2 - Poetry, Prayer, and Apostasy: SAID's Psalmen

Summary

Religion and Spirituality in SAID's Thought

SAID, BORN IN 1947 IN TEHRAN, was twice exiled from his native Iran: in 1965 he fled to escape Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and after a brief return he fled once again in 1979, this time from Ayatollah Khomeini. A large part of his work recounts the terror of these regimes and the difficulties of the migratory experience; as such it functions as a pedagogical tool for the German audience. His political activism led him to participate in the ‘68er student movement in Germany as the general secretary of the Confederation of Iranian Students’ National Union, and his work continues to be politically engaged. Fearing assassination by the Iranian authorities, he publishes under his first name only (normally written in block capitals) and initially would use only childhood photos on the sleeves of his books in order to avoid being recognized.

SAID's fiction writing is in the form of radio plays, poetry (often about love, in contrast to his other more typically exilic writing), imagined conversations, short stories, and children's literature. He has also published autobiographical essays, studies on literature, diary entries, and transcribed interviews. Wo ich sterbe ist meine Fremde (Where I Die Is My Abroad), which appeared in 1987, is a collection of poems about love and exile, and Der lange Arm der Mullahs: Notizen aus meinem Exil (The Long Arm of the Mullahs: Notes from my Exile), from 1995, is “a hybrid poetic construct consisting of poetry, letters, political commentary, eyewitness reports, imagined conversations with dead friends, censored news items, never-before-published political information and statistical reports, and personal reflections in diary form,” according to Thomas Baginski. In Der lange Arm der Mullahs, SAID writes of the loneliness of a life in exile, the death of friends and fellow activists, and his inability, from Germany, to effect political change in his native Iran. The danger of assassination is real. SAID recounts how, on October 17, 1992, “In Berlin wurden vier iranische Oppositionelle—darunter drei Führer der Demokratischen Partei Kurdistans im Iran—ermordet” (Four Iranian members of the opposition—among them three leaders of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan—were murdered in Berlin).