Lilith
Published on 1. June 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
106 pages
978-1-8380200-9-5 (ISBN)
Description
'I think therefore I am other...' In Reza Baraheni's Lilith, the mythological demon of the night gives a youthfully irreverent, viscerally wise voice to the lucidity of the rebel. Rather than renouncing freedom, Lilith is outcast for her outspokenness and sensuality. Sequestered to a place wherein freedom is crucially situated in the power and beauty of language, and where that language is seated in stark opposition with the oppressive forms of authority that seek to make it mute.
Lilith can be seen as an allegorical take on the condition of the poet in exile. Like the banned and persecuted author, the demon refuses to yield to force and is, resultantly, a pariah. Her body becomes the dumping ground of all power-driven fantasies, and the figure of the exile is invested with the projected fears and compulsions of the dominant society. But it is the creative drive of language that permeates these pages.
A deeply lyrical and irreducibly subversive work, over a little less than a hundred pages Lilith investigates the limits of a linguistic freedom via encounters between Lilith and a cast of fabled figures, as the vulnerable courage of the poet is set against avatars of patriarchal oppression and authoritarian rule alike via the demon's dance with language. In Lilith, it is language that disrupts ordinary chronology; language that allows for the shade of a dream life to dint the light of day; harking back to an envisaging of poetry as music, as ritual. This is not language as an evocation of some distant golden age, but as celebration.
An experiment in word alchemy; a dance of grace and danger on the fault line of prose and song; Lilith explores the reality-making function of language to pinpoint the antagonistic faculty and political felicities of poetry itself.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
145 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-8380200-9-5 (9781838020095)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Reza Baraheni (1935-2022) is one of the twentieth century's major writers, whose work transverses poetry, novels and essays. With more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory and criticism to his name (oft-cited as a "founder of modern literary criticism in Iran," the Washington Post), he is revered as a key figure in contemporary Persian literary culture. Baraheni's works have been translated into several languages, and he has taught at universities in Iran, the United States, and Canada. Imprisoned under the Shah in 1973, he was arrested in Tehran; Baraheni claimed he was tortured and kept in a solitary confinement for 104 days-see God's Shadow, Prison Poems (Indiana University Press, 1976), and The Crowned Cannibals (Random House, 1977)-and his involvement in the formation of the Consulting Assembly of the Writers Association of Iran necessitated his exile from the Islamic Republic. In Sweden, and in the United States thereafter, he joined the American branch of the International PEN, working very closely with such authors and poets as Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Richard Howard at PEN's Freedom to Write Committee. With Kay Boyle, Baraheni acted as the Honorary Chair of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIFI) to release Iranian writers and artists from prison. A celebrated and insightful commentator on literary freedom(s), his prose and poetry has been published in such periodicals as Time Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the American Poetry Review. Eventually settling in Canada, Baraheni lived in exile in Toronto, and held post as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto's Centre for Comparative Literature and as president of PEN Canada (2001-2003).