Saba Vasefi is a multi-award-winning writer, journalist, human rights activist, documentary filmmaker and poet. Her film Symphony of strange waters deals with the refugee experience and the death penalty as it applies to children in Iran. She writes for The Guardian on the narratives of displacement and imprisoned women on Nauru. She is the recipient of the Premier’s Multicultural Medal for Art and Culture and an Edna Ryan Award for making a significant contribution to feminist debate.
Saba Vasefi reflects on poetry and its place in her life.
Although I am writing in English in Australia, my emotion still comes from Iran where I was thinking in Persian. I’m caught between two worlds and everyday must fill the space in-between. That space is sometimes emptiness; poetry is a healing way to deal with that void, to pass the process of disenfranchisement and unsanctioned grief from having suffered the consequences of theocratic government and displacement.
This is an excerpt from Saba Vasefi's reflection. For the full comment: redroomcompany.org/projects/shadow-catchers
Segregation
We weren’t supposed to return—
No way to gather up again
The kiss that fell from our chapped
Lips as we fled.
Nothing
Is supposed to happen
In Autumn, except, one year,
My falling, and each year, the leaves’
Falling into the world.
Until that Autumn.
How much it hurt the leaves
To join the bloodbath in the streets
And alleys.
This is still autumn, and the times
Still a tumult, and the lips of the world
Are still torn from the kisses they knew
before contagion spread.
This is autumn
Again, and the whole world lives like us
Now, in segregation.
Below the belt of the earth
I sit in darkness,
And the only light to remember by
Is that which burns inside my eyes.
I turn to the mirror and shoot
My reflection, and all I capture
my distant days, before the fall.
The portable home
Once, I went with the wolf to the desert
to take back honey from the bear
but in town my two eyes counted
only for one. At school
the only colours allowed
were black, brown, navy or grey.
To make a Muslim of me,
they hid me in a chador.
No matter how many holy verses
they made my mouth express,
no prayers found their God.
I did not capitulate;
with the heat of my eyes
I incinerated the gates of Hell!
When I was seven, to console my
tears for the forbidden colours,
my grandmother told me
as we sat under a fig tree,
the sky is the same colour
wherever you are.
When I was twenty-eight,
I auctioned my kitchen garden
to fly to a forest,
yearning to burn.
under an azure sky.
I've found solace
now, though I stand naked,
stripped of the dour colours
I wore when the Persian sky
did not know my name —
though raucous sky is not kind to me,
not savvy to my skin.
Tehran was a hoarfrost
on my lips, Sydney
is a cockatoo scream in
my stateless mouth;
and the world a
Tower of Babel.
I have tried insanity,
I have taken every pill,
even the moon, I swallowed!
The ocean I swim in is blue,
but not the blue
of the Caspian.
I am the blue desert,
a pomegranate in bloom.
The broken seeds are
fragments in my mouth.
I am a memoir in blood.
The ink of all existence
is the colour of the sky
and exile is horizon without end.
Salvation beckons
like a lunar eclipse.
I have travelled the clouds
to change the sky’s mood,
but it stays
unmoved. I want to
bring the moon to the ground.
Within me
I would fashion a portable home;
wherever I go
I live nowhere.
Between the inhale
and exhale of my expatriate breath,
I ask God to lift his feet
so I can mop under my desk.
He was my prison,
but I'm always a woman
with a body in the wilderness;
not a prisoner in a tent.
Minerva
My daughter's pencil case
Is full of my future.
As if they were my dreams,
She covers her exercise books
And carries them to school
Brings them home
Damaged and mute.
She takes out pencils,
All of them lead now
And looks for me in pallid shades
of Salvador Dali’s Blue Glass
Today she comes home
With no pack on her back.
The strings of her cello
Compass the ways
We are cut from our past.
Fanatic society,
A chameleon gang,
We keep our colour
But our freedom
Grows schizophrenic.
The road is a blade
And it smells of blood.
Where, now, in my heart
Can I steal her safe.
