Simin Behbahani, the “Lioness of Iran”, died on August 19th, aged 87

[eridani]

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21614085-simin-behbahani-lioness-iran-died-august-19th-aged-87-simin-behbahani?fsrc=nlw|hig|28-08-2014|5356c587899249e1ccb62fe5|NA

EVEN as a child, she knew how poetry should sound. The rhythm of the rhyme her teacher gave her to recite—“I am a yellow rose, the Sultan of all the flowers, the Sultan of all the flowers”—was wrong. She envied the verse bestowed upon a friend, which scanned so much more sweetly, as much as she coveted the red ruffles of her dress, so much finer than her own yellow organdy.

So, at the age of 12, Simin Behbahani began writing her own rhymes. She wrote in the style of the old Persian poets: Hafez, Rumi and Sa’adi. Her contemporaries had abandoned traditional forms such as the ghazal, a sonnet of sorts, with its stiff, restrictive structure. With heads full of modernism they used rhymeless, formless verses to criticise their country and its rulers. But she embraced the old ways. After all, that was the sort of poetry that Iranians knew, the sort they could recite from memory, the cadences of their history.

She borrowed the styles of the masters, but not their substance. They wrote of goblets of wine, and nightingales, and laments for their beloved. She wrote of love, too, but also of politics and of life’s darker realities. “O moaning starving masses, what will you do? O poor anguished nation, what will you do?” asked the first line of her first published poem. Later she wrote about prostitutes hustling in the streets of Tehran, and about the pain of a mother unable to afford pistachios for her son.

She was 26 when the Americans and the British deposed Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. The autocratic rule of the Shah, whom the West found more palatable, sharpened her desire for justice. As the years passed, like many others, she began to dream of revolution—not because she yearned for an Islamic state, but because she wanted an end to repression and the fear of the secret police.