NEWS

Beyond an exclusively science issue, climate crisis is also “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (Ghosh The Great Derangement 9). Through arts and humanities, narratives help our power of imagination to grow and let us envision our climate-changed now. The urgency is to imagine the now rather than a distant future amid increasing environmental catastrophes around us. This course will stimulate your imagination to better see the now.

Learners will have access to two different artistic mediums, literature and film, during this course. They will have a freedom of choice to develop their ideas and connect what they learn in either genre of artistic expression while thinking about issues like mass migration, forced displacement, climate change, and global warming. Learners will engage with contemporary novels and films but equally learn about historical continuities and connections that colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism have had on current world affairs. 

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Saba Pakdel’s “The Poet” is a philosophical reflection on the condition of the poet — a contemplation of estrangement, and more precisely, a textual embodiment of the experience of being nowhere, and the rupture between voice and being. Written in a minimalist style, with a free, fragmented structure and suspended rhythm, the poem draws a portrait of a poet who is neither at home, nor has a home, but rather — whose only home is language, and even that, precariously.

This dual condition — of dislocation and dissonance — is etched into the very form of the poem: its bilingual fracture (between Persian and English), its syntactic breaks, and its deliberate spatial gaps. The result is a suspended space, where each line hesitates forward, leading not toward resolution but into yet another unresolved line. The poetic persona — described consistently in the third person — becomes estranged not only in content but in voice, evoking a subject exiled from her own pronouns, her own grammar. She is not the master of her language, nor at home within herself.

In “The Poet”, the speaker — or the poetic self — wanders like a rootless traveler through rooms that are never hers. These rooms may evoke the migrant’s disorientation, the impossibility of settling. But more than a reference to geographical exile, Pakdel renders this experience inward, existential. Her speaker is not merely estranged from place, but from meaning itself. She writes — and does not know what she writes. This alienation from the act of writing echoes a deeper authorial crisis: writing is no longer a vehicle of communication, but the wound left by the absence of meaning

Poetry, here, is not a refuge but an interrogation. The poetic voice (a topos? a constructed speaker?) speaks in fragments, in a dramatic monologue perhaps addressed to the reader, or perhaps to a shadow self — suspended between language and mind, between scattered place and broken time. In this sense, “The Poet” becomes meta-poetry — poetry about the failure of poetry. It resonates with postmodern and late-modernist literary traditions in which language is no longer a reliable vessel, and the self is fractured, unstable, and splintered.

One might hear in this voice the echoes of Paul Celan, Anne Carson, or Sylvia Plath — poets for whom absence, enjambed ruptures, and fracture overwhelm the act of articulation. Pakdel’s strength lies not in representing experience, but in embodying it — formally, tonally, and with radical concision. Her spareness is not restraint, but a sign of how deep the wound runs: language can neither contain nor reveal it.

Ultimately, “The Poet” seeks neither conclusion nor consolation. It stages a theatre of suspension — a meditation on the inability of words to transcend into meaning. It is a sorrow sung from the threshold, a poem written without ever quite taking shape in language. And in that crisis — in that refusal to resolve — the poem finds its integrity: a poem about silence, about the hunger for unspoken language, and about a ghosted subject, hovering at the edge of collapse — and still writing.

شعر «شاعر» تأملی فلسفی بر وضعیت خودِ شاعر، تجربه‌ی ازجاکندگی و، دقیق‌تر، بیانی متنی از نفس تجربه‌ی بی‌درکجایی، و شکافِ میان زبان و زیست است. این شعر، با زبانی کمینه‌گرا، ساختاری آزاد و ضرباهنگی موقوف، چهره‌ی شاعری را ترسیم می‌کند که نه در خانه‌ست، نه در زبان خانه دارد، و نه در خود، علت دوپارگی متن .هم از حیث زبانی و هم شکل و طرز بیان در هر یک از دو زبان فارسی و انگلیسی یحتمل همین باشد

شعر با فاصله‌گذاری‌های آگاهانه و شکست‌های نحوی، فضایی تعلیقی ایجاد می‌کند؛ گویی هر سطر، راه به سطر بی‌فرجام دیگری می‌گشاید. شاعر، دراصل پرسونای شعری، با افعال سوم‌شخص توصیف می‌شود. این فاصله‌گذاری، نه تنها از منظر تکنیکی بلکه از منظر معنایی نیز مؤثرست: گویی خودِ شاعر، رانده‌ از خویش،؛ نه مالک زبان خودست و نه ساکن درون خود.

در این شعر، «شاعر» چون مسافری بی‌سرزمین در اتاق‌هایی پرسه می‌زند که هیچ‌گاه از آنِ او نیستند. تصویری شاید اشارت‌گر تجربه‌ی مهاجرت و سرگشتگی.

اما آن‌چه این‌جا اهمیت دارد، ترجمه‌ی آن تجربه به لایه‌ای درون‌جوشیده‌تر و وجودی‌ترست: شاعر نه فقط از مکان، بلکه از ساحت معنا نیز تبعید شده‌ست. او می‌نویسد ‌و خود نمی‌داند چه می‌نویسد. این بیگانگی با نوشتار، خود نوعی بازتاب بحرانِ مؤلف است؛ گویی نوشتن، دیگر نه کنش انتقال معنا، که خودْ زخم غیاب معناست.

