Michael Beard

Master Narrative and Necessity in Ibn Fattûma

Of course this category has been mishandled in the vulgar Marxist practice of reducing characters to mere allegories of social forces, of turning “typical” characters into mere symbols of class, such as the petit bourgeois, the counterrevolutionary, the landed nobleman, the Utopian socialist intellectual, and so forth. . . . what they leave out is precisely history itself, and the notion of the unique historical situation.

BeLonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World, by Niloufar Talebi, ed. and trans., with Zack Rogow and Daniel O'Connell

The title is itself a kind of poem. A word suggesting security and acceptance breaks, by virtue of a capital L, into two parts that suggest alienation and dissatisfaction. It sounds like a philosophical concept describing the human condition (like a Heideggerian formulation), and consequently we open the book with big expectations. Similarly, one of the epigraphs is that famous quotation from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, which concludes ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’ It is a big project. There are anthologies that anchor a canon in place, and there are provisional anthologies, designed to introduce us to a new community of writers and hope to let the canon loose. Niloufar Talebi’s BeLonging, a collection of Iranian poets writing outside Iran, is in the second category. She is quite clear about the provisional nature of her project, and she acknowledges why: