Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 21, Section Two

      The Poet as Dissident- Section Two


      Asieh Amini discovered some of the brutal and sexist laws that prevailed in Iran under the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. One of these practices or laws was the stoning to death of people who committed adultery. These laws applied to both men and women but it was women who fared the worse because of this law.
    In 2002 Asieh Amini wrote a poem about stoning. In the poem called 'When the "stone rain begins"is written from the point of view of a victim of stoning.
      "Before it makes
      a mountain of stone out of me," wrote Amini
      " it turns your heart into a rock.


      Let's say that I am a sinner,
      that I am a cruel criminal
      that I deserve to be punished.


      You, who are making a stone  out of your own heart,
       and are throwing these stones at me,
      I have a question  for you:
      'At night do you sleep with the  innocence of Mary?' "

    Amini sought out many stories . She came across Leyla, a 19 year-old who was facing execution. Amini's story about Leyla became famous and saved her life. Yet now Amini was in the Iranian regime's cross hairs. She still wrote poetry and journalism. Yet it was clear that Iran's rulers wanted to silence her. Her stories of people being stoned to death outraged the Islamic rulers. She helped found a movement called "Stop the Stoning Forever'..
     "I have killed Pharoah," said one of the assassins of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1982. "I am not afraid to die." Amini was now consistently opposing fanatics like this man, though in her case these fanatics ruled her country. In 2005, the very orthodox Mahmoud Ahmadenijad won the Iranian presidential election. He cracked down hard on anyone who opposed him. He shut down all campaigns and movements that challenged his hard line Islamic rule. 'Stop Stoning Forever' moved abroad.
     At times Amini was very ill. Then her health recovered. Yet she left Iran with her daughter. If she had stayed, she would have been imprisoned and maybe killed. She'd already done time in a jail for her activities. Amini now lives in exile as do so many people whose life have been caught up in revolutions.
     Communist and non-communist revolutions alike have killed millions of people. Among these millions were creative people whose poems, music, stories, novels and paintings outraged the new rulers. "It is not wrong to rebel," said the Chinese Communist ruler Mao Tse-Tung. Mao was right. People should rebel against tyrants just as the young Mao did. Yet as ruler of China Mao too became a murderous tyrant.
     Asieh Amini could have been one of the millions of people killed by a tyrant. Yet she was lucky. She survived and now lives in Norway.
     

     

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter Twenty One; The Poet as Dissident by Dave Jaffe

     The Poet as Dissident by Dave Jaffe: Part One


    All the revolutions of the 20th century erupted in places ruled by tyrants or tyrannical governments. And yet  at the end of these revolutions, tyrants ruled the countries again. Of course the new rulers weren't the same as the old ones. But the new rulers ruled their subjects with an iron hand.
    The life of Asieh Amini shows how true this is.
    Amini is an Iranian-born woman now living in Norway. Her life was recently told by Laura Secor in a recent edition of the 'New Yorker' magazine.
   Amini grew up in northern Iran in an upper class family that had wealth and servants. Yet then came the revolution of the late 1970's. The revolution overthrew the ruling Shah and replaced him with another tyrant, Ayatollah Khomeini.
    "The United States has consistently opposed democracy and is supporting corrupt, brutal regimes," writes Noam Chomsky, reporting on people's reactions to the United States in the Middle East. The Shah was faced with a near-revolution in 1954 but survived thanks to U.S. help. He was a top-down oil-rich tyrant. Yet in the late 1970's he was faced by a massive uprising that called for his overthrow. The Shah then fled Iran. But the new ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, imposed a harsh and brutal Islamic rule on the people.
     Thousands of rebels, many of whom were Marxists, were hunted down and often killed by Khomeini's armed supporters. "I don't like my country anymore," a former Iranian citizen said in the early 21st century. "It's not a nice place to visit."
    At first, Asieh Amini didn't take sides in the revolution. For one thing she was too young to understand what was taking place. She wrote poetry and painted pictures. She even joined a poetry circle in a nearby library. Yet soon the revolution engulfed her family. One member of her extended family was a judge who condemned his two sons to death for planning anti-revolutionary activity. This man Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammidi Gilani became infamous for this act.
      Amini went to university In Tehran. She studied journalism, wrote poetry and wrote stories for a state-controlled paper. Then she became an editor for a youth supplement of a large paper. Many men working on the paper resented her for her power. She worked at other papers that were closed down by the government because of their politics. She married, raised a daughter called Ava and then endured a terribly painful illegal abortion.
   Then came a moment of revelation. In 2004 she stumbled upon the story of Atafeh Sahaaleh, a 16 year-old girl who was hanged for acts that were called 'not chaste'. Amini found about the story, tracked down many witnesses, and wrote up her account of what happened. Only a woman's magazine would publish her story.
     Amini now discovered that women who had sex outside marriage would receive 100 lashes of a whip at least three times. Yet on the fourth time they would be executed. Amini was now launched on a very dangerous path. (To be continued).
    

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health- Chapter Twenty, Second Section by Dave Jaffe

•         The Poet As Hard Working Canadian Icon:Second Section.

       Margaret Atwood's poetry, like her fiction, has often been marked by sadism.
       "In the country of the animals" she writes in her poem 'The Animals in This Country'
      " Their eyes flash in a car headlights and are gone
        Their deaths are not elegant
       They have the face of no one."

    In her poem 'For Archeologists' Atwood again describes violence  to animals.
    "Deep under, far back
    The early horses run, on rock.
    the buffalo, the deer
    run with spears in their back."
 
    "My women suffer," Atwood told Judy Klemesred in 'The New York Times, "because most of the women I talk to have suffered."
     Yet Atwood can throw a few curve balls too at those who expect simplistic feminist or nationalistic themes in her works. The main abuser and vicious character in her very fine novel 'Cat's Eye' is a woman. The novel that appeared in the 1970's, called 'Surfacing' is full of anti-American vitriol. Yet it's Canadians, not Americans, who do bad things in the novel. Atwood has faced some tough criticism from people like the late Montreal-based poet Irving Layton and the cultural critic and journalist Robert Fulford. It doesn't seem to have bothered her.
     In 2007 Atwood put out another collection of poems called 'The Door'. It was her first collection of poetry in ten years. 'The Door' contains 50 poems and is divided into ten sections. Some of the free verse works. Some doesn't.
      Atwood's poetry here says critic Jay Parini, "is full of wintry scenes, harsh autumnul rains, splintered lives and awkward relationships."
     "The brown meandering river
     he was always in some wars after that," writes Atwood in her poem 'Butterfly in the Doors'
     trying in vain to get back to that."

    From her late teens onward, Atwood may have set out to prove two things.  First, that women could and did write great literature. Secondly that before she came along, Canada produced interesting literature. If these were some of her aims, she succeeded on both counts.
     "Margaret Atwood is an iconic figure in this city," a Toronto resident said a few years ago. She is probably a Canadian iconic figure too, who's wrttten some very fine works.




      
     
    

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health- Chapter Twenty: The Poet As Very Hard Working Icon by Dave Jaffe

Chapter Twenty: Margaret Atwood: The Poet as Very Hardworking Icon- Part One


   "In Toronto you work," a franchise holder of a large chain store said to this blogger in the early 21st century. "My wife and I live in the Toronto area and we work long hard hours. Everybody works hard here."
     Stewart Piddocke, an anthropologist who spent a year teaching in the Toronto area, noted how the work ethic is engrained in the people of central Canada. "Vacations back there," Piddocke noted, "are really preparations for more work."
       And Margaret Atwood, Canada's most famous literary figure works very hard too. Based in Toronto, English Canada's cultural and financial capital, the 76 year-old Atwood has churned out more than forty books. She has writtten poetry, fifteen novels by last count, children's literature, non-fiction anda libretto to an opera. She is a true workaholic.
     A mother of an adult daughter, Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 to an entomologist father and a mother who was a dietitian.
     Atwood has defined Canadian literature in her book 'Survival'. According to her, the central theme in Canadian fiction is  survival. Only one book didn't embody this theme and that was Mordecai Richeler's 1950's novel 'Son Of A Smaller Hero'. But then Richler, like Atwood, was a path breaker too.
     Atwood has not only written many books. She has also been a tireless advocate for feminism, environmentalism and social justice. Her early novels seemed somewhat feminist, though Atwood denies that her earliest novel 'The Edible Woman' was a feminist work at all. Many of her early and later novels show us female characters who are clever and complex.Some of the men on the other hand in works like 'Surfacing' and 'Life Before Man' aren't loaded down with too much intelligence.
     Atwood's later novels like 'Oryx and Crake' she calls 'speculative fiction'.They are dystopias where life has become a nightmare. In the mid-1980's Atwood wrote her first dystopian novel called 'The Handmaid's Tale'. In this novel set in the future, women are owned by the state which is totally male-dominated. When this book came out in 1985, it won the Governor General's award for fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
     "The Handmaid's Tale is more relevant now than when it was  written," Atwood said about the book that is now will be made into a series being produced by a streaming service and MGM Television. "I am sure the series will be watched with great interest."Atwood first came to Canadian notice in 1964 when she won the Governor General's award for her collection of poetry called 'The Circle Game'. She went on to win many more literary prizes but hasn't yet won the Nobel Prize for literature.
    Atwood and her works are known world wide.She has lived in many places including Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Sarnia, Alliston Ontario, Alabama, Australia, France and Italy.
 (To Be Continued).