Nima Yushij’s poem Hey, People (Ay Adamha) has been much anthologized in the years following its 1941 publication, often in support of leftist ideologies. The poem was written during the productive period when Nima (the name commonly used) worked for the innovative Musiqui magazine, and its publication coincided with the deposition of Reza Shah and widespread participation of intellectuals in public life in Iran. As Kamran Talattof observes, many critics have read the poem as a call for revolution (84).
The poem begins with an urgent address: “Hey, you over there,” directed toward a festive crowd on a seaside shore. The message relates that someone is drowning—struggling against the waves of an “angry, heavy, dark, familiar sea.” The voice of alarm turns to accusation: against the crowd’s “old world” affluence, selfish concerns, and apathy before the suffering and sacrifice of the castaway, now fatigued, face disfigured with fear (vainly heroic). Emblematically, even the waves meet resistance against the “silent shore.” In the end, the wind carries the faint cry of alarm away, but, elsewhere, the shout persists—the call for awareness and action.
Hey, People is an example of Persian modernist New Poetry, wherein formalism and metric regularity are replaced by social conscience and organic, “natural” structure. The poem bears the stamp of the French symbolists, whose work Nima Yushij was examining in his manifesto The Value of Feelings. At this point in his career he had traveled through the romanticism of Legend, the realism of The Soldier’s Family, to the symbolic. Yushij offers a recurring vocabulary of images: the inclusive and collective “you,” of the “People,” morphs to a conflict of perspectives—the complacent versus the voices of reform and transformation (in art as well as politics). He emphasizes other binaries for comparative effect: sea/shore, day/night, old/new. An always appreciative observer of the environment, he imbues natural settings with poetic mood, as in the despair and urgency of Hey, People.
Yushij’s contribution is enormous: Persian poetry entered the 20th century, with few exceptions, in fossilized imitation of the great medieval poets of the classical period. These giants—Ferdowsi, Khayyam, Sa’di, Rumi, Hafez—had pioneered a distinguished poetic tradition. In the 500 years since, however, their descendants had been content merely to imitate the conventions, motifs, and rules. Iranian society and Persian poetry were not modernized in the same graduated evolution as seen in the literatures of the West. Persian poetry made the leap from a medieval idiom to the modern in the space of one generation. Imagine, as Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak suggests, a comparable jump in Western literature from Alexander Pope to e.e. cummings—in 50 years’ time (5). In Iran the voices for change were many, but the task of articulating a modern aesthetic fell to one man, Nima Yushij.
Bibliography
Alishan, Leonardo P. “Ten Poems by Nima Yushij.” Literature East & West 20, nos. 1–4 (1976): 21–31.
Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1978.
Talattof, Kamran. The Politics of Writing in Iran. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
Categories: British Literature, Iranian Literature, Literature, World Literature