Khashayar Mohammadi’s Moe’s Skin and Persian feminist activism in Toronto
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Background
In 2018, I met the Persian-Canadian poet/translator/photographer Khashayar Mohammadi at multiple Toronto poetry readings, most vividly as our first meeting, Shab-e She’r, the monthly poetry series run by Persian-Canadian poet Banoo Zan. Mohammadi’s 2018 chapbook from Zed Press, Moe’s Skin, piqued my curiosity as a sociolegal scholar. Mohammadi wrote poems about the emotional life of legally transgressive sexual politics in two national cultures, Iran and Canada. Through Mohammadi’s poems, the different cultures became a single multicultural autobiography.
Whether the narrator in Moe’s Skin is Mohammadi themselves, or a fictional narrator, the autobiographical nature of the book appeared to me as a resource for furthering my own interpretations of legal consciousness and legal pluralism: the ways in which people construct the law by living their own realities on their own terms; legal pluralism being a scenario in which people live a life within multiple overlapping legal systems. The contexts in which I met Mohammadi were live poetry venues throughout Toronto that identified their audiences as multicultural. The venues’ shared cultural role, such as that espoused by Shab-e She’r, was to provide audiences with the opportunities to construct interculturally informed, politically critical, literary lives.
So naturally, interviewing Mohammadi about the relationship between Moe’s Skin and Toronto’s multicultural literary contexts seemed like the logical progression of my sociolegal train of thought. I wrote up six questions that I believed would elaborate Moe’s Skin as artwork that developed Mohammadi’s multicultural consciousness, and situate the poems in Toronto’s literary time and place. They were gracious enough to answer the questions. Then, promptly, the interview sat in a file folder on my computer until 2022.
In September of 2022, The Washington Post published an editorial by Mashih Alinejad, “Women are leading a revolution in Iran. When will Western feminists help?” Alinejad is a Persian journalist, a member of the Human Rights Foundation’s International Council, and she hosts Tablet, a talk show on Voice of America’s Persian service. Alinejad’s WaPo editorial is a scathing indictment of Western feminists for being purely theatrical; refusing invitations to further concrete actions for social change, on behalf of feminist and sexual diversity activists in Iran. Alinejad argues that the torture and deaths of feminist activists in Iran are used to rally Western feminists to their own local concerns, without any action to concretely oppose Iran’s repressive policing of women.
Mashih Alinejad seems unaware that Iranian women’s radical, street-level activism for sexual diversity and social change extends into the neighborhoods of Toronto. In Toronto, Canada, Western feminists like Khashayar Mohammadi and Banoo Zan are both taking concrete steps to further Persian LGBTQ+ social justice, in multiple venues each month. They provide spaces for Persian people to create art for which they would be arrested, detained, tortured, or die, in Iran. They create support networks. Their activism changes the society of Toronto in ongoing, consistent venues throughout the city’s geography, with observable impacts on the lives, the epistemologies, and the philosophies of individual audience members, evolving in their collaborations and in subtle ways visible to an ethnographic, or autoethnographic, analysis.
Alinejad might be equally unaware that Khashayar Mohammadi is an example of Canada’s most important observers of social change through literary transgression, being one of Toronto’s most present-and-accounted-for audience members in literary venues of all sorts. (Banoo Zan was too, until recently taking a Writer-in-residence post at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.) In a megacity with over three million people, at some point in time, every literary example of multiculturally diverse social change intersects the paths of these feminist poet-activists.
What an unfortunate oversight, in small part by Alinejad, but mostly by me, and hundreds of other informed literary observers. If Alinejad and the Human Rights Foundation International Council, The Washington Post, and Voice of America’s Persian service are unaware and unable to draw on Toronto’s feminist literary examples, that is partially my personal fault. I let this interview languish. That was a disservice, and clearly was a choice I made that resulted in missing an opportunity to mitigate the despair of activists who could have been somewhat assured of their effectiveness, had I only helped to amplify Mohammadi’s voice.
Therefore, I am presenting the interview now. With luck, this interview will help Mohammadi’s work inform sociolegal projects about legal pluralism and legal consciousness. More importantly, I hope this interview will show that Western feminists are succeeding in creating the social change sought by Iranian activists, extending those changes among the people and places of Toronto. I apologize to Khashayar Mohammadi for failing to follow through on behalf of their work. I apologize to Mashih Alinejad for my example as yet another Western feminist failing to support Persian women’s movements and I hope this somewhat mitigates my mistake.
(Edited and submitted with Mohammadi’s permission. The interview has only been edited for spelling.)
Whether the narrator in Moe’s Skin is Mohammadi themselves, or a fictional narrator, the autobiographical nature of the book appeared to me as a resource for furthering my own interpretations of legal consciousness and legal pluralism: the ways in which people construct the law by living their own realities on their own terms; legal pluralism being a scenario in which people live a life within multiple overlapping legal systems. The contexts in which I met Mohammadi were live poetry venues throughout Toronto that identified their audiences as multicultural. The venues’ shared cultural role, such as that espoused by Shab-e She’r, was to provide audiences with the opportunities to construct interculturally informed, politically critical, literary lives.
So naturally, interviewing Mohammadi about the relationship between Moe’s Skin and Toronto’s multicultural literary contexts seemed like the logical progression of my sociolegal train of thought. I wrote up six questions that I believed would elaborate Moe’s Skin as artwork that developed Mohammadi’s multicultural consciousness, and situate the poems in Toronto’s literary time and place. They were gracious enough to answer the questions. Then, promptly, the interview sat in a file folder on my computer until 2022.
In September of 2022, The Washington Post published an editorial by Mashih Alinejad, “Women are leading a revolution in Iran. When will Western feminists help?” Alinejad is a Persian journalist, a member of the Human Rights Foundation’s International Council, and she hosts Tablet, a talk show on Voice of America’s Persian service. Alinejad’s WaPo editorial is a scathing indictment of Western feminists for being purely theatrical; refusing invitations to further concrete actions for social change, on behalf of feminist and sexual diversity activists in Iran. Alinejad argues that the torture and deaths of feminist activists in Iran are used to rally Western feminists to their own local concerns, without any action to concretely oppose Iran’s repressive policing of women.
Mashih Alinejad seems unaware that Iranian women’s radical, street-level activism for sexual diversity and social change extends into the neighborhoods of Toronto. In Toronto, Canada, Western feminists like Khashayar Mohammadi and Banoo Zan are both taking concrete steps to further Persian LGBTQ+ social justice, in multiple venues each month. They provide spaces for Persian people to create art for which they would be arrested, detained, tortured, or die, in Iran. They create support networks. Their activism changes the society of Toronto in ongoing, consistent venues throughout the city’s geography, with observable impacts on the lives, the epistemologies, and the philosophies of individual audience members, evolving in their collaborations and in subtle ways visible to an ethnographic, or autoethnographic, analysis.
Alinejad might be equally unaware that Khashayar Mohammadi is an example of Canada’s most important observers of social change through literary transgression, being one of Toronto’s most present-and-accounted-for audience members in literary venues of all sorts. (Banoo Zan was too, until recently taking a Writer-in-residence post at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.) In a megacity with over three million people, at some point in time, every literary example of multiculturally diverse social change intersects the paths of these feminist poet-activists.
What an unfortunate oversight, in small part by Alinejad, but mostly by me, and hundreds of other informed literary observers. If Alinejad and the Human Rights Foundation International Council, The Washington Post, and Voice of America’s Persian service are unaware and unable to draw on Toronto’s feminist literary examples, that is partially my personal fault. I let this interview languish. That was a disservice, and clearly was a choice I made that resulted in missing an opportunity to mitigate the despair of activists who could have been somewhat assured of their effectiveness, had I only helped to amplify Mohammadi’s voice.
Therefore, I am presenting the interview now. With luck, this interview will help Mohammadi’s work inform sociolegal projects about legal pluralism and legal consciousness. More importantly, I hope this interview will show that Western feminists are succeeding in creating the social change sought by Iranian activists, extending those changes among the people and places of Toronto. I apologize to Khashayar Mohammadi for failing to follow through on behalf of their work. I apologize to Mashih Alinejad for my example as yet another Western feminist failing to support Persian women’s movements and I hope this somewhat mitigates my mistake.
(Edited and submitted with Mohammadi’s permission. The interview has only been edited for spelling.)
Interview
Terry Trowbridge: There is a generation of newcomer Persian writers in Toronto, who, like you, were born in Iran but now live and write here. Unlike you, though, they are ten or twenty years older. I am thinking of two examples, the poet Banoo Zan, and the short story writer Ava Homa.
I compare the poems in Moe’s Skin to Zan’s poetry and Homa’s stories, because they both write about gender, sexual desire, and power. Like their books, the love story in Moe’s Skin alternates between images of Iran and Canada. But I am not sure if I am being fair when I compare your writing to theirs.
Do you owe the form or the content of Moe’s Skin to your Persian peers living in the Greater Toronto Area?
Khashayar Mohammadi: As much as I admire the abovementioned writers, I really can’t say the poems in Moe’s Skin have been informed by their writing, or any Persian peers. The spark for this chapbook was struck when I was reading a poem from Marc Di Saverio’s Crito Di Volta; specifically after reading the line “Calvaried in the laughter of the patio, Hunchbacked in misfitness, I saw your beam-splitting eyelight boil my wounds into a moment of balm.” That line struck the match for the ending poem of the collection which retroactively gave birth to the chapbook itself.
TT: Do you think that you are drawing on the same cultural tropes, either Iranian or Canadian, in your imagery and your forms? (I am using Zan and Homa as examples, but feel free to bring up other Persian writers you think would be relevant).
KM: Unfortunately I am not familiar with Ava Homa’s work; however, compared to Banoo Zan’s work I can say the concept of home and the cognitive dissonance that it creates between a Persian queer’s love for the homeland and their disdain for its oppressive sexual politics informs the poetry in this collection. In Moe’s Skin, Iran is always depicted in a dreamlike state since it has become so intangible.
TT: Do you think of your writer self as belonging to the same immigrant wave as them, or does your age difference mean that you see yourself as part of a distinctly different generation of writers?
KM: I can’t speak on their behalf, but I belong to a fresh wave of immigrants who left Iran after the disastrous 2009 elections and the political and economic turmoil that followed.
TT: Was writing Moe’s Skin in Canada an expression of power? Is there a different power that comes with writing homosexual love poems in Iran than writing them in Canada?
KM: I feel it’s more an expression of power within a relationship than it is an aim to assert oneself within a certain society. The segregation of genders in Iran creates a strange power dynamic where homoerotic poetry can exist, masked as heteronormative art. Gender segregation has existed in Iran for centuries, cultivating wonderful homoerotic poetry (for example a great number of Rumi’s sonnets) whose initial identity has been simply erased by reading it as heteronormative; a task that can be easily achieved due to the lack of gendered nouns and pronouns in the Farsi language. In Iran queers have to explicitly assert their queerness in order to be recognized, a path that many queers choose not to take due to its dangerous repercussions. However there have been magnificent queer artists who have asserted their identities and, through suffering the consequences, have become a manifestation of their rebellious art. Writing the same poetry in the English language, in a country like Canada, takes a more confessional form.
TT: The eleventh poem ends with an image of Canadian nationalism and, I think, a kind of multicultural oxymoron that comes with being Canadian. There is at least an aesthetic access to every culture’s symbols, but somehow the symbols get lost, or at least treated with a shallow disinterest, just as abruptly as we can collect them. I’m talking about these lines:
…I peeled you off into a
constellation and rode you to my true north.
A candlelit buddha smiled at my reflection and lost in the boredom
of arrival I spoke ill of you.
Canada is a place where cultures become instantly mixed, but personal relationships become instantly flippant. Moe’s Skin is the product of concentration. What do the aesthetics, the symbols, the easy flippancy of Canada do to make it easy or difficult to be in love?
KM: I’m not sure whether this flippancy is in any way exclusive to Canada. Having lived in three different countries in the past ten years has made me realize that perhaps this flippancy is a global process whose acceleration might vary in different places. I risk sounding like a hypocrite here, but I sincerely believe that there is a fundamental flaw in seeking “love” anywhere else other than right here right now. I’m unsure how hard it is to coexist with other queers throughout Canada, since I have only lived in Toronto. I can only say that there are various socio-political factors that differ from city to city even within Canada that affect the life of queers immensely.
TT: You write,
…Picture your ego and draw.
A blue whale? A deep trail? Roots.
lover’s kiss
and mother’s bones
There is a renaissance of Persian writing in the Greater Toronto Area happening right now. There is a Persian identity in the suburbs. It comes with ownership of real estate, expressions of fashion, language, friendships, and relationships. The nationalist image in the passage I quote here is final, though. An ego with deep roots, a pathway that has been traveled, but the source, the mother, is encoded as bones.
Your Iranian ego and your writing voice could come from Iran and thrive in Canada. Do you think that the newcomer self can return to Iran, or cannot return to Iran, with the same voice and the same sense of self-importance?
KM: Through various aspects of my artistic life, I feel like I have distanced myself from who I was when I was a teenager in Iran. I’m gonna sound like Barthes for a second here, but I’ve chosen to go by an English nickname that has been mythologized by both me and my peers. My 16-year-old self would not have recognized this current mythologized self. I’d like to think that I can go back and be comfortable in my skin, but the truth is that even Iran is having an identity crisis right now. Iran doesn’t know who it is anymore, and I’m afraid I’m not willing to nurse it through its tough times.
I compare the poems in Moe’s Skin to Zan’s poetry and Homa’s stories, because they both write about gender, sexual desire, and power. Like their books, the love story in Moe’s Skin alternates between images of Iran and Canada. But I am not sure if I am being fair when I compare your writing to theirs.
Do you owe the form or the content of Moe’s Skin to your Persian peers living in the Greater Toronto Area?
Khashayar Mohammadi: As much as I admire the abovementioned writers, I really can’t say the poems in Moe’s Skin have been informed by their writing, or any Persian peers. The spark for this chapbook was struck when I was reading a poem from Marc Di Saverio’s Crito Di Volta; specifically after reading the line “Calvaried in the laughter of the patio, Hunchbacked in misfitness, I saw your beam-splitting eyelight boil my wounds into a moment of balm.” That line struck the match for the ending poem of the collection which retroactively gave birth to the chapbook itself.
TT: Do you think that you are drawing on the same cultural tropes, either Iranian or Canadian, in your imagery and your forms? (I am using Zan and Homa as examples, but feel free to bring up other Persian writers you think would be relevant).
KM: Unfortunately I am not familiar with Ava Homa’s work; however, compared to Banoo Zan’s work I can say the concept of home and the cognitive dissonance that it creates between a Persian queer’s love for the homeland and their disdain for its oppressive sexual politics informs the poetry in this collection. In Moe’s Skin, Iran is always depicted in a dreamlike state since it has become so intangible.
TT: Do you think of your writer self as belonging to the same immigrant wave as them, or does your age difference mean that you see yourself as part of a distinctly different generation of writers?
KM: I can’t speak on their behalf, but I belong to a fresh wave of immigrants who left Iran after the disastrous 2009 elections and the political and economic turmoil that followed.
TT: Was writing Moe’s Skin in Canada an expression of power? Is there a different power that comes with writing homosexual love poems in Iran than writing them in Canada?
KM: I feel it’s more an expression of power within a relationship than it is an aim to assert oneself within a certain society. The segregation of genders in Iran creates a strange power dynamic where homoerotic poetry can exist, masked as heteronormative art. Gender segregation has existed in Iran for centuries, cultivating wonderful homoerotic poetry (for example a great number of Rumi’s sonnets) whose initial identity has been simply erased by reading it as heteronormative; a task that can be easily achieved due to the lack of gendered nouns and pronouns in the Farsi language. In Iran queers have to explicitly assert their queerness in order to be recognized, a path that many queers choose not to take due to its dangerous repercussions. However there have been magnificent queer artists who have asserted their identities and, through suffering the consequences, have become a manifestation of their rebellious art. Writing the same poetry in the English language, in a country like Canada, takes a more confessional form.
TT: The eleventh poem ends with an image of Canadian nationalism and, I think, a kind of multicultural oxymoron that comes with being Canadian. There is at least an aesthetic access to every culture’s symbols, but somehow the symbols get lost, or at least treated with a shallow disinterest, just as abruptly as we can collect them. I’m talking about these lines:
…I peeled you off into a
constellation and rode you to my true north.
A candlelit buddha smiled at my reflection and lost in the boredom
of arrival I spoke ill of you.
Canada is a place where cultures become instantly mixed, but personal relationships become instantly flippant. Moe’s Skin is the product of concentration. What do the aesthetics, the symbols, the easy flippancy of Canada do to make it easy or difficult to be in love?
KM: I’m not sure whether this flippancy is in any way exclusive to Canada. Having lived in three different countries in the past ten years has made me realize that perhaps this flippancy is a global process whose acceleration might vary in different places. I risk sounding like a hypocrite here, but I sincerely believe that there is a fundamental flaw in seeking “love” anywhere else other than right here right now. I’m unsure how hard it is to coexist with other queers throughout Canada, since I have only lived in Toronto. I can only say that there are various socio-political factors that differ from city to city even within Canada that affect the life of queers immensely.
TT: You write,
…Picture your ego and draw.
A blue whale? A deep trail? Roots.
lover’s kiss
and mother’s bones
There is a renaissance of Persian writing in the Greater Toronto Area happening right now. There is a Persian identity in the suburbs. It comes with ownership of real estate, expressions of fashion, language, friendships, and relationships. The nationalist image in the passage I quote here is final, though. An ego with deep roots, a pathway that has been traveled, but the source, the mother, is encoded as bones.
Your Iranian ego and your writing voice could come from Iran and thrive in Canada. Do you think that the newcomer self can return to Iran, or cannot return to Iran, with the same voice and the same sense of self-importance?
KM: Through various aspects of my artistic life, I feel like I have distanced myself from who I was when I was a teenager in Iran. I’m gonna sound like Barthes for a second here, but I’ve chosen to go by an English nickname that has been mythologized by both me and my peers. My 16-year-old self would not have recognized this current mythologized self. I’d like to think that I can go back and be comfortable in my skin, but the truth is that even Iran is having an identity crisis right now. Iran doesn’t know who it is anymore, and I’m afraid I’m not willing to nurse it through its tough times.
Considerations
Nobody identifies with their answers in a five-year-old interview from their mid-twenties. Since Moe’s Skin was published, Mohammadi developed more books and chapbooks of original poems and translations. Their participation in Toronto’s literary enclaves has deepened; Mohammadi has made substantial contributions to the progressive vibes of audiences throughout Toronto’s quasi-cliquish crews (spanning, say, the different audience sensations from Shab-e She’r to Art Bar). Those readers who are interested in a more deliberate archaeology of Mohammadi’s thought can locate their arrival in Toronto’s literature as an editor at Inspiritus Press, and then investigate the evolution of their role as multidisciplinary media critic, translator, and photographer (see also: Mohammadi in Smith, Mohammadi, and Takatsu, 2017), and up to the present day, on Mohammadi’s website.
Even though there are diminishing returns on interviews, the role of Persian feminism in transnational social change for social justice has become one of the first movements to emerge from the pandemic as strong as ever, if not stronger. The movement’s successful mobilization against repressive police contrasts with other social justice movements.
For example, the transnational mobilization to fight climate change was, until 2020, able to claim that Greta Thunberg was correct when she said “No one is too small to make a difference” (2019). By the end of 2019, the EU was in the process of ratifying radical socioeconomically paradigm-changing environmental legislation. In North America, the Green New Deal answered the legislative demands of climate activists. When the European Parliament went into pandemic lockdown in 2020, the legislation was not ratified and the bills expired, disappearing without a trace (Malm, 2021). North America’s Green New Deal has been defeated. Nothing has changed: even including the USA’s $3.2 billion Executive Order to reduce greenhouse emissions, there is no credible way to reduce warming by even 1.5 degrees Celsius within our lifetimes (UNEP, 2022). After the pandemic, it seems no existing climate activism is big enough to make a difference.
Mashih Alinejad provokes Western feminists to action on behalf of Persian feminist resistance movements. What Alinejad’s provocation does not ask, however, is how Persian feminist resistance inside of Iran has remained so strong, whereas other local and global movements have fragmented without opportunities to regroup.
Answering that question through my interview of Mohammadi ends up challenging Alinejad’s axiom that there is a critical division between Persian and Western feminists. Mohammadi is both. On the one hand, as a Persian feminist, Mohammadi sometimes translates Iranian women poets who would be jailed for their writing, and hands it out for free at Toronto poetry venues. On the other hand, during our interview, Mohammadi professes that Moe’s Skin, containing original poems that toggle between imaginaries of Canada and Iran, was inspired by reading poetry by Marc di Saverio, a white Catholic visionary poet from Hamilton, Ontario.
Likewise, the poetry venues that are sustained by Mohammadi’s contributions of time, art, and conversation are to some extent radicalized Western feminist spaces mobilized by Mohammadi’s Persian feminist literary activism. Granted, for me to make that claim, I have to confess that I am making inferences from analyzing the audiences and the cultural changes over time spent in Toronto’s poetry culture. Feminism is a complex form of activism that connects movements across space and time. In the geographical context of Toronto, Mohammadi identifies a “confessional form” for Farsi queerness. That might be a westernization of Persian queerness; or it might be a sustaining element of poetic diversity in Persian feminism that sustained a queer movement with the transnational strength to mobilize tens of thousands of people against Iran’s police and judiciary.
Using formal interview dialogue to identify the diversity of Mohammadi’s influences, then prompting Mohammadi to articulate them, yields some challenges to the cultural images inside and outside of Persian feminism. Mohammadi did not merely answer me about the personal poetics of a single poetry chapbook. Mohammadi’s answers can be read ethnographically as revealing a dynamic intercultural process of reading, responding, and action.
For my part, as an interviewer, I am exactly the sort of feminist who enjoys Western privilege of reading without urgency to act on behalf of non-Western women and sexual minorities who are suffering from police violence. Had I refined the interview and submitted it for publication, audiences in Toronto, and elsewhere, might have absorbed Mohammadi’s insights. They could have discussed their work in conversations about poetry and queer diaspora. Mashih Alinejad could have touched that discourse through her human rights work (perhaps through Mohammadi’s work with PEN Canada and other immigrant diasporas). Alinejad would have a different narrative to consider than cycles of Western feminist appropriation and abandonment.
Unfortunately, I lived up to Alinejad’s expectations. Fortunately, the life of feminist-driven social change lives up to the intercultural wisdom of Khashayar Mohammadi’s poetics.
Even though there are diminishing returns on interviews, the role of Persian feminism in transnational social change for social justice has become one of the first movements to emerge from the pandemic as strong as ever, if not stronger. The movement’s successful mobilization against repressive police contrasts with other social justice movements.
For example, the transnational mobilization to fight climate change was, until 2020, able to claim that Greta Thunberg was correct when she said “No one is too small to make a difference” (2019). By the end of 2019, the EU was in the process of ratifying radical socioeconomically paradigm-changing environmental legislation. In North America, the Green New Deal answered the legislative demands of climate activists. When the European Parliament went into pandemic lockdown in 2020, the legislation was not ratified and the bills expired, disappearing without a trace (Malm, 2021). North America’s Green New Deal has been defeated. Nothing has changed: even including the USA’s $3.2 billion Executive Order to reduce greenhouse emissions, there is no credible way to reduce warming by even 1.5 degrees Celsius within our lifetimes (UNEP, 2022). After the pandemic, it seems no existing climate activism is big enough to make a difference.
Mashih Alinejad provokes Western feminists to action on behalf of Persian feminist resistance movements. What Alinejad’s provocation does not ask, however, is how Persian feminist resistance inside of Iran has remained so strong, whereas other local and global movements have fragmented without opportunities to regroup.
Answering that question through my interview of Mohammadi ends up challenging Alinejad’s axiom that there is a critical division between Persian and Western feminists. Mohammadi is both. On the one hand, as a Persian feminist, Mohammadi sometimes translates Iranian women poets who would be jailed for their writing, and hands it out for free at Toronto poetry venues. On the other hand, during our interview, Mohammadi professes that Moe’s Skin, containing original poems that toggle between imaginaries of Canada and Iran, was inspired by reading poetry by Marc di Saverio, a white Catholic visionary poet from Hamilton, Ontario.
Likewise, the poetry venues that are sustained by Mohammadi’s contributions of time, art, and conversation are to some extent radicalized Western feminist spaces mobilized by Mohammadi’s Persian feminist literary activism. Granted, for me to make that claim, I have to confess that I am making inferences from analyzing the audiences and the cultural changes over time spent in Toronto’s poetry culture. Feminism is a complex form of activism that connects movements across space and time. In the geographical context of Toronto, Mohammadi identifies a “confessional form” for Farsi queerness. That might be a westernization of Persian queerness; or it might be a sustaining element of poetic diversity in Persian feminism that sustained a queer movement with the transnational strength to mobilize tens of thousands of people against Iran’s police and judiciary.
Using formal interview dialogue to identify the diversity of Mohammadi’s influences, then prompting Mohammadi to articulate them, yields some challenges to the cultural images inside and outside of Persian feminism. Mohammadi did not merely answer me about the personal poetics of a single poetry chapbook. Mohammadi’s answers can be read ethnographically as revealing a dynamic intercultural process of reading, responding, and action.
For my part, as an interviewer, I am exactly the sort of feminist who enjoys Western privilege of reading without urgency to act on behalf of non-Western women and sexual minorities who are suffering from police violence. Had I refined the interview and submitted it for publication, audiences in Toronto, and elsewhere, might have absorbed Mohammadi’s insights. They could have discussed their work in conversations about poetry and queer diaspora. Mashih Alinejad could have touched that discourse through her human rights work (perhaps through Mohammadi’s work with PEN Canada and other immigrant diasporas). Alinejad would have a different narrative to consider than cycles of Western feminist appropriation and abandonment.
Unfortunately, I lived up to Alinejad’s expectations. Fortunately, the life of feminist-driven social change lives up to the intercultural wisdom of Khashayar Mohammadi’s poetics.
Works cited:
Alinejad, Mashih. (September 22, 2022). Women are leading a revolution in Iran. When will
Western feminists help? The Washington Post. Web.
Malm, Andreas. (2021). How to Blow Up a Pipeline. London: Verso Books.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2018). Moe’s Skin. Windsor: Zed Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2019a). Dear Kestrel. Toronto: Knife/Fork/Book.
Mohammadi, Khashayar, (Trans.). (2019b). Dying in My Mother Tongue: An Anthology of
Female Persian Poets. Toronto: Self-Published.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2020). Solitude is an Acrobatic Act. Ottawa: Above/ground Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2020). KhashayarMohammadi.com. Website.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2021a). Me, You, Then Snow. Guelph: Gordon Hill Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar [Trans.], Tavenaee, Saeed. (2021b). The OceandWeller. Ottawa:
Above/ground Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar [Trans.], Various Authors. (2021c). The Divine Bergamot. Toronto:
Anstruther Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar [Trans.], Yushij, Nima. (2022a). Death Toll. Toronto: Gap Riot Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. [Trans.], Tavanaee, Saeed. (2022b). WJD. Guelph: Gordon Hill Press.
Smith, Amy, and Mohammadi, Khashayar [Photog.], Takatsu, Stephen [Photog.]. (May 16,
2017). Inspiritus Press: Bringing the Noise for PEN Canada. PEN Canada Blog. Web.
Thunberg, Greta. (2019). No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin Books.
UNEP. (27 October, 2022). Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window – Climate Crisis
Calls for Rapid Transformation of Societies. Web.
Alinejad, Mashih. (September 22, 2022). Women are leading a revolution in Iran. When will
Western feminists help? The Washington Post. Web.
Malm, Andreas. (2021). How to Blow Up a Pipeline. London: Verso Books.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2018). Moe’s Skin. Windsor: Zed Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2019a). Dear Kestrel. Toronto: Knife/Fork/Book.
Mohammadi, Khashayar, (Trans.). (2019b). Dying in My Mother Tongue: An Anthology of
Female Persian Poets. Toronto: Self-Published.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2020). Solitude is an Acrobatic Act. Ottawa: Above/ground Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2020). KhashayarMohammadi.com. Website.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. (2021a). Me, You, Then Snow. Guelph: Gordon Hill Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar [Trans.], Tavenaee, Saeed. (2021b). The OceandWeller. Ottawa:
Above/ground Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar [Trans.], Various Authors. (2021c). The Divine Bergamot. Toronto:
Anstruther Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar [Trans.], Yushij, Nima. (2022a). Death Toll. Toronto: Gap Riot Press.
Mohammadi, Khashayar. [Trans.], Tavanaee, Saeed. (2022b). WJD. Guelph: Gordon Hill Press.
Smith, Amy, and Mohammadi, Khashayar [Photog.], Takatsu, Stephen [Photog.]. (May 16,
2017). Inspiritus Press: Bringing the Noise for PEN Canada. PEN Canada Blog. Web.
Thunberg, Greta. (2019). No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin Books.
UNEP. (27 October, 2022). Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window – Climate Crisis
Calls for Rapid Transformation of Societies. Web.
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Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Bombfire, American Mathematical Monthly, and more. His lit crit has appeared in Ariel, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, and The /t3mz/ Review.
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