Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz

by Dick Davis

  One way of solving, or at least sidestepping, these questions, is to say that Jahan Khatun simply observes the conventions of writing as if she were male, and that the poems are to be taken as exercises within a given genre. In other words, the author’s gender should be neither here nor there when the poems are considered as examples of the particular genre to which they belong. This is true, up to a point.

  It’s certainly the case that Jahan Khatun usually writes “as” a male (and, which can be something of a break with the usual conventions of the ghazal, sometimes as a male apparently addressing a woman). That she is clearly writing from within male conventions is shown by the fact that she will use tropes natural to a male writer, but which can cause a readerly double-take coming from a female one. For example, she will ask people not to pluck at her beard (that is, deride her or tease her), or she will ask her lover not to veil him(?) self before her. Neither of these conventions makes literal sense spoken by a woman to a man. (A contemporary reader might possibly think that when she asks her lover not to veil herself, she is in reality talking to a woman, and that perhaps Jahan Khatun liked girls, but women didn’t veil themselves before other women, and the trope still makes no literal sense.) This means that she is using the tropes for their tenor (what they actually mean) rather than for the vehicle/metaphor that conveys the tenor: “don’t pluck at my beard” means “don’t bother me”; “don’t veil yourself from me” means “don’t disappear and leave me.” In one ghazal she invokes a number of pairs of legendary pre-Islamic lovers, always casting herself as the male, the addressee as the female:9

  You are Layla, you are Layla…

  I am Majnun, I am Majnun, I am Majnun…

  You are Shirin…

  I am Farhad…

  You are Shirin, you are Shirin, you are Shirin…

  I am Khosrow…

  You are Azra, you are Azra…

  I am Vameq, I am Vameq…

  You are Golshah, you are Golshah…

  I am Varqeh, I am Varqeh…

  You are Vis…

  I am Ramin…

  But the fact that she is in reality a woman, and that her audience would know this, frequently tweaks the poetic conventions, and much of the piquancy in her poems comes from this disjunction between what we as readers know about the author (that she was a woman, something her original audience of course also knew) and the “male” assumptions inherent in the genre in which she is writing. At such moments we have glimpses of the kind of complex, self-mirroring eroticism that happens in Shakespearian comedy, when boys pretending to be girls dress up as boys, which everyone knows they “really” are in the world outside the theatre, while remaining as “really” girls for as long as the play lasts. Jahan Khatun is really a woman, but for as long as the poem lasts, she is doing what a man does and assuming a male persona, and as that fictive man she can, as male poets do, assume traditionally inferior – that is “feminine” – roles (of submissiveness, begging, flirtation, midnight tears, and so on). As previously stated, the paradox of assumed submissiveness for the male writer of the ghazal is that the speaker is in fact almost always more socially powerful than the addressee, who is often a young servant or slave. Jahan Khatun, by the sheer fact of her sex, eroticizes, or more accurately “genderizes,” this social disparity. And there is a further twist: as a princess she is superior to almost anyone she might address, but as a woman she is, in the gender terms of her social milieu, inferior to almost any male lover she might address. Her poems play with these paradoxes constantly, and the reader often glimpses her appearing to get a heady kick out of the game. Despite the extreme conventionality of the rhetoric and situations of her ghazals, their tone is often distinctive and memorable; this is in large part due, I think, to the ambiguity – almost duplicity – of the gender (and to a lesser extent social) roles in them. The issue of gender is a tense one in her poems, and she uses that tension to express tension about other things, such as social hierarchy and politics. Once the reader is attuned to this gender ambiguity and to the delicate interplay of power and powerlessness – the ways in which the conventions of the poetic tradition within which she is writing, her gender, and her social status all meld and confirm and contradict one another in her poems – getting to know her oeuvre can be an extraordinarily subtle and moving experience. Another distinctive quality of her verse is that she can be both plangent and flippant in the same poem, sometimes in the same thought, a quality that can probably be traced back at least in part to a consciousness of the ambiguous gender and social status that she assumes in any given poem.

  The fundamental and most common theme of her poetry is a sense of lost happiness, and given her history it is easy to see why this should be the case (the murder of her father when she was in her teens would probably have been enough to set her off on such a course, quite apart from everything that happened to her subsequently). What is so notable is the way that she can use the conventions of the love poem, in which the theme of lost happiness was considered natural and expected, to parley this general apprehension into poems about politics and social upheaval – the rhetoric and the emotional tenor are continuous, although the subjects she brings them to could hardly be more different from one another. But we should remember that this pervasive sadness is not her only tone: she can joke with her lover(s) too, and she can be light-heartedly excited at times, especially in her evocations of outdoor social gatherings. Like Hafez, she seems to have had a special love of music, particularly the music that accompanied poetry. In one of her ghazals she says,

  If you get hold of Jahan’s poems

  Take up an instrument to pass the time,

  And sing one or two of her lines with a sweet voice;

  Let the sounds of the tambourine and flute delight you…

  It is instructive to compare the poetry of Hafez and Jahan Khatun to see how what are basically the same conventions, the same metaphors, and the same rhetorical tropes, can produce poems that speak to us with such distinctly disparate, individual voices. Within the same deployed conventions of the ghazal, we can discern distinct psychological profiles, or at least stylistic emphases that can suggest psychological leanings beneath them. Hafez loves to imply a number of things at once; Jahan Khatun tends to say one thing at a time. Sufi notions hover around – many would say wholly pervade – a number of Hafez’s poems; Jahan Khatun almost never mentions Sufism. Jahan Khatun is a more plaintive and direct writer than Hafez; Hafez is a more dismissive and evasive writer than Jahan Khatun. He is also much more Anacreontic, bibulous, crapulous, and generally wine-besotted than Jahan Khatun, who mentions wine according to the usual conventions but rarely dwells on it, and who more than once indicates that she doesn’t much like it when her lover(s) are drunk. Jahan Khatun’s tone, except when she is angry about politics, is almost always elegant and appropriately aristocratic; we feel she’s a very well-brought-up young lady, if also one who has sometimes been ready to kick over the traces erotically (at least imaginatively, possibly actually). Hafez’s tone is far more various and capricious; it’s the tone of someone who doesn’t have a respectable public persona to keep up; of someone, in fact, whose public persona is that he isn’t respectable. We can perhaps glimpse a particular difference in these two authors’ sense of themselves as poets in their treatment of the convention that the author’s pen-name should appear in a ghazal’s closing lines. It was common for poets to boast about their poetic prowess at this moment (such poetic self-promotion had a particular name, fakr), and Hafez very often does this, announcing in effect that no better poet than himself can be found anywhere. Jahan Khatun almost never boasts in this way; instead she often puns on her name, Jahan, which means “world.” This too might seem grandiose, like Hafez’s fakr, but in reality the pun almost always diminishes her; it talks about a lost world, or a broken world, or a world upset, imprisoned, or in tears. The very fact that she puns on her name so often as her poems end, as if her identity is in doubt or dissolving into som
ething else, seems indicative of her fluctuating sense of self.

  It is often when poets who write largely within a stylized set of expectations innovate that we feel we come closest to their preoccupations and personalities. Hafez’s vehemence against religious hypocrisy is one of his greatest themes, and he was virtually the first poet to give it such constant emphasis; here, we are convinced, is something dear to his heart. Jahan Khatun’s most obvious departure from convention is that, though she often appears to speak in her poetic voice “as a man,” her ghazals are fairly unequivocally heterosexual in their implications. A further distinctive feature of her poetry is her use of the rhetoric of hopeless love to comment on her hopeless political situation, after her immediate family lost power in Shiraz, and this too seems to bring us closer to her as a person, rather than simply as a skilled manipulator of language. If we must always remember that these poems are above all exercises in style, we can also invoke Buffon’s aphorism “Le style, c’est l’homme même” (“Style is the man himself”). The style is a fashion that everyone wears (everyone uses more or less the same conventions when he/she writes a ghazal), but the reader who becomes intimate with the fashion can discern distinctive traits that point to the personal preoccupations, predilections, and foibles of the wearer. And some people just do it so well that you feel a fundamental part of the personality is a flair and élan that lift them effortlessly above the crowd. For all their differences, Hafez and Jahan Khatun share this quality.

