The Politics and Poetics of Language in the Persianate World
Panel 042, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 15 at 8:00 am
Panel Description
As scholars from Marshall Hodgson to, most recently, Shahab Ahmed have suggested, Persian has never been the only constitutive language of Persianate societies, which have always been characterized by a dynamic hierarchy between languages. What is the place of other languages in relation to each other in the multilingual Persianate sphere? What kinds of continuities and ruptures can be found in the poetics and political uses of language in this zone? The panel discusses the poetics and politics of language and literary multilingualism in the Persianate context, across a range of geographies (the Balkans, Eastern Anatolia, and Iran), time periods (from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries), and linguistic traditions (encompassing Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Bosnian, and Kurdish). Analyzing the relationship between prestigious and less prestigious literary idioms through poetic texts, it operates with the premise that language has had different roles in identity formation, and different political uses, in premodern and modern times. It will also demonstrate how language remains political over time while the content and contours of debates shift significantly according to different epistemes. In addition, it problematizes the boundaries between literary idioms as well as those between popular and elite culture.
The individual papers follow a chronological order. The first one focuses on an anonymous quadrilingual (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Bosnian) poem from seventeenth-century Ottoman Bosnia, and discusses the methodological problems in studying provincial literary idioms vis-à-vis Ottoman cosmopolitanism in the early modern era. The second paper presents the problem of multilingualism in early eighteenth-century Safavid Iran that can be seen in a small divan of poetry written by Masih of Tabriz, offering remarkable linguistic, metalinguistic and spatial connections between Turkic, Arabic and Persian, and suggesting that the end of confessionally and politically centralized Safavid rule in Iran brought about new dynamics in the power relations between literary languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkic, too. Analyzing the gendered nature of linguistic purism in twentieth-century Iran, the third paper analyzes Iranian ethno-linguistic identity through what it calls an ‘erotic attachment’ to language in the case of the modernist Persian poetry of Mohammad-Taqi Bahar and Parviz Khatibi. The fourth and final paper will survey how the prominent Kurdish poet of the twentieth century, Cegerxwîn (1903-1984), vernacularized leftist anticolonialism in his poetry.
Disciplines
Participants
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Mr. Metin Yuksel
-- Presenter
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Dr. Sooyong Kim
-- Chair
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Dr. Ferenc P. Csirkes
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Alexander Jabbari
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Marijana Misevic
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Marijana Misevic
The period between late fourteenth and late seventeenth centuries witnesses the process of gradual incorporation of the region of South-Slavic Europe into Ottoman literary and professional networks not always directly revolving around the imperial capital in Istanbul. A corpus of texts characteristic for recording Slavic by the use of Arabic script is one of the products of the contact of South-Slavic speaking Europe with Islamicate languages and their rich cultural and literary traditions. The corpus has been commonly designated and studied as Slavic aljamiado literature, but has rarely been investigated from the perspective of cultural history of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. The proposed paper analyzes linguistic, literary and political strategies applied in a four-language poem dated to the mid-seventeenth century, which was authored by an anonymous poet from Sarajevo. This quite exceptional poem, preserved in two slightly different versions, consists of ten quatrains in which each verse is in a different language (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Bosnian). The poem is a concise critique of the state of affairs in the Ottoman province of Bosnia, and also in the empire as a whole. Focusing on the relationship between and the meaning of, the author’s linguistic, formal and thematic choices, the analysis of the poem is aimed to serve as a backdrop for a discussion of three broader, interrelated questions: first, the existing scholarly toolkit for the analysis of multilingual texts in the context of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire; second, the poetic function of the four abovementioned languages in the Ottoman Empire of the time; and third, the cosmopolitan literary, linguistic and formal strategies in the service of meaning-making within a particular locale, in this case Ottoman-ruled Bosnia.
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Dr. Ferenc P. Csirkes
The paper discusses the politics of language (Turkic, Arabic, and Persian) and literary patronage in Safavid Iran in the first few decades of the eighteenth century. Focusing on a hitherto largely neglected physician and litterateur by the name of Masih of Tabriz (fl. late 1720s), I will try to outline the cultural and political dynamics of literary production in non-prestige languages, in this case Turkic, in the early modern Persianate world. Masih of Tabriz was active during the last years of centralized Safavid rule and saw the demise of the dynasty in 1722 with the fall of Isfahan to the Afghans, and that of Tabriz to the Ottomans. He was a physician at the court of Tahmasp II (r. 1729-40), and he also tried his luck by switching to the Ottoman side. In the second half of the 1720s he produced a short divan, which today survives in a unique manuscript. This collection of poetry reflects a remarkable attitude to the three main literary languages of the Turko-Persian world, Persian, Arabic, and Turkic. The majority of the collection is made up of maqlub (‘inverted’) poems. Some of the letters of these Turkic or Persian pieces can be rearranged in a given way to produce poetry in Persian, Arabic, and Turkic, and vice versa. Such poetic word plays are not at all unknown to the Persianate literary tradition, and beyond mere word play, in a symbolic sense they are illustrative of both the interconnectedness of and the cultural difference between these three literary languages. Further, I suggest that by connecting the three languages on a metalinguistic level, and also by elevating Turkic to a level equal to that of the other two idioms, i.e. Arabic and Persian, Masih’s poetic experimentation can be contextualized against the background of the Safavid and post-Safavid elite’s search for new patronage networks in the tumultuous years after the end of the dynasty.
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Dr. Alexander Jabbari
While much has been written about twentieth-century Iranian nationalism and the politics of ‘purifying’—as the nationalists saw it—Persian of its Arabic loanwords, less attention has been paid to the sexual dimensions of this linguistic nationalism. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, and other scholars have demonstrated that Iranian nationalism is gendered and begins to depict the nation as a woman around the turn of the twentieth century. But what of Iran’s Other—how has Arabic been gendered in the Iranian nationalist imagination? Furthermore, what kind of erotic attachments to language are engendered by these depictions? This paper offers insight into those questions through a close reading of two poems that circulated in 1940s Tehran. One is a qet‘eh published by Mohammad-Taqi Bahar (1886-1951), and the other a tasnif by Parviz Khatibi (1922-1993). The latter was performed in theaters on Lalehzar street by Khatibi, and recorded for radio by Morteza Ahmadi (1924-2014). Both poems revolve around Arabic—in particular, its distinctive pharyngeal consonants which are generally lost in Persian pronunciation—as a marker of male and foreign sexual deviancy against which a feminized Iranian nation should be protected. I argue that these poems demonstrate an erotic attachment to language that goes beyond the image of the nation as a female beloved: the very phonology of Persian becomes the object of desire, and the insertion of Arabic pronunciation which both poems rely on is meant to evoke the nationalist zeal of its Iranian audience. The feminization of Persian and masculinization of Arabic offer an interesting departure from the way nationalists have gendered language elsewhere in the Middle East (for example, in early Zionist contexts, the ‘national language,’ Hebrew, is masculinized in opposition to the feminized Yiddish, as Naomi Seidman argues). Finally, this paper also considers the contribution this eroticized discourse of language makes to establishing the Tehrani dialect as the Iranian national standard, against other Persian dialects, some of which (eg. Dezfuli, Shushtari, and others) containing the very Arabic pharyngeal sounds mocked in Bahar and Khatibi’s satirical poems.
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Mr. Metin Yuksel
The prominent Kurdish poet of the 20th century, Cegerxwîn (1903-1984) penned nationalist and Marxist poetry, which was disseminated in the 1950s and 1960s particularly through Kurdish madrasa students and teachers in Kurdish-populated regions in the Middle East. From the 1970s on, his poetic works were disseminated even more widely, as they were set to music by the Europe-based Kurdish singer ?ivan Perwer. Through his poetry, Cegerxwîn vernacularized modern social and political themes and/or problems in a Marxist and Kurdish nationalist idiom. In addition to his poetry, this paper makes use of invaluable audio-visual sources such as his 1983 video-taped interview in Paris and a video recording of his funeral ceremony in the Kurdish town of Qamishlo in Syria, which was attended by thousands of Kurds. It highlights three characteristics of Cegerxwîn’s poetic work. First, in his poetry he incessantly uses the common modernist metaphor of “awakening” to awaken the Kurds, peasants and laborers, from their sleep of oppression. Second, his poetry has a strong anti-colonial, leftist and internationalist solidarity characteristic. His global perspective covers such issues as African American struggle and the wars in Vietnam and Korea. Third, his poetry is also autobiographical. One can trace his personal experience in his poetry such as his imprisonment in Syria and his observations after he moved to Sweden in 1979.
