There Are More than Just Two Ways to Read Persian Literature

Persian poetry, frequently fetishized and commercialized in the West, is often discussed without analytic and critical interpretation, which are applied to the study of Euro-American literatures.

by Aria Fani and Amirhossein Vafa

At first glance, Neima Jahromi’s recent piece in The New Yorker, “Poetry and Politics in Iran,” published on July 14, 2015, on the eve of Iran’s nuclear agreement with the P5+1 countries, was a welcome contribution. By using the Persian literary tradition as a lens to understand the future of Iranian diplomacy, the article broke with standard Western media coverage on Iran, which focuses heavily on the country’s politics.

Sadly, however, there are serious issues with the caliber and depth of Jahromi’s discussion of Iranian literature and culture. The vague language Jahromi uses to describe Persian literary culture stands in stark contrast to The New Yorker’s usually insightful writing on North American and Western European culture and art. This double standard is not a surprise, and is often endemic to treatments of non-European literatures in mainstream media—despite the increasing number of in-depth studies on Persian literature published throughout the United States and Europe. In addition to using a reductionist and naive vision of Persian literary culture, these studies create a false dichotomy between anti-Western (“nativist”) and pro-Western (“worldly”) paths.