در این میان، شعر، به جای آن‌که پناهگاهی باشد، می‌شود میدان بازجویی. پرسونای شعری (توپوس یا صدای سخن‌ساز متنی؟)، در پریشان‌ترین وضع و در حال گفتگو با مخاطبی در قالب تک‌گویی دراماتیک است، شاید مخاطب بالقوه‌ی این متن، و به‌هرحال پرسونایی در تعلیق، میان ذهن و زبان، و نیز مکان و زمانی دوپاره. به‌نوعی، شعر به  فراشعر بدل می‌شود: شعری در ناتوانیِ شعر. این گرایش، به‌وضوح با سنت‌های پسامدرن و مدرنیستی متاخر در ادبیات هم‌خوانی دارد - سنتی که در آن، زبان دیگر  اعتمادپذیر و رساننده نیست، و سوژه، شکسته‌ست و چندپاره.

در نگاهی دقیق‌تر، شعر یادآور آثار شاعرانی چون پل سلان، آن کارسن یا سیلوسا پلات است؛ جایی که وقفه، شکاف، و غیاب، سکوت را بر فریاد و ناگفته‌ی متن را بر گفته‌های او چیرگی می‌بخشد. شعر پاکدل، عوض بازنمایی تجربه، آن را مجسم می‌سازد،  در فرم، در لحن، و به ایجاز. این ایجاز، نه از سرِ کم‌گویی، بل ناشی از وسعتِ زخمی‌ست که کلمات را نه توان آشکارسازی آن است و نه فروپوشاندن‌اش.

در نهایت، «شاعر» نه دنبال نتیجه‌گیری است و نه تسلی. این شعر، نمایش تعلیق است و ناتوانی‌ کلمات در استعلایابی به پهنه‌ی معنا؛ اندوه‌یادی از لحظه‌ای که نوشته می‌شود، بی‌که در نوشتار پیکر بپذیرد. و در همین دقیقه‌ی بحرانی، شعر با خود به صداقت می‌رسد: شعری درباره‌ی سکوت، درباره‌ی زبانِ ناجسته‌کام، و درباره‌ی سوژه‌ای گذرنده و اثیری در آستانه‌ی فروریختن، و هنوز نویسا.

On the stage, Azam lives the stagnant temporality of waiting. While waiting, she addresses imaginary fellow passengers and tells them stories from her deepest past to the darkest future possibilities. The audience follow Azam’s uninterrupted story as she waits for her red-ribboned suitcase by the running carousels in the airport. 

We, the audience, also play many roles here, considering the self-contradictory and complex connotations Samini gives to the concept of here and there through a migrant’s perspective. For example, Samini opens her Director’s Note with a reminder for her audience: “We are either immigrants ourselves, or descendants of immigrants,” not applying to Indigenous people who have lived on their territories from time immemorial. She breaks this critical imagined distance between the protagonist of her play and us, the audience. Azam’s experience of pain mirrors, or at least somehow echoes, similar encounters Samini’s audience may have lived through –as immigrants themselves. By breaking dramatic dimensions as such, Samini engages her audience even more by inviting them to be fellow passengers on Azam’s flight.

Samini opens the play dressed in a flight attendant’s attire, with a routine house-keeping note and then refers to the audience as imaginary flight passengers. While reminding us that the emergency exits are the same as entrance doors we’ve just passed through, Samini encourages her audience not to be shy with the expression of their human emotions, be it uncontrollable laughter or an embarrassing burst into tears. Then, Azam’s character, with an overtly comic tone, high-pitched voice, hysterical laughs, and intentionally exaggerated body movements enters the stage. But no one really laughs, neither at the opening nor throughout. The jokes and ironies are quite clear. Some are very funny, indeed. Of course, I can assume some of the audience members might feel shy to make any noise during a live performance. Nevertheless, I read this grotesque moment of dark comedy that Samini has prepared us for to seamlessly epitomize ‘the migrant time zone’.

The Migrant time zone, beside the unavoidable moments of waiting, runs simultaneously in two directions: the past and the present in parallel. In the migrant time zone, based on Samini’s paly, the past has continued to be the migrant’s present doppelganger: simply, the doppelganger of Azam’s past life, dreams, and hopes would come in a tireless fight with her present self. Azam’s past resembles her present self but not quite accurately –as doppelgangers do. It is a blurry distinction that makes the migrant live a parallel timeline: the past self that would have created Azam’s imaginary present self (even her present self, like any other bi-lingual migrant, interchanges between the one who speaks English and the one who performs in Farsi on the stage). Azam’s past irresistibly haunts her present with some burning questions. What would have happened if I had never left there to come here? Is part of me still living there? What has moved with me to here and now? Which part of me is here, then? Where is here, exactly? 

I encourage you, ‘immigrants or descendants of immigrants,’ to book your plane tickets and fly with Azam. She will make you laugh even though no one assumedly hears it, except maybe our doppelgangers from the past, sitting next to us and asking, “Where Is Here?”

Saba Pakdel

January 19, 2025