  It is indicative, too, to see how these two poets built on and reacted to the inheritance of their great poetic predecessor in Shiraz, Sa’di. Sa’di had been born into a world that was much more coherent and cohesive culturally than that of his fourteenth-century successors, but the second half of his life was passed in as troubled times as theirs. His major work, the Golestan (“The Rose Garden”), was written in 1258, the year of the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols, and the subsequent destruction of the Abbasid caliphate, which had ruled most of the Islamic world since the eighth century. Sa’di’s poetry was seen as exemplifying a previously unattained purity of form and sentiment. Formally, his verses were characterized by what was called his “difficult simplicity,” a sophisticated limpidity of language that appeared guileless and easy, but which was thought to be almost inimitable. His sentiments advocated an easygoing humane tolerance, which was taken as the mark of a noble and generous poetic nature. They are well typified by his verses now inscribed in the main hall of the United Nations Building:

  Man’s sons are parts of one reality

  Since all have sprung from one identity;

  If one part of a body’s hurt, the rest

  Cannot remain unmoved and undistressed;

  If you’re not touched by others’ pain, the name

  Of “man” is one you cannot rightly claim.

  In a way, Jahan Khatun and Hafez can be said to have divided up, and internalized and intensified, Sa’di’s legacy between them. Jahan Khatun’s poems sometimes echo phrases by the Shirazi poet Khaju, and occasionally moments in her verse will seem to allude to comparable moments in Hafez’s poems, but her most obvious stylistic debt, one she acknowledges, is to Sa’di. She consciously strives for his clarity and elegance, and her poems are often similar to his, both in the tropes they typically utilize and in the way they can at their best suggest a kind of distilled essence of pure lyric feeling. But Jahan Khatun’s verse also takes Sa’di’s achievement in a particular direction. For all the conventionality of their language, her poems suggest the inwardness of a specific individual sensibility; they use generic, conventional means to produce a distinctively personal voice. Hafez complicates and expands the legacy he receives from Sa’di; no one could accuse his poems of “simplicity,” obscure or otherwise, and Sa’di’s tolerance is taken by Hafez in directions the thirteenth-century poet could not have foreseen and perhaps would not have countenanced. It’s clear from both his prose works and his poems that Sa’di’s much vaunted tolerance tended to stop short at the boundaries of Islam; Hafez’s emphatically does not. And like Jahan Khatun, Hafez personalizes his inheritance from his great predecessor: if Sa’di very often seems to be saying in quietly deprecating tones, “Don’t be censorious, leave others alone,” Hafez equally often brings the sentiment abruptly home by saying in effect, “Don’t be censorious, leave me alone.”

  OBAYD-E ZAKANI

  There is an interesting, rather eccentric Shirazi poet of a slightly later generation than the poets in this book (assumed to have been born in the mid fourteenth century, he died in 1427), Sheikh Bos’haq At`ameh Halaj Shirazi, commonly known simply as Bos’haq. He is often linked with Obayd, because both of them dealt with mundane or even sordid things, in a mock-heroic manner, and Bos’haq acknowledges his debt to the earlier poet. Bos’haq’s specialty was writing about food and recipes (the word “At`ameh” in his name means “edibles”). Frequently his poems were gastronomic parodies of “classic” poems, as though an English-speaking poet might write a culinary poem parodying a well-known Shakespeare sonnet:

  Shall I compare thee to a lamb kebab?

