Melançon 31

Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution

Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom, eds.

Reviewed by Jérôme Melançon

(Guernica Editions, 2025)

Through the careful pacing and juxtaposition of poems by editors Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom, the collective book Woman Life Freedom stands as a call to knowledge, understanding, community of feeling, and solidarity.

Though it is through-and-through poetic, poetry is not the book’s primary concern. Poetry is the air it breathes, the medium of its existence. It allows voices to find one another and join in a common act of defiance, voices that speak poetry but are concerned with justice—concerned perhaps with maintaining their own liveliness, their ability to resound, their impact on eyes and ears.

A regime like Iran which demands that women hide and LGBTQ+ people not be seen – just like regimes which demand that they be fully and plainly seen as in France or Québec – is a regime that requires some to be silent and others to shout at them. We see in this anthology how the acts of maintaining voice, singing in spite of the noise, and shouting back from varied and changing locations all find form and solidity in poetry.

There is, however, great difficulty in writing and editing political poems, in the enterprise of putting the message and its effect first while attempting to work on language itself. These poems express solidarity and create the knowledge that those who are fighting have support and will be remembered, that there are witnesses. They express indignation, pain, loss, suffering, and the refusal of many to have hateful acts committed in their name.

All the poems in this book succeed in these forms of expression, in using a strong hand and voice to concentrate lived and imagined experience so that they may become tangible for others. They succeed in arresting the course of life, in sharing strong statements. There is great precision within this anthology: no allusive poems, no generalizations.

In Razia Karimi’s poem “Echoes of Captive Tulips” (translated by Ali Abdollahi and Theresa Rüger), we read the sorrow, the loss of self, the self-hatred that come with the violence that is directed at women through their bodies. The title addresses directly the fragility of women’s voices, prompting an image of sound bouncing off petals and only echoing beyond their place of captivity to reach the speaker who, like many who have left Iran, can only faintly hear them. Yet she hears them, knows of the extinguishment of life, metaphorical and material, knows of wilted lives and the destruction of beauty. Karimi carefully and beautifully uses the image of flowers wilting, making them just as material as women, placing flowers beside women rather than having them stand for them in metaphor: “It has been a long time / since the dawn carried a sweet scent.”

In Ayda Niknami’s poem “the pomegranate,” the speaker has been “crying all day from pain / and grief and hope and the weight of history” in America, as protests continue in Iran. The poet offers us a question: why is it wrong to be a woman, not only in Iran, but in so many countries? The pomegranate the speaker opens and eats that leads her to describe those she ate in Iran: like oppression, fruit tastes different depending on the country, but can be named with the same words and retains the same associations. Here Niknami slips a reference to Genesis into the poem, where “the fruit of knowledge” is likely a pomegranate (and not an apple). Tasting it brings the speaker back to her memories, to her family, to the poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, allows her to remain close to this form of knowledge – though it comes with the curse of having been expelled from the land where her first pomegranates grew.

In Rahil Najafabadi’s prose poem “When the World Moved On Without Me,” we feel the contradiction between distance and comfort. The speaker is far from Iran as a place and as a home; also far from the places and factories where the objects of daily life are made; and temporally removed from the Iranian revolution of 1979. Far from sleep, as well, on the edge of comfort: “I panic and cover myself with too many quilts. / I suffocate a little and only let one of my nostrils emerge / above the heat.” They never quite get to a state of peacefulness; fullness is a threat rather than a sense of being complete. Restlessness is a bane, but also necessary. Najafabadi leads us to a question that inhabits much of the anthology, speaking of the “revolution I wasn’t here to stop. How do I start / a new one, without bringing new curses to a woman’s home?”

The anthology directly addresses and takes up the imagery, chants, and points of focus of a movement it also embodies and extends. While women’s civil disobedience as well as broader protests against the Iranian state are nothing new, these grew in strength, numbers, allies, and breadth following the death of Mahsa Amini, also known as Zhina or Jina, while in the custody of the morality police. She had been arrested for failing to wear her hijab in the manner preferred by agents of the morality police, and according to a UN report, the cause of her death was the physical violence to which the police subjected her. The word “prefer” is important here: it carries the arbitrariness of individual judgments on propriety, as well as the arbitrary nature of a desire for violence against women.

Woman, Life, Freedom is a varied movement, and traditional (cis) women’s struggles intersect with those of queer people as well as members of religious and ethnic minority groups – and indeed the slogan is traced back to Kurdish political movements. It has echoed throughout Iranian society and abroad. The still ongoing struggle means that the protests against the conditions originally imposed on women have also turned against the well-documented repression of these protests by the state.

The preface and afterword give much of the context that is necessary to hear with some precision the poems in the anthology and to set them in the current state of affairs: resistance met the repression of the policing of women’s clothing, bodies, and being, through arbitrary decisions by agents of the state; state repression met this resistance by women and their allies demanding not only respect, not only freedom, but the possibility of life; further resistance has met this repression through protests and demonstrations, which was followed by repression of even greater violence – and now the women of Iran who are still in their country are seeking new ways to resist, often by simply remaining alive.

“This volume rants against the tyranny of home,” Bänoo Zan writes. Many of the women writing in this anthology are of Iranian origin, but live around the world – many others have no personal ties to Iran, but draw their solidarity from shared experiences of patriarchal domination. All refuse the primacy of home, of community, over the possibility of being oneself, of being free, of living. Zan affirms and takes up the right and responsibility to speak against injustice, which includes the necessity to criticize one’s own group. She situates the emigrants and the refugees in relation to these imperatives – but she also calls to account the readers, publishers, and writers who avoid criticism of the Iranian regime and are too happy to accept the vision of Iran the regime wants the world to see, the Iran whose artefacts can be traced back for millennia, whose culture is firmly anchored in a long tradition, the Iran where civilization excuses inactivity. Against such devices for inaction, Cy Strom argues that books can bring people together and create the conditions for a revolution: they can make events known, they allow writer and reader to “imagine people and situations into being.” The poems in the book, he suggests, respond to the voices of those who are speaking in Iran, join them in troubling their oppressors, show “that this cause is alive and will not be put down.” Each of the poets in the anthology, he explains, takes up the tasks of witnessing, speaking out, and creating conditions for assembly and action.

Many of the poems give us strong depictions of patriarchal domination and stand as sharp instances of resistance. Through these and others, we find a strong figure that unifies the anthology, as it does the broader movement. By the time the poems were written and the anthology assembled, Jina Mahsa Amini was already a symbol. She appears as a girl speaking in the first person of the dualities of her existence (Riccio); addressed in the second person, as someone who is made of light, made of fire, and walked into the heart of Iran rather than leaving it (Saadlou); epigraphed and alluded to, as bearing a name that will remain a symbol (Bayat, translated by Asadollahi); as needing to be memorialized and brought into the context of North American protests against police violence, anti-blackness, and policing itself by the phrase Say her name (Shidmehr); as only one death, which followed others and will be followed by others (Marshall Flaherty); as an image to be painted (Gomez Fonseca); as freed and bringing freedom (Lotayef); as already painted, portrayed, in a mural in Hamilton (MacDonald); and in her last moments, where she passes through death toward freedom (Molavi).

Among these, Leila Farjami’s poem “Louder than These Bullets” stands out; it reads like a folk song and seems designed to be declaimed in front of a crowd, with italicized cries of “Mahsa!” twice, and “Death to the dictator!” Still, the poem resists its transformation into slogans, and so its eventual cooptation, by maintaining a strong voice and embodying a concern for the aesthetic, which make it possible to establish parallels like “Stars are lucent pebbles that plunge / into the earth’s grey mouth” and “a man who hurls a stone at a militia member / gets shot.” In this poem, Mahsa Amini is a figure of courage and care which at once lives in the imagination of children and stands in for every woman who performs heroic acts. She takes on a supernatural existence as Farjami places her among the elements that care for her – embalmed by air, made of and by light, rooted in precious stones and seeds, borne by the river to the sea.

In a ghazal by Chang Shih Yen, writing under the pen name Parastu Kamangir, Mahsa Amini speaks in the first person to request remembrance and life. Quickly, this first person morphs into a series of others: Hadis Najafi, Armita Geravand, Sarina Esmailzadeh, Nasrin Ghaderi, Atefeh Naami, Nika Shakarami, Asra Panahi, Minoo Majidi. Chang plays on the repetition of the ghazal to repeat requests, and inserts the repetition of murders into this formal structure. Each of these women is, in a sense, all of the others as well, choosing freedom over life because freedom is life: “I paid with my life, so don’t forget me.” In other poems, we see mentions of and dedications to Mahvash Sabet, Roya Heshmati, Tahireh (likely the nineteenth-century poet and feminist Fatimah Baraghani), a nine-year-old boy named Kian Pirfalak, a man named Mohammad Mehdi Karami who was executed as punishment for taking part in protests, a blogger and dissident named Hossein Ronaghi, as well as Armita Geravand, and Sarina Esmailzadeh again, for whom Leila Farjami writes in “The End Without an End,” in full knowledge of the limits of what symbols can make possible:

Who knew bullets could immortalize us,
make us as endless as the blood streaks
on the city boulevards?

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), all with above/ground press, as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have much to do with some of this. He sometimes translates poetry for periodicities as well as other text in other places, and is currently working on translations of books by Denise Desautels and by Phyllis Webb. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.