From Zayandeh Rud to the Mississippi by Mahnaz Badihian (OBA)
Reviewed by Jennifer Langer
This is a collection of poetry by Iranian born Mahnaz Badihian who has lived in the US for twenty-five years. Half the poems are translated from Persian and half written in English.
The subtitle of the collection is ‘A Voice form a Road between East and West’ and her work aims to mediate a space between the two cultures. However, this collection represents the emotional difficulty and struggle of negotiating the loss of home regardless of the length of time spent in the country of exile.
There is a sense of loneliness in an alien American environment. Identity is continually interrogated – she asks ‘Where am I from?’ and dreams are significant as they reveal her repressed consciousness, be it of the blue of the Caspian Sea or of the mirror in Iran waiting for her return. She yearns for the sensory signifiers of her homeland – tapes of Shamloo reading, a bag of sabzi , the sound of the Copper Bazaar, her grandfather’s pomegranate garden, because although she persuades herself that her life is filled with harmony, nevertheless ‘something is missing’ which leads her to perceive herself as a prisoner of memory. In the poem ‘Mirror’, despite breaking the mirrors of the present, the narrator continues to see past ‘unshattered faces in shattered dreams’ with the mirror also being an emblem of temporality and the irretrievability of time marked by ‘the footsteps of moments’. Finally, the presence of her poetic muse relieves the suffering of loneliness and the pain of memory and she experiences elation.
The poetry also focuses on unrequited love with some of the love poems deploying traditional Persian poetic metaphors including, ‘wine’, ‘flame’ and ‘moonlight’ and in fact Badihian grew up with the mystic poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Khayam. Sufism, the Islamic/Persian form of mysticism, demanded the most intense forms of introspection and this is what Badihian does in her poetry.
However, examining of the self is problematic in a culture that idealises feminine silence and restraint and interestingly the poetry is written in the safer space of exile.
Jennifer Langer is the founding director of Exiled Writers Ink and editor of The Bend in the Road: Refugees Writing, Crossing the Border: Voices of Refugee and Exiled Women Writers and The Silver Throat of the Moon: Writing in Exile. She is completing an MA in Cultural Memory.
