sequences of Hospitality
Delibrations on poetics of Refusal
Ilghar Dadgostari
Sequence I – Transporting the Memory / Home on Wheels
For the transport of my furniture, I contracted a company in berlin. As we arrived in front of my new apartment, he started to shout at me, ordering me to get out of the car. I had all my Memories loaded in that truck an he threatened to ride with them away. Carpets from my parents, that could fly me and sway me home. Stones I gathered as recalls of the days gone. The shirt with the roses that my mother´s scent has worn. Plates and bowls my old friend made from southern soil. Wild Thyme leaves that my uncle picked on the mountains of Iran in north with joy. But it was the thought of separation from my “Saaz” that made me fasten my belt and tell him, wherever he wants to take my things, I come with them. I refuse to be stranded in the streets of Berlin, taken easily away from what time has left me.
I overheard his boss on the phone and could understand their discussion in Kurdish. Maybe he was frightened to lose his job or was just annoyed by his nagging boss. I reached for his hand, made him calm and convinced him to carry my stuff inside. After I paid, I asked, what made him so furious. He looked with a dread of solitude in his eyes and reminded me with his words of being a guest in a foreign country. The trajectory that one takes by leaving home behind, with the risk of never finding it again.
BUT HOME IS WHERE OUR HEART BEATS, LOVE! AND NO LAND AND NO MAN SHALL EVER TELL US OTHERWISE.
WE DREAM ABOUT HOME AND BECOME SAD, HOW UNREACHABLE IT FEELS, HOW UNBEARABLE… AND STOP DREAMING. BUT SOMEDAY THE DREAM COMES TRUE, ALTHOUGH WE MAY FORGET HOW TO DREAM ANYMORE… CUZ HOME IS, WHERE THE HEART BEATS!
The beating heart of a migrant body embodies hope and possibility “of the future for the future.” It is not in power of an exclusionary space to violently doom the idea of home and make the land inhospitable for it. The migrant heart beats beyond the notions of roots, blood, soil or even memories.1
ON A SEA WE DROPPED AS IT RAINED. MILLION YEARS, IS GONE SINCE THOSE WAVES. TO THE SHORES WE BELONG FROM THEN ON. AND ONLY MEAGRES AND STONES WILL REMEMBER OUR DROPPING SOUND.
1
Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the terms of Recognition,” in Culture and Public Action, eds. Vijayendra Rao and Micheal Walton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59-84.
Sequence II –
Sand as the righteous child of the sea floats in water, seats on the ground and flies by the wind, carrying a millennial scent around. The scent of resistance and love.
This strange concurrence as a form of refusal to borders is an evidence, suggesting that the earth shall not be possessed, but cherished and shared.2 Sand evokes the truth that no one has more right than another to a particular part of the earth and that our globe can host all beings together.3
“An unconditional readiness to share” is praised in African cultures as the natural core of hospitality, inherited from the soil on which all life rises.4 One Atlantic Ocean apart indigenous tribes in Canada sing the same song:
“They were the first to find us in this country. We never asked them to come here, but nevertheless we treated them kindly and hospitably and helped them all we could. They had made themselves (as it were) our guests.“ The Chiefs of the western hemisphere, spirited by the sense of humanity, didn´t lose their hope and believed in goodness: “These people wish to be partners with us in our Lands. We must, therefore, be the same as brothers to them, and live as one family. We will share equally in everything half and half in land, water, timber and so on. What is ours will be theirs, and what is theirs will be ours. We will help each other to be great and good.” 5
2 Panu Minkkinen, Hostility and Hospitality (Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press, 2007), 53-60.
3 Immanuel Kant, “Zumewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf” in Gesammelt Schriften. Erste Abtheilung: Werke, BandVIII, Abhandlungen nach 1781, Herausgegeben von der Königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften It (Berlin/Leipzig: De Gruzter 1923), 341-386.
4 Austin Echema, Corporate Personality in Igbo Society and the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), 35.
5 Memorial To Sir wilfrid laurier, premier of the dominion of canada From the Chiefs of the Shuswap, okanagan and Couteau Tribes of British Columbia. Presented at Kamloops, 25th august 1910
But there were no brothers waiting on the shore but invaders that made war and devoured the land from within with a closed heart. The Sand was witness to their hostility and still blows the scent of those bother´s blood into the wind and resounds their path with honor.
WHICH WIND ARE YOU GOING WITH, LOVE? THESE DARK CLOUDS HAVE SHROUDED YOUR CHEST AND THOUSAND YEARS OF RAIN DAY AND NIGHT CANNOT OPEN YOUR HEART.
YOU CAME FROM MILLENNIA, INTO THIS BLOODY STRETCH. LOOK, LOVE! A JEWEL IS BURRIED BENEATH EVERY STEP. IN THIS DREADFUL DIOCESE FROM ALL SIDES, RESOUNDS YOUR PATH SHORT AND TALL. THIS OPEN DEN OF NAME AND SHAME WILL BE YOUR LETTER OF LOVE WRITTEN IN BLOOD.6
6 Hushang Ebtehaj (Pen name: H. E. Sayeh) 1928-2022, Title of Poem: “Life”, Translated by Ilghar Dadgostari.
Sequence
“I pray for the freedom and glory of the entire existence of the holy while I bless it, and I pray for the repression and shame of the entire existence of the wicked.” 7
Contrary to what one perceives from these words of Zarathustra, the supreme leader of the current Regime in Iran describes the historic Persian rituals as barbaric, product of tyrannical governments and rotten monarchies of pre-Islamic era.8 The Rituals he refers to are based on Zoroastrian Doctrine, which has displaced or merged with many Islamic beliefs in Iranian communities since the Muslim conquest of Persia (633-654 CE). 9
In Zoroastrian system of ethics “whole existence becomes the appropriate sphere for the working of human sympathy.” 10 One gets respect and glory through “charity”11 by which world becomes easy and happy.12 In Pahlavi writings the higher manifestation of the act of Benevolence shows itself “in different virtues such as generosity, sympathy, hospitality, peacefulness, patience, good temper, courtesy, and disinterestedness.”13 And goes on by placing the heart and conscience of a generous man on top of the light of the holy fire.14
These tenets of Zarathustra are Memories and Monuments of a land that have been a victim of vicious acts by many invaders throughout history that were set to erase its culture.15 By Butchering these monuments, Military regimes planned to demolish protective territoriality of a hospitable space called home. Fear and anxieties compound in this cruel space and shift “social borders”. The tyrannical gladiators put their black military boots on and trap the citizens inside rural forms of brutality and agonize Memories to transform the society into solitary cells. They imprison bodies and thoughts and resolve them into domestic migrants and strangers in their homeland.
7 Avestan Writings, Yasna VIII (approximately 1000 B.C.), http://avesta.org/yasna/yasna.htm#y0 (accessed on 24 March 2022), 8.
8 Ali Khamenei, New Year´s (Nowruz) Address on national TV (1998)
9 Albert Hourani, Minorities in the Arab world (New York: AMS Press, 1947), 87.
10 Maganlal A. Buch, Zoroastrian Ethics (Surat: Mission Press, 1919), 134.
11 See Ibid., 135. “Charity” or good- will, active philanthropy in all its shapes and forms, large-mindedness are part and parcel of a virtuous organization.
12 Peshutan Dustoor, Darab Sanjana, The Dinkard: The Original Pahlavi Texts, Vol. VII (Bombay: Duftur Ashkara Press, 1894), 468.
13 Avestan-Pahlavi texts, edited and translated by Peshutan Dastur Behramji Sanjana (Bombay, 1885), 18.
14 Edward William West, Pahlavi Texts, in “The Sacred Books of The East”, Vol. XXXVII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 555.
15 Example Articles on the Issue: https://iranwire.com/en/features/933 --- https://www.article19.org/data/files/pdfs/publications/iran-art-censorship.pdf - https:// millichronicle.com/2021/01/irans-regime-like-isis-and-the-taliban-destroys-more-ahwazi-historic-sites/ ---
But the benevolent means tend somehow to survive such a tragic transition in historically charged civilizations. Persian language as an archeological knowledge in Iranian communities has always preserved its historic qualities. This knowledge refuses heartless erasure and appropriations and keeps its strings attached to the communal practices enriched by it.16
While bordered and estranged; bodies refuse being stranded in cells of the tyrants, and create communities in which no one is a guest or a host, but united share that space they all call home. These underground emerged communities start a complex quest by protesting their rage toward the wicked through practicing the principles of love and generosity; as their ancestors did. This supreme unifying principle of life is for them simply and solely the motive of an active service binding all the individual moral virtues together 17, for which sacrifice might be inevitable to keep their home safe from the invaders:
“THERE’S LIFE IN MY DEATH, SO PLEASE UNDERSTAND, HOW LONG MUST I STAY EXILED IN THIS LAND! IF I WERE NOT IN EXILE HERE TODAY, ‘WE WILL RETURN TO GOD’ WHY WOULD HE SAY? RETURNERS GO BACK TO THEIR HOME AGAIN, TO UNITY FROM SEPARATION’S PAIN.” 18
16 P. 5 - Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 5.
17 Maganlal A. Buch, Zoroastrian Ethics (Surat: Mission Press, 1919), 16.
18 Jalal Al-Din Rumi 1207-1273, The Masnavi: Book one, translated by Jawid Mojaddedi (Oxford University Press, 2004), 239.
Sequence IV – Serving History / Nameless Poetry
The rage that the wicked brought upon us is to protest and to speak out, even if we are afraid of the consequences.19 So, a new space can emerge, that might initiate a new melody for freedom. Freedom for our bordered body. An expensive but affordable step into the light. So, we dance our way together through. We will grow and glow, till the lights follow. And so on, each move we make becomes a new string of light in air and demands its place in memory with no despair.
“Memory is our curse as much as it is our blessing. It is our ability to remember that which happened in the past, and our consciousness about creating memory of and for the future that could actually safe us from falling in the same pits like our antecedents did.” 20
What Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung explicates in this passage, i percieve as the dynamic relation that memory has with time and heritage. within this relationship our body positions itself according to each space and becomes poetry by reflecting all time and space in memory.
MEMORY BECOMES THE BODY. BODY BECOMES MOTION AND TRANSITIONS INTO FORM.
FORM IS NOW THE NEW LIGHT, WHICH FOLLOWS THE TRUTH, IN A TRAIT OF SEQUENCES. SEQUENCES OF AN UNSAID POEM THAT WILL BE TOLD THROUGH RAGE AND FIGHT…
19 Audre Lorde, Your Silence will not protect you (Silver Press, 2017), IX.
20 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, The delusions of care (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021), 133.
Where our rage and pain are hidden, also lies our power. “They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom.” We realize them in poetry that gives us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.21 Audre Lorde suggests that; “Poetry forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change: first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”22
Nameless as love is. Nameless as the sensual feeling that touching hands transmit, and “let us know that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing”. Whereas empty hands provoke a desire, a wanting of a better world, a rejection of the here and now.23 Hands are delicate and strong. They are full of knowledge, motion, and emotion. Full of Memory and poetry. So, we make poems with them as we make love; “holding hands and loving each other as refusing the world that judges some of us to be unlovable; loving each other as a way of surviving the world.” 24
That is how history comes to be creating what you need to survive, where it has not yet been served. You ignite by refusing the reality oppressed to you and ought to imagine a new one. Poetry is a glitch of our hopes and imagination that we could use as a vehicle to move and rethink our physical selves and eventually be hospitable to our own body.25
21 Audre Lorde, Your Silence will not protect you (Silver Press, 2017), 11.
22 Ibid., 8.
23 Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism (London, NewYork: Verso, 2020), 22.
24 Audre Lorde, Your Silence will not protect you (Silver Press, 2017), X.
25 Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism (London, NewYork: Verso, 2020), 30.
Sequence
V – Transcending Memory / Breathe of ease
I AM A HYPERLINK, A FLAG FOR A FAKE COUNTRY. WHEN YOU NAME ME , YOU TAME ME. YOU LOOK AT ME AND TELL WHAT I AM. I BECOME WHAT YOU CALL ME. I CARRY ALL THESE BECOMINGS.
I AM NEITHER A GUEST NOR A HOST. I AM NEITHER, BUT NOT A GHOST.
I AM NEITHER MASCULINE NOR FEMININE, I AM JUST A POEM FLOATING IN BETWEEN.
You refuse binary regulation of roles in a society, that determine a hostile border between the host and the guest by denying their humanity. Humanity is that “unconditional readiness to share” that cosmos Philosophies of our ancestors demonstrate. This notion resonates their heritage and enlightens a path toward “personhood and communality”.26
This utopian inherited image gives us hope and offers us a home. It challenges us to consider how we can penetrate… break… puncture…. tear the material of the institution, and, by extension, the institution of the body that regulates, and controls us.27
So, for the sake of poetry, we shall reject the binary institutionalized form of hospitality, and the economy that goes along with it.28
“I AM NEITHER MOUNTED ON A CAMEL NOR A MULE UNDER A BURDEN. I AM NEITHER THE LORD OF VASSALS NOR THE VASSAL OF A LORD. I THINK NOT OF PRESENT SORROWS OR PAST VANITIES, BUT BREATHE THE BREATH OF EASE AND LIVE THE LIFE OF FREEDOM!”29
26 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Whose Land have I Lit On now? Contemplations on the Notions of Hospitality (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020),16.
27 Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism (London, NewYork: Verso, 2020), 24.
28 Ibid., 68.
29 Saadi Shirazi 1210-1291, Saadi: collected works, Delphi Poets Series (Delphi Classics, 2019), 177.
To dematerialize the body and transcend its limitations, we need to break with self-sufficiency in the very sense of that unconditional hospitality, that has been introduced to us as the true path towards a virtuous life. So that Mediterranean Sea doesn´t remain a watery grave,30 but becomes the bridge it was, connecting all beings. So that this globe doesn´t lodge a major crime scene of failure to help persons at risk but becomes the soil we knew, on which all life has risen.
“LET IT BE THE DREAM THE DREAMERS DREAMED –LET IT BE THAT GREAT STRONG LAND OF LOVE WHERE NEVER KINGS CONNIVE NOR TYRANTS SCHEME THAT ANY MAN BE CRUSHED BY ONE ABOVE
…
O, LET MY LAND BE A LAND WHERE LIBERTY IS CROWNED WITH NO FALSE PATRIOTIC WREATH, BUT OPPORTUNITY IS REAL, AND LIFE IS FREE, EQUALITY IS IN THE AIR WE BREATHE.”31
Cover Photo: Vida Movahed - “Speech without a veil” - Igniter of white wednesday Movement in Iran, 2017.
30 Lionel Manga, Knocking on heaven´s Door?, Article in “Whose Land have I Lit On now? Contemplations on the Notions of Hospitality” (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020), 259.
31 Langston Hughes 1902-1967, “Let America be America Again”, written in 1935.
