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Javad Mojabi
Iranian Writer & Poet
(Photo:
Masoud)
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Research:
Iran
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We Speak
The Language of Love
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Literature
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Javad
Mojabi: A
Speech at Pen, New York, October 30, 1999 |
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According to the Iranian
Poet Rumi, this world echoes our works, our voices,
back to us; voices, which had arisen from the inside.
The world outside is a mirror, held before the
beautiful garden of the human mind.
Iranian literature has an intuitive structure. The
journey of the poet and writer often takes place in
the internal territories, with deliberation in the
spirit. In literature, this journey reflects itself in
allegorical forms. Iranian architecture is a journey
into the inside. The external appearance of building
is made up of tall walls plastered merely with thatch,
but the passageway and corridors lead to the
enchantment of gardens, terraces, galleries,
mirror-rooms and decorative stucco. The Iranian Eden
Garden blossoms in Persian carpet, and the geography
of people's imagination reflects itself in ceramic and
folk crafts. Iranian philosophy is concealed in
poetry, and the mystery of Iranian life manifests
itself in myth and legend. The Iranian being faces the
inside. He internalizes the colorful world of the
outside to re-project it in miniatures. The reflection
is such that, not the transient events, but the
spiritual realm and the national imagination are
represented. The human spirit provides the paradigm,
and the world, following that spirit, is a human
interpretation. Man is a small world, the chiaroscuro
of whose being molds the surrounding universe.
This is how we have lived for many millenniums. So,
for us, it is the subject that is the paradigm, the
genuine; and not the object facing us from outside. We
have sought the realization of our subjective forms in
the real world. This does not turn us into
day-dreamers. On the contrary, it makes the material
world humanly possible. The natural world becomes
meaningful, because of humankind. The key to know the
world is not in the surrounding world; it is in the
human heart. This key, we have called
"Love". It is through love that humanity
reaches elation. So does existence.
When writing, we, poets and writers, are the explorers
of our solitude and individuality; and the others and
the world discover them in us and reveal themselves
through our writing. We begin with ourselves and reach
the others. We start from our own culture, and through
a deep recognition of our own identity, recognize the
cultures of other people, our world relatives. Thus,
world cultures are united through the language of art.
This is a world that had been unified in the
beginning; and now, after many centuries, it is moving
in the direction of an ineluctable unity. All over the
world, we speak the same language, the language of the
cultural human being; but on the surface, we will not
understand each other, unless we cross over
conventional languages, established at geographic
frontiers. The language of culture, the unique
language of all of us, as writers, is the language of
imagination. It is the language of peace and love, not
the linguistic demarcations in the geography of power
the words, of which are saturated in violence and
poverty, war and ignorance.
In Iranian literature, the word "mehr"
(meaning "Love"), has had greater usage than
any other word from the time of the Mithraism
inscriptions to the present. I have no doubt that this
has been the case with your literature, or any other
cultural work. Culture, like imagination, recognizes
no boundaries. This endless sea sets the sail of The
Noah's Ark of peace-seekers and lovers such as us; and
the Ark inevitably passes through the storm of blind
conflicts and hostilities. But, the ship of
freedom-lovers neither gets marooned in mud, not does
it allows the invasion of evil forces, because its
wheel steers with the sun of the liberty of mind and
the liberation of the humankind.
Art deals with the knowledge and structure of the
inside. It deals with the architecture of the human
mind and truth; science and technology, and their
instruments apply themselves to the outside. They deal
with the architecture of nature and reality. We,
writers, are not negligent of the outside. But, we
fell safer inside ourselves. We are the trustees of
the essence of human memory. For us, culture is a
process, from thousands of years ago to the present.
The multi-millennial current of Iranian culture has
always endeavored to gain fresh strength and become
more comprehensive through relations with new and
ancient cultural currents. Its aim has been to let the
human voice, the whole of truth, be heard freely and
fairly throughout the world.
Rulers, businessmen and politicians may lie to deceive
the people. But culture, as historical evidence shows,
has neither attempted to deceive the people, nor lied;
it has neither created the war, nor has it sided with
the humiliation and destruction of the humankind or
the beautiful nature around him. Not that writers
don't know how to lie. They have no need for it. But
they have exposed, throughout history, the great lies
in human relations. Writers have always speculated on
this deceitful catastrophe with agonizing pain.
Literature oscillates us between the subject and the
object; between others and us; between one culture and
world cultures. Art and literature are the anchors of
imagination among human being. We are always getting
close to each other; and we are always getting away
from each other, only to come closer again in a common
space, in search of our lost human language.
Art in Iran, generally, stands beyond the realm of
"Loss and Profit". It separates itself from
the system of common materialistic values of the
society. Here, art is looked upon as the spirit's
sanctity and asceticism, or according to Nima, the
founder of modern Persian poetry, it is a kind of
martyrdom. From the standpoint of the artist, the
reward of art lies in the art itself, the pleasure and
ecstasy of creation. In a world, where everything is
measured by the yardstick of loss and profit, art is
created for the sake of peace and exultation, for the
sake of humanity's pleasure and unity. The genuine
artist blocks the road of prejudice and indignity,
animosity and greed, and fight against them.
We are here with you, as the citizens of a mythical
city, the megalopolis of a contemporary humanity both
in pain and in ecstasy. He is in pain, because of his
difficult conditions and unpleasant atmosphere; but,
he is also brimming with a joyful creativity, which is
the ecstasy of a god; ever searching for clues for the
human condition, ever struggling for the happiness of
human being, ever trying to make the world tolerable.
It is a miracle of art and literature that we can
still stand together here with the voices of Homer and
Dante, Hafiz and Whitman, with that very essence of
humanity that is love. We can work alongside each
other, or away from each other, but with one heart,
for ourselves, as well as for others; for a world that
is faithless mother of all.
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Research:
Critic, Speech, Novel |
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