Flowers For Socrates

Originally published in 2016 – republished 
for Women’s History Month 2020

by Nona Blyth Cloud

In an interview in the Kenyon Review in 2103,  the poet Solmaz Sharif  was asked: What have you learned about the writing process in the last five years?

“…I’m surprised to find that in addition to empathy, my writing requires a callousness. Maybe this is the nature of the material I immerse myself in—mostly testimony of warfare and imprisonment. Maybe this is the nature of the craft—that putting language, putting
music first requires a kind of violence.”

Every poem is an action.
Every action is political.
Every poem is political.

**

A lover, once: You can’t say every action is political.
Then the word political loses all meaning.
He added: What is political about this moment?

I was washing his dishes. I had left the water running.

**

Solmaz Sharif (1983 – ), daughter of Iranian parents, was born in Istanbul. As she describes it: “en route out of the country, out of Iran. We went to Texas, then we went to Alabama, then we finally ended up in Southern California. We moved around a little bit there. It’s been a long route.”

In the 2013 Kenyon Review interview Sharif explained a major project: “I’ve been working on a poetic rewrite of the US Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms for several years now. My own experience as an Iranian born in Turkey beneath the long shadow of the Iran-Iraq War has always been an impetus behind this project. As an Iranian abroad, this experience was quintessentially American—the warfare was happening over there. Less American, perhaps, was being from the there. Regardless, the being from an elsewhere forced me to cultivate an image, as many have, of the home they left. An imagined place. This imagination-building happened to coincide with a war that killed 1,000,000 people. My father’s brother, a draftee, was one of those killed, shortly before I was born.”

Even after years of seeing and reading news reports and stories about the loss and devastation caused by cycles of war and terrorism in the Middle East, and the cost of reactionary policies in Europe and the Americas, her imagination and passion will take you into realities that sear your eyes and make you rethink what you believed you knew. There’s nothing comfortable about Sharif’s poetry, but her gift for the stark and telling detail will stick in your mind long after the pretty images of other writers have faded.

Lanat Abad / The Place of the Damned

this mangy plot where

by now
only mothers still come,

only mothers guard the nameless plots

.

and then sparingly

.

Peepholes burnt through the metal doors

of their solitary cells,

.

just large enough
for three fingers to curl out
for a lemon to pass through
for an ear to be held against
for one eye then the other
to regard the hallway
to regard the cell and inmate

.

peepholes without a lens

so when the guard comes to inspect me,
I inspect him.

Touch me, he said.

.

And through that opening

I did.

According to a 2004 British Ahwazi Friendship Society (BAFS) report on the ethnic cleansing of Iran’s Ahwazi Arab minority in the Al-Ahwaz region, their lands have been confiscated, the people forcibly relocated, or ‘disappeared’ — imprisoned, or executed and buried in mass graves in a place the government “calls ‘Lanat Abad’, the place of the ‘damned people’… The bodies do not stay long in the unmarked graves, before they are dug up and eaten by dogs.”

Continue reading →