Poetry:Ahead, Above All Directions
Maryam Ala Amjadi
Maryam AlaAmjadi (Tehran, 1984) is a young poet, translator and essayist who has spent the impressionable years of her childhood in India. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian, Persian and Romanian. She was the winner of the “Young Generation Poet” Award at the first Yinchuan International Poetry Festival in China (September 2011). AlaAmjadi currently writes a weekly page, “Lifestyle”, for the Tehran Times Daily.
Childhood is the time you learn to give things either a name or a number, a period in the chart of yourexistence when you start seeking definitions that you probably have to unlearnall your life. One lazysummer in my childhood, I was curious to know if it was possible to do absolutely nothing. If I could find a state of being in which I was simply doing nothing. So I sat down on the chair and I realized I was sitting down. I got up and I noticed that I am standing. I started walking and I knew that I was walking. I stopped and I was conscious that I was still. Everything that I did had a name. There was nothing I could do that couldcompletely mean nothing.
We are all doing something even if we think we are not doing anything at all. Evenour inaction is a form of action. When people ask me if I am a poet, I simply answer “I write poetry”.This is not an intellectual gesture or even if it is, it means to point in a different direction: that a poet is someone who can verb all nouns. That poetry is an event and not an occasion. And that the silences between the lines are as alive as the words. What you do not say is perhaps the alter ego of what you say.
Poetry may be a form of reconciliation between dreams and reality in the eyes of many, but beyond all definitions,poetry isprotest. The voice comes alive in the void. In fact, the void exists so our voice can come to life as it circles the rooftops of possibilities, even if it is to echo and dance back to us what we have already said. When we get to listen to ourselves, we give our words a chance to experience another level of existence. The speaker becomes the listener. The writer becomes the reader. And the witness becomes a seer.The echo comes back to tell us that the question we have thrown at the void could not be answered by anyone but us. And the echo is never repetitious, for what we hurl at the universe,travels instantly through manylabyrinths of sounds and noises until it can come back to us again in the uniform of a voice.
Poetry is protest. The pen gives us the opportunity to cross out words as much as it gives us to the power to write them. Primarily, a poem is protest against very basic questions of life, protest against the frustration of looking death in the face andthe temptation of grappling with immortality. Death is our most inevitable and violent love affairup or down the ladder of human existence. In the light of the shadow of death, glorification of anything under the sun seems absurd. But does this mean that everything and every deedare justifiable? Anything and everything are two alluring words that can open into a thousand chasms of promises and failures.What is the limit to our wants? Where is that acute border where we say ‘stop!’, if ever at all?Despite being framed in time and place, the page can never succumb to a limited existence. The borders are lifted and the margins are extended as the reader, from time to time, takes her eyes off the page.
Poetry is hunger for even more hunger and thirst foreven more thirst, a constant state of curiosity to turn the page at the ripe time and to leave the memory of our fingerprintsin the timed and placed covenant of the perennial touch, the need for human and humane contact and to treasure the life we live as much as the life we could have lived. It is a cry that becomes audible as it breaks the rigidness of the lines, the formal tyranny of prose and generously gives room to words to extend and breathe in a new space each time they are read and encountered.
The poet shuts what is open, opens what is shut. Brings down the most elevated and lifts the lowest of the low. Makes home for the unwanted and banishes the accepted in favor of creating ameaningful space within spaces for that innermost growth. Such is the power of the lively pen. And the poet does this, not merely because being different is a hopeful sign of being on the road to salvation but because change comes as a result of wholeness and wholesomeness. And what is wholeness without that mess of inconsistencies? Nothing is complete in its sameness. It is by discerningthe subtle flavors of our differences and appreciation of them that we can save ourselves from the insipidness of indifference.
It is impossible to be alive, to live and be in a state of nothingness. And it is impossible to achieve anything worthwhilealone. A poem is perhaps written in solitude, but it is actually formed and realized in the togetherness of words and the eyes of those who read it. The road is shaped by its travellers, the past and the present and we can never learn or grow without each other. We can never flourish in isolation.We can only learn together and then relive and grasp what we have experienced within the concentrated walls of our solitude. We are all in continuation of one another. Nothing really ends. Even a poem has more commas than full stops because it never trulyends.And at the foot of each page, there is hope. Hope that the words may continue to move on and that they move ahead, above all directions.
Maryam Ala Amjadi - (born 1984, Tehran) is an Iranian poet, essayist and translator who has spent the impressionable years of her childhood in India. She also has an M.A. in English Literature from University of Pune. Ala Amjadi who writes primarily in English was the winner of the Silver Medal in the 14th National Persian Literature Olympiad (2001) and was awarded Honorary Fellowship in Creative Writing by the International Writers Program (IWP) at University of Iowa, U.S.A. (2008).
