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July 1, 2007 |
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World Literature for the Unworldly: Teaching Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in a General Education Course* (non fiction)
Lynn Houston
The field of World Literature is at a crossroads over its definition as a discipline. On one side of the crossroads lies an exclusionary path: a definition of World Literature that encompasses only the modern and ancient classics of Western Civilization, both in English and in translation (from Greek and Roman, for example). On the other side lies a definition of World Literature that includes only non-Western literatures, some in English but most in translation. Travelers who choose this road often (but not always) focus on modern and contemporary authors, especially if they have decided to cover only texts that have been originally written in English, works mainly by exiled writers, writers from former British colonies, or by second-generation immigrants. Then, there is the comparative approach: a thematic selection of World Literature that places a smorgasbord of ancient, modern, and/or contemporary texts from the Western canon in dialogue with ancient, modern, and/or contemporary non-Western texts. Our choice of paths at this crossroads produces various implications, consequences, and theoretical concerns. From my experience teaching Persian literature in a general education World Literature course, I would suggest that the greatest challenge in defining World Literature lies in the relationship that our choice of definition constructs between the readers of a literary text and the author’s culture.
The readers, in this case, were students fulfilling general education credits through an English department course in a branch of the California State University system; the literary text was Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings), written in approximately 1010; and the author’s culture is best called Persian, since the name designating the country as Iran was not used until 1935, although that name comes from a word, “Arya,” referring to the identity of a group of people originally located in and near that geographical area. In the context of post-911 society and America’s subsequent “War on Terror” during which an incessant amount of blood has been shed in the Middle East and all peoples of Middle Eastern descent have been demonized by the international media, the students who signed up for this course could not have distinguished the characteristics of Arab culture from those of Indian culture, let alone Arab from Persian, and would have more than likely responded to a question asking them to distinguish between any of these with the slogan from a bumper sticker popular on pick-up trucks in this small, agricultural region: “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.” For these students, whether or not the translated text of the Shahnameh betrayed Ferdowsi’s political project to assert the literariness of the Persian language was of little concern. The only way they were going to access the text was through a translation. More importantly, the only way they were going to be able to read, understand, and appreciate the translated text was if they could open up their minds and find connections between what they know of the world and what Ferdowsi represents.
The course began with an essay by contemporary Turkish writer (and Nobel Laureate) Orhan Pamuk. The essay, “My Father’s Suitcase,” is also Pamuk’s Nobel prize acceptance speech and served as a touchstone for the course, addressing issues of writing about one’s culture in a way that the rest of the world can relate to, issues of exile -- of the struggle to become a writer in the non-Western world -- and issues related to identity, of his relationship with his now deceased father whose dreams of becoming a writer were never realized. The two major questions that this initial essay established were used repeatedly throughout the course: what elements of the literary text make it specific to the time, place, and culture of the author who produced it? What elements of the literary text make it universal so that anyone (the students especially) can relate to it? I framed the course with these two questions so as to do justice to the historical, political, and cultural context out of which the literary works were produced, but also to help students find the common ground between themselves and the ideas expressed in the literature.
We then began a historical journey through non-Western literature (most in translation): the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Book of A Thousand and One Nights, the Shahnameh, the Pillow Book, and then selections from modern and contemporary authors from Palestine, Iraq, Algeria, Nigeria, China, Vietnam, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Some of the later authors we read had lived in exile from their homelands since a very young age. While some could argue that this suggests only a tenuous connection to their original culture, to the students in my general education course this did not matter at all. While many of them may have heard references to various conflicts in the Middle East, like that between Israelis and Palestinians, for example, they had never before read a personal account of exile told from the perspective of a child such as they did in reading Ghassan Kanafani’s “The Land of Sad Oranges.” While none of them could relate to what it would be like to be forced to leave their homeland, some of them could relate to what it was like to leave home and come to college. All of them could identify the deterioration of the family unit in the story as a consequence of major life trauma as they all had some knowledge of how hard times can take a toll on your interpersonal relationships with family members. Playing up the universal aspects of this short story allowed them to access the narrative and imprinted on students the political, historical, and cultural specificities of the text. In a similar way, students learned to access Ferdowsi’s epic and to understand something about the origins of Middle Eastern culture and, more specifically, about the distinct origins of Persian culture through the progression of texts studied in this course.
By beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh, students came to understand that the ancient Middle East is the same setting for the Christian Bible, a text with which they had much more familiarity. The character of Noah appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh as Utanapishtim, who survives a flood because he was told ahead of time by the Gods and was then able to build a ship. Through this text, students came to understand something about the nature of conquest and of the literary construction of the conquering hero-ruler in the figure of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is punished by the Gods because of his excessive pride, similar to many Greek and Roman stories students had heard of or read before, so students began to understand that stories about hero-rulers transmit notions about how best to rule and how best to live as a hero, both according to the cultural values at the time. They also came to understand the power of literature as a testament to a longevity of cultural identity: Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality is fulfilled through literary means; although he may not have physically lived forever, his story has lived on.
Moving on to Thousand and One Nights, students became more versed in the literary construction of Kings, their relationship with their people and with the culture, and, in general, they became familiar with mythologies from a conglomeration of various Middle Eastern cultures that represent the values of those peoples. Students learned about how the character Shahrazad teaches the King (and the reader) moral lessons through her stories. Students learned specifically to pick out the theme of forgiveness from her stories. They were reminded that the theme of forgiveness is also a major theme in the Christian Bible. This text was useful to demonstrate to them how good and evil work metaphorically in this literature through supernatural beings and occurrences, just like in Greek and Roman mythology.
Next, we tackled Ferdowsi’s epic, the Shahnameh. Students could already relate to many aspects of these stories. They understood how moral lessons appear in the guise of characters, their motivations, and their actions. They understood that the descriptions of the best heroes in a story represent the best of what that culture values. After having read the previous two texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Thousand and One Nights, they came to understand Persian culture within the context of the stories about conquest from these different texts. The unique nature of the Shanameh in this comparative context allowed it to stand out as a testament to the value Persian culture places on the honor and bravery of its hero-Kings in terms of being benign rulers to their people, fighting for equality, and striving to bring better lives to those they conquered. Many of the heroic attributes of the Kings and warriors depicted by Ferdowsi were values recognized by the students as being shared by Christianity: loyalty, dedication, respect, and sacrifice, to name only a few. In many of the stories, they learned about the respect that young people should have for their elders, also a Christian value.
Students’ interest was captured by specific stories in the Shahnameh because of their ability to relate to them. For example, the story of Rostam and Sahrab, a King who unknowingly kills his son, is a reversal of the Western story of Oedipus, where a son unknowingly kills his father, the King. The description of Rostam also made them think of Homer’s Achilles. The stories of Zal and Rudabeh, as well as Byzun and Manijeh, reminded them of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Students also made comparisons to ideas in texts by Aristotle and Shakespeare after reading about Feridoun testing the strength of his three sons Salm, Tur, and Iraj and then splitting up his kingdom between them. We did not have to read Oedipus Rex, Homer, Romeo and Juliet, the dialogues of Aristotle, or King Lear in the course; students made easy reference to these ideas as they are frequently just part of their general knowledge base or material studied in other classes. Suddenly, Ancient Persia did not seem so far away from our twenty-first-century California classroom.
For these students, at this time in history, it was not as important to teach them about what makes the Shahnameh distinctly and authentically Persian in the tenth and eleventh centuries at a time of increasing Arab cultural dominance in the Middle East as much as it was important to show them how much they can relate, even in the year 2007, to the culture of the Shanameh and its author. According to this view of the discipline of World literature, authors whose texts represent their culture in a manner that is easily relatable to an outside audience are valuable, whatever the author’s relationship may be to an “authentic” view of that culture. Also valuable are teaching strategies that emphasize connections between western and non-western cultures. The key to teaching World Literature in the contemporary American university lies in how you embed the texts within a group of readings that is conducive to these goals, so that in a predominantly Christian cultural setting, students can come to relate to texts that express the very human hopes, dreams, and desires of Islamic and other peoples that have been dehumanized in contemporary political rhetoric |
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Lynn Marie Houston is an assistant professor of literature in the English department at California State University, Chico, where teaches courses in American literature and World Literature. Her research is in the area of food studies: she works primarily on postcolonial food culture and contemporary food crises. She published a reference book entitled Food Culture in the Caribbean with Greenwood Press in 2005. Currently, she is creating a new course in food and literature that uses novels by contemporary women authors, such as Marsha Mehran's Pomegranate Soup, Diana Abu-Jaber's Language of Baklava, Nazneen Sheikh's Tea and Pomegranates and others, to explore the politics of recipes in literature as expressions of cultural identity. |
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* Many thanks to my Iranian friend, Master Farshad Azad, owner of Azad’s Martial Arts in Chico, California (http://www.azadsmartialarts.com). Through discussions with him, I have come to greatly appreciate and better understand Persian culture and history, as well as the international politics affecting Iran. His exemplary teaching techniques have also influenced my classroom methodologies and have helped to me to become a better teacher. |
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