  Thou art more tasty and more temperate…

  Bos’haq parodies a number of poems by Hafez in this way. Take, for example, the poem on pp. 98–9, which begins:

  A loving friend, good wine, a place secure

  From enemies –

  What luck is yours if you can always lay

  Your hands on these!

  Bos’haq’s parody of this begins:

  A loving friend, good saffron rice,

  With oil inside it –

  What luck is yours, if there should be

  Halva beside it!

  In bracketing himself with Obayd, Bos’haq pays the older poet a rather back-handed tribute:

  Imagine that each poet has contributed with his verses to the building of a house, but one that had neither a privy nor a kitchen. My master Obayd has built the privy, and your humble servant has built the kitchen. From his verses comes the smell of someone loosening his underwear, from mine the fragrance of a cloth spread with good things to eat.10

  It is as Persian literature’s prime “privy/lavatorial” poet that Obayd-e Zakani is best known, although his range is wider than this, and he could also on occasion write charming and wholly respectable lyric poems as well as, or better than, the next poet. He wrote prose as well as poetry, and his forte is satire, which generally goes with a hatred of hypocrisy (a hatred the three poets in this book shared). Obayd’s satire is often quite dirty-minded, and it’s written with great gusto. He can be simultaneously coarse and learned, like Rabelais, or he can indulge in vituperation and satirical fantasy, like Swift; his complaints about his debts and his unabashed boasting about begging his way through life on the fringes of society can sometimes make him sound like a Persian François Villon.

  Unlike Hafez, Jahan Khatun, and Bos’haq, Obayd was not born in Shiraz, but in Qazvin, in northern Iran, around 1300. The name Zakani was said to come from that of an Arab tribe from which his family claimed descent. The men of his family appear to have been career civil servants, happy to serve whichever local monarch might employ them. It’s clear from Obayd’s writings that he had received a good education as a young man; he might have used his learning for facetious and sometimes obscene purposes, but there was no doubt of its extent and sophistication. He moved to Shiraz at some point, perhaps attracted by reports of Abu Es’haq’s liberality towards poets, and for a time was a member of his court. The constant complaints about his debts and poverty that repeatedly crop up in his poems are not unusual in the work of medieval poets, particularly itinerant ones, which Obayd was for a while, but he does seem to be especially insistent about it, which perhaps suggests that he couldn’t hold any position down for long. His habitually sharp tongue, which he seems to have had difficulty controlling, might well have got him thrown out of more than one court. His poems express great affection for Shiraz, just as much as that expressed by the native-born Jahan K
hatun and Hafez, but he seems not to have settled there. Not surprisingly, given his reputation for dissipation and generally appalling manners, he left town when Mobarez al-din took over, and returned to Shiraz when Shah Shoja became king. But by then he may have felt the glory days were over, or he may have fallen foul of Shah Shoja, as he seems to have been particularly good at annoying his patrons. For whatever reason, he appears to have spent his last years back in his home town of Qazvin. He died in 1370.

  There is a tradition of Obayd’s poetic rivalry with Jahan Khatun, and the two poems ascribed to him that are about Jahan Khatun (one has survived only as a single-line fragment) are singularly nasty. These poems appeared in a fifteenth-century work on poets, Tazkirat al-Sho`ara (“Memorials of the Poets”), by Amir Dowlatshah Samarqandi, and it’s possible they are not by Obayd at all (they have also been attributed to the poet Kamal Khojandi, 1320–1401), but because they seem typical of Obayd’s manner, and are so specific in their target, they are usually assumed to be genuine. One warns a prospective husband not to marry Jahan, and Obayd uses the habitual pun in Jahan’s poems (Jahan/world) against her. Typically of Obayd’s poetic technique, he takes a commonplace of the poetic tradition (“the world is faithless”) and twists it to make an obscene point. His language is as bluntly unpleasant as the translation indicates: