it, and he knows as well that it is his life his father is really after, not Rostam’s humiliation, and he tells his father so:
…“O shah of all the world,” he said,
“Turn back from this. Your purpose here is not
Rostam or Zal. You seek Esfandiyar.
You would not yield your place to any man,
And so you’d have me vanish from the earth.
Let the crown and throne of all the Kays be yours,
And mine a single corner of the world.
I’ll be your loyal servant there as well
And humbly bow my head to your command.”
Esfandiyar means it. He is not seeking the throne, and he would be willing to sit in a corner of the world and bow his head to the shah’s command, but Goshtasp believes none of it and he sends his son off the bring Rostam back. Esfandiyar, bound as he is both by a religious duty to obey a divinely appointed shah and by a filial duty not to be a disobedient son, has no choice but to obey. To do otherwise would, in fact, brand him as a traitor and a threat to the world order. So, he takes his own sons and some other men with him to Zabolestan to confront Rostam.
It is possible, at this point, to find any number of parallels between the story of Esfandiyar and Rostam and the Bush administration’s war on terror, not so much in the plot points of the narratives, but in the values the narratives espouse and in the fact that these values are held in the context of imperial ambitions, among them:
- Our leader’s authority should not be questioned, neither should we question his reasoning or his motives;
- If you’re not with us, you’re against us.
What put me in mind specifically of the war in Iraq, though, were the various exchanges between Esfandiyar and Rostam leading up to their final battle. Not only do they smack of the shock and awe rhetoric with which the Bush Administration tried to intimidate the Iraqi forces leading up to the invasion of Iraq, with each man retelling his exploits on the battlefield in a way clearly intended to instill fear in the other, but, and more importantly, Rostam’s attempts to talk Esfandiyar out of what he is trying to do and Esfandiyar’s single-minded adherence to both to his father and his nation reminded me very strongly of the debate going on between President Bush and his supporters and those who have suggested it is time for the US to find a way to get our forces out of Iraq. Here is Rostam puzzling out for himself the politics of Shah Goshtasp’s charge to his son:
“Whether I let him bind my legs and arms,”
He thought, “or boldly choose to do him harm,
Both actions lead to evil and disgrace.
To set such harmful precedents is wrong.
His shackles will disgrace my name, and Shah
Goshtasp will do me harm at last. Throughout
The world, whoever has the power of speech
Will never weary or reproaching me.
‘Rostam was beaten by a single youth,
Who entered Kabol, bound his arms and brought
Him to Iran.’ My name will be disgraced.
No scent or hue or Rostam will survive.
And if he’s slain upon the battlefield,
His death will shame in all royal eyes.
‘He slew the youthful shah,’ they’ll say, ‘because
His speech to him was impolite and harsh.’
For this, when I am dead, I will be cursed
By all, and called an infidel. If I,
Instead, am killed by him, Zabol itself
Will lose all name and fame. No one will speak
Of it with pride.”
And here is what Rostam says to Esfandiyar:
“The years you’ve lived are few. You do not see
The shah’s malicious tricks. Your heart is pure,
And you know nothing of the world. Meanwhile,
The shah in secret plots your death. Goshtasp
Will never weary of the crown and throne.
They’re in his stars. That’s why he sends you off
Adventuring around the world and thrusts
You into each new crisis he stirs up. He searched
The earth from end to end, his clever mind
As sharp as any ax or adz, to find
Some hero who had never turned aside
From bloody strife and who was strong enough
To do you harm. All this so this high throne
And crown would stay within his grasp. It wouldBe right for us to curse the throne. Should we,To serve his purpose make the earth our bed?”
Rostam goes on to beg Esfandiyar not to do what he has come to do, and Esfandiyar offers this reply:
“I will not disobey the shah’s command,
Not for a crown or throne. I find in him
Whatever’s good or evil in this world.
My hell and heaven are contained in him.”
Esfandiyar will not budge and so the two men have no choice but to fight, but don’t their positions sound very, very familiar? Rostam argues, not unlike many on the left who think we never should have invaded Iraq, that because the shah’s motives for sending Esfandiyar are suspect (read here inaccurate, bad or purposely manipulated intelligence; our need to control Mideast oil, etc.), that Esfandiyar can and should back out of this mission. More to the point, Rostam argues that doing so in response to those suspect motives is an honorable thing to do. Esfandiyar, on the other hand, not unlike many on the right, insists that he can do no such thing, that his allegiance is to a higher calling (read here: the spread of democracy, national pride, the need to support our troops now that we’re in Iraq, etc.) than whether or not his father’s motives are pure.
The value in seeing this parallel between classical Iranian literature and contemporary politics, however, is not that the Shahanmeh provides any justification for one side or the other in today’s ongoing debates over Iraq or the war on terror or any other Bush administration’ policies. Not only is the world of the Shahnameh too far removed from our own, but also, as a work of literature, it is more an exploration of issues than it is an argument for one side or the other. Indeed, it is this kind of exploration, the willingness on the part of both parties fully to explore the consequences of their positions, that is missing from our current debate and that works of literature like the Shahanmeh can provide.
At the end of In The Dragon’s Claws, Rostam kills Esfandiyar and, as Rostam predicted, he is shamed as a result; Esfandiyar comes out as the “good guy” and the one with the greatest reward because he has left a good name behind him and will carry that good name into the next world. As for Shah Goshtasp, who is the only one in the story who has gotten what he wants, once the cynicism of his motives is revealed, his people turn against him. And all of that is in keeping with the structural principles that organize the world in the Shahnameh, and all of that cannot help but feel unjust. According to Clinton, that injustice is precisely what Ferdowsi, the author of the Shahnameh wanted his readers to ponder:
"I believe that questioning God’s wisdom in choosing and supporting Goshtasp as shah is precisely what Ferdowsi wishes us to do. He is no revolutionary. He accepts monarchy as the system that God has chosen to order human society. But in this magnificent and painful tale he has chosen to reveal to us the dark and shadowy side of that system. A bad monarch can be the enemy of all that is most admirable, and peace and security have been won here at a price that may be too heavy for society to bear." (23)
If only those who so single-mindedly support the war on terror and the war in Iraq would, even if only in a similarly non-revolutionary way, ask the same kinds of questions about how President Bush and his associates want to achieve peace and security. I probably would not agree with much of what they would come up with as an answer, but the questioning itself would be a welcome change from the rhetoric that now dominates our discourse on the subject.
Monday, December 05, 2005
Nadia Anjuman, Dalton Conley's "Men's Right To Choose" and Saadi's Bustan
It’s been months since I’ve written anything here, but I have been buried in translating Saadi’s Bustan, a masterpiece of 13th century Iranian literature, a project I have finally—finally!—finished, and I am just now beginning to pick my head up out of that sand to look around and see what I have missed. Actually, calling the Bustan sand is unfair, though the image is accurate for how little I have bothered to keep up with what is going on around me. At the same time, though, it is also true that translating Saadi’s masterpiece brought me precisely back to much of what is happening in the world today. Saadi has an awful lot to say about what it means to run an empire, and since we are, here in the United States, being dragged by our government into the role of imperial rulers, whether we like or not (many would say we are there already), I found it hard not to marvel at how consistently Saadi’s advice to the rulers of his time is advice that George Bush and those who work with and for him ought to take. This, however, is not the particular connection I am interested in making today. It’s too easy.
Instead, I’m thinking about two things that have been in the news recently. One, the death of Afghani poet Nadia Anjuman, which I am embarrassed to say I did not pay enough attention to when it first came out; and, two, Dalton Conley’s op-ed piece in The New York Times on Thursday, December 1, called “A Man’s Right To Choose,” which captured my attention not only because it is a badly reasoned argument for allowing a man, under certain circumstances, to obtain a court order to compel a woman with whom he has conceived a child to carry that child to term against her will, but also because the issue it addresses is one that I wrote about almost twenty years ago in two essays that were published in a magazine called Changing Men. The first article was called “His Sexuality, Her Reproductive Rights;” the second, “Fertility and Virility: A Meditation on Sperm.” (The link will take you to a PDF file that contains both essays. Before I continue, one caveat: I will be quoting from both of these articles and I am going to resist the temptation to revise what I said in 1988 and 1989 to fit my understanding of these issues today. While I still agree with the main points I was trying to make in those essays, there are many things I would now phrase differently.)
What I tried to do in these two pieces was address Conley’s concern about how to “legitimate men’s claims to a role in…reproductive decision-making,” but without doing what he does, which is to trample on women’s reproductive rights in the process. The first essay was my attempt to work through my own sense that the “injustice of men controlling the biology of reproduction will find no remedy in the injustice of women’s control over our emotional investment in having children.” This is precisely the injustice that Conley asserts motivated him to take the position that he does:
“About a decade ago, my girlfriend became pregnant. It wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t exactly unplanned either, in that we obviously knew how biology worked. I desperately wanted to keep the baby, but she wasn’t ready, and there were some minor medical concerns about the fetus, so she decided to terminate the pregnancy against my wishes. What right did I have to stop her? As it turned out, none. It was, indeed, a woman’s right to choose.”
It must have been very painful for Conley to have to give up the fatherhood he was imagining himself into when his girlfriend had that abortion, but to argue that the logical measure to take against such pain is for “a father [who] is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother…[to] be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create” is to argue, ultimately, that heterosexual men do not have to bear any real responsibility for our own sexuality. I know that what I just wrote sounds counterintuitive. Conley, after all, is talking about a man who is willing to take full responsibility for a child he helped to conceive, but think about it like this: One way of defining the notion of taking responsibility for yourself is the ability to draw and live within one’s own boundaries, while at the same time recognizing and respecting the boundaries of others, and since there is no way that what Conley proposes can be construed as anything but both disrespect for a woman’s boundaries and a man’s failure to live within his own, there is no way that what Conley is talking about is heterosexual male responsibility. This is how I put it in “His Sexuality, Her Reproductive Rights:”
“Male heterosexual responsibility should begin with the realization that once we fertilize the egg…what happens thereafter is beyond our control. We need to start with what we can control: the extent and nature of our heterosexual relationships.”
I wonder, for example, whether Conley and his girlfriend had a serious, explicit, nuts-and-bolts conversation before they started having sex about how each of them felt about the possibility of her getting pregnant and the choice she would have to make if she did. His contention that while the pregnancy “wasn’t planned…it wasn’t exactly unplanned either, in that we obviously knew how biology worked” is a pretty strong indication that they did not have such a conversation, since knowing that a given consequence is possible is in no way the same thing as planning for that consequence; it’s not even close to the same thing. Indeed, if Conley really wants to talk about what it means for a man to take responsibility for his own sexual behavior, he ought to begin by acknowledging that the problem he describes might have been avoided if he and his girlfriend had had the kind of conversation I am talking about and made their sexual decisions accordingly, avoiding intercourse, for example, if their ideas about pregnancy and abortion were significantly different enough. More to the point, if this conversation did not take place, he needs to hold himself accountable for that fact.
In “Fertility and Virility,” the second essay I published in Changing Men, I tried to work through not only what that kind of accountability might mean, but also what kinds of reproductive rights men could reasonably claim if we took that accountability and the responsibility I talked about above seriously. The problem, as I phrased it at the time, and Dalton’s op-ed makes abundantly clear that the same problem exists now, was this: “While the existence of male reproductive rights may seem self-evident, most discussion I have heard or read on this topic begins precisely where it should end: after the egg has been fertilized.”
Men do not like to accept the reality that neither the division of labor nor ownership of the means of production in the biological processes of human reproduction is fair—women do more of the work and the bodies in which that work is done are theirs—and nothing is going to change that. A large part of what drives Dalton Conley and men who feel as he does is the anxiety this imbalance produces. They fear women’s full and absolute control of women’s own reproductive lives, because that means that men, or at least it feels like it means that men are left with no control over when and whether we have children.
On one level, of course, if women have full reproductive choice, we don’t and cannot have that kind of control. Whether or not we have children depends on whether or not the women with whom we conceive choose to give birth, and this, for me, is where the distinction between fertility and virility comes in:
“Fertility lies as much in the potential as in the fact of reproduction. Virility lies only in having reproduced. Men, by privileging virility, by investing our sense of sexual [and reproductive] validity in the effect our bodies can have on the bodies of women, have created a situation in which our feelings of sexual [and reproductive] self-worth depend upon the presence of women. Only when they give birth…can we see ourselves as fully sexual, fully human beings.”
Conley distinguishes between fertility and virility as well, though he does so only by implication. Moreover, a careful reading of his essay reveals that it is virility and not fertility he is trying to protect: “And my desire for fatherhood was eventually fulfilled by two wonderful children. But every so often I think back to the fateful decision and frustration boils up.” Conley does not mourn this child-that-might-have-been; nor does he express regret that it was not brought into the world. Rather, he expresses his frustration that he could not compel his girlfriend to give him the child. What he ultimately wanted, in other words, was control, and the control he wanted, and wants, is no different from the control that men have exercised over women’s reproductive lives for centuries, a control that is at the heart of patriarchy and that is central to traditional notions of virility.
Please note: I am not suggesting that Conley should not have been frustrated, nor that he should not continue to feel this frustration even now, all these years later. I cannot imagine, except to mouth the platitude that it must be very painful, what it would be like to want a child, to know that I have already helped to conceive the beginnings of that child-to-be’s life and then, with no appeal possible, to have to accept the fact that, against my wishes, the woman who was carrying the beginnings of that child-to-be’s life chose to end it. Nonetheless, to argue from that pain to a social policy giving men the right to take possession of women’s bodies in the ways that Conley suggests is to argue not for a valuing of men’s fertility, or even of men’s desire for fatherhood—which is what Conley insists his argument is about—but, rather, it is to argue that any given man’s desire to be a father, assuming he is willing to put his money where his mouth is, is tantamount to a legally enforceable edict that he should be made a father. Power, in other words, is what’s at stake here, not fairness, and power is the province of virility, not fertility.
So what would it mean to think through the scenario Conley presents us with in terms of male fertility? In “Fertility and Virility,” I tried to suggest some places where we might begin to answer that question, starting with a serious examination of the social meaning of sperm. When I was growing up, sperm was either something you used to get a girl or woman pregnant or something that you needed to neutralize in order to avoid getting a girl or woman pregnant; the fertility inhering in sperm was not something of value in and of itself. I also wrote that placing male fertility at the center of a discussion of men’s reproductive rights means acknowledging that the male body, just like the female, has a reproductive cycle and that we go through this cycle every time we ejaculate, whether we do so inside a woman’s body or not; and if we want to honor what that cycle means in a way that does not impose itself and take possession of women’s bodies, we need to think about how men can take control of the fact that, biologically speaking, there is no difference for us between erotic and reproductive sex.
One way to take this control would be to demand a form of male birth control that is at least as effective as the pill. (The question of whether or not women would trust us to take it is, for the moment, a separate question; that is a trust that men would have to earn. All I am talking about right now is how men might start to think about the issue of reproductive rights in terms of male fertility, not virility.) Another way of asserting this control would be, as I suggested above, for heterosexual men to make the question of whether our partners agree with us about what should happen if they become pregnant central to whether or not we have intercourse with them. We, in other words, would have to take the responsibility of saying no to intercourse if we were not willing to risk what a disagreement would mean. If you really want to talk about fairness when it comes to reproductive rights, women always have to these kinds of judgments about the possible consequences of intercourse when they are decided whether or not to have sex with a man.
What kinds of policies might flow from this very different way of looking at intercourse for men is something I will not presume to predict, but I would be willing to bet that if Dalton Conley had learned when he was younger to think about reproductive rights in terms of his fertility, what he remembered most about his child-that-might-have-been would be how he’d mourned fit and not how much he resented the fact that he couldn’t control the woman who chose not to carry that pregnancy to term.
This issue of controlling women is what brings me to Nadia Anjuman, the 25-year-old Afghani poet who died after a fight with her husband, Farid. They had been married for 15 months. He admits to slapping her during the fight but vehemently denies killing her. Instead, he insists, she committed suicide, having swallowed poison after he hit her. Farid’s mother has also been arrested in relation to the killing. This article from the Afghan Recover Report gives the fullest account of the story, along with the many questions it raises. Apparently, Farid’s mother wanted him to marry someone else and when he chose to marry Nadia instead, and she moved into his house—which is the custom in Afghanistan—the tension between the two women was intense. Nadia’s mother blames Farid’s mother for the death; the doctor who examined Nadia’s body, Dr. Barakatullah Mohammadi, confirms that there was “bruising around her right eye, but no other signs of an injury that could have caused her death,” which lends support to Farid’s insistence that his blows did not kill her; but Nadia’s family refuses to authorize an autopsy, which means that, in the absence of someone making a full confession, the cause her death will never be known for sure. Two other articles that gives detailed coverage to this story can be found here, in The Australian and here, in The Times..
Nadia Anjuman published one book of poems, Flowers of Smoke, to wide literary acclaim, and she was at work on a second volume of poetry when she died. (The name of her first book, Gule Dudi, has most commonly been translated into English in the press as Dark Flower, but “dud”—pronounced dood—actually means smoke in Persian.) According to both The Australian and The Times, though this is not mentioned in the Afghan Recovery Report, there is some speculation that her family’s shame over Nadia’s writing, which dealt with love and beauty, might have had something to do with why she was allegedly killed. If that is the case, then Nadia’s death would be the result of a kind of honor killing, a term which commonly refers to the murder of a woman by her male relatives because she has sexually dishonored her family.
There it is. Male control of the female body. The female body as the repository of male, and therefore family, honor. The responsibility of upholding that honor in male terms weighing entirely on the shoulders of the woman. The resulting and often horrifyingly circumscribed nature of that woman’s life. The deaths, psychic and literal, of women who cannot survive such circumscription.
Dalton Conley would, no doubt, be horrified at the suggestion that his proposal has anything at all in common with the practice of honor killing. He, after all, is talking about life, the life of a child, nor does he propose that the woman who is forced to carry a pregnancy to term under his proposal, a kind of slavery though it may be (my words, not his), should be anything other than free to live her own life when that term is over; but, again, if you read carefully, I think you will find that the same code of honor that men use to justify honor killings is at work in his proposal. After stating the pro-choice position that the debate about reproductive rights “is really about a woman’s control over her body,” Conley goes on to write, “Hence my lack of rights to have any say in whether my seed comes to fruition.”
Think about that language: my seed. Not “the child we conceived.” Not even “our seeds” or “our combined seed.” Or anything else that would recognize and legitimize her. But my seed. As if her body were nothing more than the soil in which he’d planted it. More to the point, though, the court order he would like men to be able to get is a way to prevent her from killing his seed, from dishonoring him, in other words, in very explicitly sexual terms. Still, Conley is not advocating that such a woman be put to death, but what would happen if she were to die as a result of complications from the pregnancy she was forced to continue? While he obviously would not be guilty of murder in the legal sense, wouldn’t it be the case that she died as a result of actions he took in order to preserve his honor? Would that not be a form of honor killing? Would he be at all liable for her death?
I assume that Conley wrote his op-ed in good faith, by which I mean simply that he was trying to work his way as honestly as he knew how through an extremely difficult issue, but his piece is frightening to me nonetheless because it attempts to promulgate precisely the kinds of values that may have led to Nadia Anjuman’s death. The Bush administration has made it clear in any number of ways that they are eager to return the United States to those values, to a time when men were men and women knew their place. It is part and parcel of the empire building to which Bush and company have committed themselves with so much fervor. We need, and by “we” I mean particularly pro-choice men, to critique Conley’s editorial and others like it as loudly as we can. We need to take responsibility for this because he is presuming to speak for us, and I will end this now, very neatly, by offering you a quote from Saadi’s Bustan which I hope I have lived up to, and sewing up the last loose end in this entry:
Beware the ignoramus
who presumes to speak for ten others! Speak
for yourself instead, once, after much thought,
the way a wise man does. If you let a hundred
arrows fly at once, each one of them
might go wide. Take a single shot instead.
Just make sure you shoot it true!
Instead, I’m thinking about two things that have been in the news recently. One, the death of Afghani poet Nadia Anjuman, which I am embarrassed to say I did not pay enough attention to when it first came out; and, two, Dalton Conley’s op-ed piece in The New York Times on Thursday, December 1, called “A Man’s Right To Choose,” which captured my attention not only because it is a badly reasoned argument for allowing a man, under certain circumstances, to obtain a court order to compel a woman with whom he has conceived a child to carry that child to term against her will, but also because the issue it addresses is one that I wrote about almost twenty years ago in two essays that were published in a magazine called Changing Men. The first article was called “His Sexuality, Her Reproductive Rights;” the second, “Fertility and Virility: A Meditation on Sperm.” (The link will take you to a PDF file that contains both essays. Before I continue, one caveat: I will be quoting from both of these articles and I am going to resist the temptation to revise what I said in 1988 and 1989 to fit my understanding of these issues today. While I still agree with the main points I was trying to make in those essays, there are many things I would now phrase differently.)
What I tried to do in these two pieces was address Conley’s concern about how to “legitimate men’s claims to a role in…reproductive decision-making,” but without doing what he does, which is to trample on women’s reproductive rights in the process. The first essay was my attempt to work through my own sense that the “injustice of men controlling the biology of reproduction will find no remedy in the injustice of women’s control over our emotional investment in having children.” This is precisely the injustice that Conley asserts motivated him to take the position that he does:
“About a decade ago, my girlfriend became pregnant. It wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t exactly unplanned either, in that we obviously knew how biology worked. I desperately wanted to keep the baby, but she wasn’t ready, and there were some minor medical concerns about the fetus, so she decided to terminate the pregnancy against my wishes. What right did I have to stop her? As it turned out, none. It was, indeed, a woman’s right to choose.”
It must have been very painful for Conley to have to give up the fatherhood he was imagining himself into when his girlfriend had that abortion, but to argue that the logical measure to take against such pain is for “a father [who] is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother…[to] be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create” is to argue, ultimately, that heterosexual men do not have to bear any real responsibility for our own sexuality. I know that what I just wrote sounds counterintuitive. Conley, after all, is talking about a man who is willing to take full responsibility for a child he helped to conceive, but think about it like this: One way of defining the notion of taking responsibility for yourself is the ability to draw and live within one’s own boundaries, while at the same time recognizing and respecting the boundaries of others, and since there is no way that what Conley proposes can be construed as anything but both disrespect for a woman’s boundaries and a man’s failure to live within his own, there is no way that what Conley is talking about is heterosexual male responsibility. This is how I put it in “His Sexuality, Her Reproductive Rights:”
“Male heterosexual responsibility should begin with the realization that once we fertilize the egg…what happens thereafter is beyond our control. We need to start with what we can control: the extent and nature of our heterosexual relationships.”
I wonder, for example, whether Conley and his girlfriend had a serious, explicit, nuts-and-bolts conversation before they started having sex about how each of them felt about the possibility of her getting pregnant and the choice she would have to make if she did. His contention that while the pregnancy “wasn’t planned…it wasn’t exactly unplanned either, in that we obviously knew how biology worked” is a pretty strong indication that they did not have such a conversation, since knowing that a given consequence is possible is in no way the same thing as planning for that consequence; it’s not even close to the same thing. Indeed, if Conley really wants to talk about what it means for a man to take responsibility for his own sexual behavior, he ought to begin by acknowledging that the problem he describes might have been avoided if he and his girlfriend had had the kind of conversation I am talking about and made their sexual decisions accordingly, avoiding intercourse, for example, if their ideas about pregnancy and abortion were significantly different enough. More to the point, if this conversation did not take place, he needs to hold himself accountable for that fact.
In “Fertility and Virility,” the second essay I published in Changing Men, I tried to work through not only what that kind of accountability might mean, but also what kinds of reproductive rights men could reasonably claim if we took that accountability and the responsibility I talked about above seriously. The problem, as I phrased it at the time, and Dalton’s op-ed makes abundantly clear that the same problem exists now, was this: “While the existence of male reproductive rights may seem self-evident, most discussion I have heard or read on this topic begins precisely where it should end: after the egg has been fertilized.”
Men do not like to accept the reality that neither the division of labor nor ownership of the means of production in the biological processes of human reproduction is fair—women do more of the work and the bodies in which that work is done are theirs—and nothing is going to change that. A large part of what drives Dalton Conley and men who feel as he does is the anxiety this imbalance produces. They fear women’s full and absolute control of women’s own reproductive lives, because that means that men, or at least it feels like it means that men are left with no control over when and whether we have children.
On one level, of course, if women have full reproductive choice, we don’t and cannot have that kind of control. Whether or not we have children depends on whether or not the women with whom we conceive choose to give birth, and this, for me, is where the distinction between fertility and virility comes in:
“Fertility lies as much in the potential as in the fact of reproduction. Virility lies only in having reproduced. Men, by privileging virility, by investing our sense of sexual [and reproductive] validity in the effect our bodies can have on the bodies of women, have created a situation in which our feelings of sexual [and reproductive] self-worth depend upon the presence of women. Only when they give birth…can we see ourselves as fully sexual, fully human beings.”
Conley distinguishes between fertility and virility as well, though he does so only by implication. Moreover, a careful reading of his essay reveals that it is virility and not fertility he is trying to protect: “And my desire for fatherhood was eventually fulfilled by two wonderful children. But every so often I think back to the fateful decision and frustration boils up.” Conley does not mourn this child-that-might-have-been; nor does he express regret that it was not brought into the world. Rather, he expresses his frustration that he could not compel his girlfriend to give him the child. What he ultimately wanted, in other words, was control, and the control he wanted, and wants, is no different from the control that men have exercised over women’s reproductive lives for centuries, a control that is at the heart of patriarchy and that is central to traditional notions of virility.
Please note: I am not suggesting that Conley should not have been frustrated, nor that he should not continue to feel this frustration even now, all these years later. I cannot imagine, except to mouth the platitude that it must be very painful, what it would be like to want a child, to know that I have already helped to conceive the beginnings of that child-to-be’s life and then, with no appeal possible, to have to accept the fact that, against my wishes, the woman who was carrying the beginnings of that child-to-be’s life chose to end it. Nonetheless, to argue from that pain to a social policy giving men the right to take possession of women’s bodies in the ways that Conley suggests is to argue not for a valuing of men’s fertility, or even of men’s desire for fatherhood—which is what Conley insists his argument is about—but, rather, it is to argue that any given man’s desire to be a father, assuming he is willing to put his money where his mouth is, is tantamount to a legally enforceable edict that he should be made a father. Power, in other words, is what’s at stake here, not fairness, and power is the province of virility, not fertility.
So what would it mean to think through the scenario Conley presents us with in terms of male fertility? In “Fertility and Virility,” I tried to suggest some places where we might begin to answer that question, starting with a serious examination of the social meaning of sperm. When I was growing up, sperm was either something you used to get a girl or woman pregnant or something that you needed to neutralize in order to avoid getting a girl or woman pregnant; the fertility inhering in sperm was not something of value in and of itself. I also wrote that placing male fertility at the center of a discussion of men’s reproductive rights means acknowledging that the male body, just like the female, has a reproductive cycle and that we go through this cycle every time we ejaculate, whether we do so inside a woman’s body or not; and if we want to honor what that cycle means in a way that does not impose itself and take possession of women’s bodies, we need to think about how men can take control of the fact that, biologically speaking, there is no difference for us between erotic and reproductive sex.
One way to take this control would be to demand a form of male birth control that is at least as effective as the pill. (The question of whether or not women would trust us to take it is, for the moment, a separate question; that is a trust that men would have to earn. All I am talking about right now is how men might start to think about the issue of reproductive rights in terms of male fertility, not virility.) Another way of asserting this control would be, as I suggested above, for heterosexual men to make the question of whether our partners agree with us about what should happen if they become pregnant central to whether or not we have intercourse with them. We, in other words, would have to take the responsibility of saying no to intercourse if we were not willing to risk what a disagreement would mean. If you really want to talk about fairness when it comes to reproductive rights, women always have to these kinds of judgments about the possible consequences of intercourse when they are decided whether or not to have sex with a man.
What kinds of policies might flow from this very different way of looking at intercourse for men is something I will not presume to predict, but I would be willing to bet that if Dalton Conley had learned when he was younger to think about reproductive rights in terms of his fertility, what he remembered most about his child-that-might-have-been would be how he’d mourned fit and not how much he resented the fact that he couldn’t control the woman who chose not to carry that pregnancy to term.
This issue of controlling women is what brings me to Nadia Anjuman, the 25-year-old Afghani poet who died after a fight with her husband, Farid. They had been married for 15 months. He admits to slapping her during the fight but vehemently denies killing her. Instead, he insists, she committed suicide, having swallowed poison after he hit her. Farid’s mother has also been arrested in relation to the killing. This article from the Afghan Recover Report gives the fullest account of the story, along with the many questions it raises. Apparently, Farid’s mother wanted him to marry someone else and when he chose to marry Nadia instead, and she moved into his house—which is the custom in Afghanistan—the tension between the two women was intense. Nadia’s mother blames Farid’s mother for the death; the doctor who examined Nadia’s body, Dr. Barakatullah Mohammadi, confirms that there was “bruising around her right eye, but no other signs of an injury that could have caused her death,” which lends support to Farid’s insistence that his blows did not kill her; but Nadia’s family refuses to authorize an autopsy, which means that, in the absence of someone making a full confession, the cause her death will never be known for sure. Two other articles that gives detailed coverage to this story can be found here, in The Australian and here, in The Times..
Nadia Anjuman published one book of poems, Flowers of Smoke, to wide literary acclaim, and she was at work on a second volume of poetry when she died. (The name of her first book, Gule Dudi, has most commonly been translated into English in the press as Dark Flower, but “dud”—pronounced dood—actually means smoke in Persian.) According to both The Australian and The Times, though this is not mentioned in the Afghan Recovery Report, there is some speculation that her family’s shame over Nadia’s writing, which dealt with love and beauty, might have had something to do with why she was allegedly killed. If that is the case, then Nadia’s death would be the result of a kind of honor killing, a term which commonly refers to the murder of a woman by her male relatives because she has sexually dishonored her family.
There it is. Male control of the female body. The female body as the repository of male, and therefore family, honor. The responsibility of upholding that honor in male terms weighing entirely on the shoulders of the woman. The resulting and often horrifyingly circumscribed nature of that woman’s life. The deaths, psychic and literal, of women who cannot survive such circumscription.
Dalton Conley would, no doubt, be horrified at the suggestion that his proposal has anything at all in common with the practice of honor killing. He, after all, is talking about life, the life of a child, nor does he propose that the woman who is forced to carry a pregnancy to term under his proposal, a kind of slavery though it may be (my words, not his), should be anything other than free to live her own life when that term is over; but, again, if you read carefully, I think you will find that the same code of honor that men use to justify honor killings is at work in his proposal. After stating the pro-choice position that the debate about reproductive rights “is really about a woman’s control over her body,” Conley goes on to write, “Hence my lack of rights to have any say in whether my seed comes to fruition.”
Think about that language: my seed. Not “the child we conceived.” Not even “our seeds” or “our combined seed.” Or anything else that would recognize and legitimize her. But my seed. As if her body were nothing more than the soil in which he’d planted it. More to the point, though, the court order he would like men to be able to get is a way to prevent her from killing his seed, from dishonoring him, in other words, in very explicitly sexual terms. Still, Conley is not advocating that such a woman be put to death, but what would happen if she were to die as a result of complications from the pregnancy she was forced to continue? While he obviously would not be guilty of murder in the legal sense, wouldn’t it be the case that she died as a result of actions he took in order to preserve his honor? Would that not be a form of honor killing? Would he be at all liable for her death?
I assume that Conley wrote his op-ed in good faith, by which I mean simply that he was trying to work his way as honestly as he knew how through an extremely difficult issue, but his piece is frightening to me nonetheless because it attempts to promulgate precisely the kinds of values that may have led to Nadia Anjuman’s death. The Bush administration has made it clear in any number of ways that they are eager to return the United States to those values, to a time when men were men and women knew their place. It is part and parcel of the empire building to which Bush and company have committed themselves with so much fervor. We need, and by “we” I mean particularly pro-choice men, to critique Conley’s editorial and others like it as loudly as we can. We need to take responsibility for this because he is presuming to speak for us, and I will end this now, very neatly, by offering you a quote from Saadi’s Bustan which I hope I have lived up to, and sewing up the last loose end in this entry:
Beware the ignoramus
who presumes to speak for ten others! Speak
for yourself instead, once, after much thought,
the way a wise man does. If you let a hundred
arrows fly at once, each one of them
might go wide. Take a single shot instead.
Just make sure you shoot it true!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
