Issue 104 / October 2019

My friend, Alireza Nassimi was a swan, a black swan.
He lived a hermitic life and died a death of absolute
loneliness. Alireza and I were in an unrequited love
for Shiraz, that behemoth Narcissus. Shiraz did
not like its admirers, its poets. It was a Jerusalem who stoned
its messengers. So, we pined away until all that remained of us
were our voices, our poems. Alireza went west, and I went to the
West. He went to Qalat,
a village near Shiraz,
and in a sleety night
overdosed, after he gave
his manuscripts to fire.
For seven years
after my friend’s death
in a ravine in Qalat, a
village near Shiraz, my
throat was occluded
with a morsel of grief,
but all my efforts to
make him a garland
with my words were
doomed to failure. My
overpowering grief was
intermingled with a
fear that what I would
produce might well be
prone to become, in Tennyson’s words, a “sad mechanic exercise
in measured language” (In Memoriam).
My migration to England took place some six years after
Alireza’s translation into the netherworld. Maybe I was like H.
D.’s Helen, who “need[ed] peace and
time to reconstruct the legend” (Helen in
Egypt). I finally found the peace, time, and
breath I needed, in Liverpool, where my
prenatal silence of travelling in the dark of
a shipping container ended, and I opened
my eyes to a different world.
In September 2018, a wooden wall
which separates a construction site from
a pavement at Great George Street in
Liverpool was covered with a long list of
34,361 documented deaths of asylum
seekers, refugees and migrants who had
lost their lives within or on the borders of
Europe since 1993 “due to the restrictive
policies of ‘Fortress Europe’” I found
myself several times standing in front of
that list of many fates, gawping at the
names, ages, regions of origin and causes
of deaths. The list was a frame containing
a myriad of stories; stories of us,
stowaways and steerage passengers of
the world. It was a memorial to poverty,
as opposed to “a memorial to money”
which is what Robert Hampson calls St
George’s Hall in Seaport.
It did not take someone more than
a week to come and daub ‘INVADERS
NOT REFUGEES!’ on the list. I
could not thank the unknown
hatemonger enough, for they
made me rethink a key concept in
an epiphanous moment. I loosely
translated the three English words
in my mind and came up with a
slogan in Persian: “MOHAJEM
NA MOHAJER!”. I told myself, “let
me see things through their eyes.
They are the ghost defenders of
the city. Their monolithicity is at
stake. What if I, a man of colour,
a writer of scripts that look like
scribbles in their eyes, am an
invader in effect?” that epiphany
broke a seal, and I could see my
work’s ethos in a new light.
The two main speakers of
Nassim’s Testament, Nassim and
Vahid, abandon their village and
the ruined poetry they once built
on its riverbank, in search of a
Kingdom. That Kingdom, we soon
find out, is the United Kingdom.
Unlike the heroes of the traditional
epic, who demonise the Others,
Nassim and Vahid are able to see themselves as demons through
the eyes of the Others. This is how their flesh is translated at the
very outset of their entrance by their hosts.
Vahid has a Persian poem named The Letters, about the
migration of Persian scripts. In that short poem, the calligraphed
scripts desert a manuscript, going to the blank banks of “the
rivers flowing from the left to the right”, and reside there on the
margins forever. Persian is written from the right to the left. Vahid
sees that poem as an autobiography of himself and Nassim. They
migrated to the UK clandestinely, in fear for their lives. They spent
days and nights in shipping containers to get to somewhere safe.
Once in the UK, they were sent to Liverpool, the city wherein
they had to wait for their turn on the day of judgment, to be
interviewed by UKBA (UK Border Agency).
It was in an evening when Nassim and Vahid arrived at
Liverpool. There was nothing sinister in the air. Year 2013 was
before the time when one needed to answer a sphinx’s riddle
correctly in order to be let into a city. They were unaware,
nonetheless, that modern cities also have their own sphinxes,
planted not necessarily at their entrances, but in every corner of
them – on the thresholds of every micro-territory. They realised
that only after they encountered the frowning Liver birds. What
did that emblem mean? It was a
scowling heron-like bird holding three leaves with its beak.
A ritual was needed to appease the bird’s wrath: a sacrifice,
or an offering was obliged to the Liver bird. Vahid and Nassim
were Iranian poets; before then, they had composed poetry only
from the right to the left, and not the other way around; they
were disarmed now, and empty-handed. They knew that only
through writing a tribute to the city, could they cajole the bird into
having them in its nest. A poem written and read aloud only in
Persian would probably infuriate the bird. Therefore, Vahid and
Nassim’s poem had to be forced out of its natal language in order
to be accepted as an offering.
On Alireza Nassimi’s burial day, ISNA, The Iranian Students
News Agency, published a lie that is the established account of
his death to the day. As long as I was in Shiraz after that – that is,
for six years – I conformed with the misleading narrative with my
smothering silence. But, eventually, there came a time to write a
palinode, a rebuttal.
The lie to I was going to respond to even quoted another one
of Nassimi’s friends to prove its own forged authenticity: “I will
say very clearly what the cause of Alireza Nassimi’s death was.
Nassimi, who spent his nights with the homeless to write a little
of their reality, was sad because of the coldness we had caused
him. He had gone to take refuge in nature’s arms. He went to
Qalat to visit his poet friend, Vahid Davar. It was on his way to
Davar’s house that he slipped on the snow, [fainted] and froze”.
That account, with its melodramatic transparency, banalised the
untranslatable opacity of my
friend’s death. He had phoned
“I finally found the peace,
time, and breath I needed,
in Liverpool, where
my prenatal silence of
travelling in the dark
of a shipping container
ended, and I opened my
eyes to a different world”
NASSIM’S
TESTAMENT
Iranian poet Vahid Davar considers the inherent
sacrifice that migration demands, after living
in Liverpool for a period after fleeing Qalat, a
town near Shiraz. The following extracts are
taken from his dissertation, which discusses
whether a new language can be a resurrection.
me from a pay phone a few hours
before he went to a ravine in
close vicinity of where I used to
live, unbeknownst to me. He had
told his siblings he was going
to my place. And it was a sleety
night.
Mehdi Hamidi’s allegorical
ghazal, the Beautiful Swan, in
its depiction of the death of the
swan, shows how the bird seeks
seclusion, sits on a wave and
goes to a distant corner to sing
until she dies among her own
songs. My ghazal-writer friend
sang his swan song when he was
in the 33rd year of his life. They
say when a scorpion is encircled
within a ring of fire, it stings itself. Beckoned by the eidolon of
his mother, I suppose, who was stabbed in her youth by Alireza’s
father, consumed by addiction and poverty, that “lost angel of a
ruined Paradise” stung himself, when self-murder seemed to be
his last resort.
I was a frail cygnet when I
stepped out of the dark with six other
heterogeneous litters of the same
womb, the same shipping container. I
was too frail to stand in dole queues; I
was too frail to endure the Liver bird’s
frowning stare; I was not strong enough
to see ‘NO REFUGEES’ daubed by the
night host on Jamaica Street’s walls. I
was in dire need of Nassim, because
“one swan and one cygnet / were
stronger than all the host / assembled
upon the slopes”.
Nassim and Vahid could have
been two more names on the list of the
documented deaths. There were names
on the list as unspecified as “N.N.” and
regions of origin as unsure as “Somalia,
Iran”. The descriptions were as sharp as
“stowaway, found frozen in landing gear
of airplane in Brussels” and “drowned
after boat capsized, found on beach
near Kenitra”. The list was an artwork by
Banu Cennetoğlu, presented as part of
Liverpool Biennial 2018. I do not know
if Cennetoğlu has ever faced ethical
questions concerning her cenotaph,
since in her craftless work, art
is reduced to naked concept.
It is not only modern
elegists who question elegising
ethically. Jahan Ramazani
highlights Hardy’s berating
“himself for fashioning
numerous poems out of
his wife’s death”, Owen’s
uneasiness “about profiting
artistically from carnage on the
battlefield”, and Hill’s worry
“that his elegiac poetry, like
other artistic, commercial, and
historical memorials, helps
to make their [the victims of
Nazi genocide’s] long death
documented and safe” – “the
transfiguration of the dead
into consolatory art”. Masud
Sa’d Salman, the medieval
Persian prisoner poet, after his
friend’s death briefly wrote:
“On Mohammad Alavi’s death
/ I wanted to breathe a couple
of poems out || Methinks,
however, that in the world
/ It is vulgar of one to write a poem henceforth” (my verbatim
translation).
Neither Masud Sa’d’s anti-elegy nor its Western counterparts
can make me feel ashamed for having composed an elegiac epic.
Had I not written Nassim’s Testament, all that would remain
about Alireza’s demise would probably be a number of watery
posts in the blogosphere, a lie on ISNA, and even worse, a
manipulative report on an anti-regime website which attributes
his mysterious death to agents of the regime. News headlines
mask bodies with scraps. They read: “Two cars badly damaged as
skip truck overturns near Walsall Academy” or “Russian warplane
shot down by rebels in Syria”. It is as if the press laments the
destruction of vehicles. Maybe this provides adequate grounds
for elegising. !
Words and Illustrations: Vahid Davar
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