‘The home I’ve been searching for has always been within me'

Iranian poet and translator Sholeh Wolpe has been living in exile since 1979 Islamic revolution

Falah Faisal

Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born poet, playwright, and librettist. Her performances, solo or in collaboration with musicians and artists, have been hailed by audiences as mesmerizing. Her most recent work is a memoir in verse, Abacus of Loss was hailed by Ilya Kaminsky as a book “that created its own genre—a thrill of lyric combined with the narrative spell.”

She was in town for the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators festival at Alliance University where she performed with Mystik Vibes that mixed music, poetry, and storytelling. She was in her teens when Iran had the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and has lived in exile since.

“To me, exile means when you want to go home but can’t for various reasons,” she says, adding the longing for finding a home has informed most of her work. Besides writing poetry she is also a literary translator and translated the works of 12th-century Sufi mystic Attar, who Rumi considered his master, for her play The Conference of the Birds.

“That really changed my life when I realized the home I was searching for was within me and I carried it wherever I went,” she says. “What’s happening in Iran now really excites me because women are at the forefront of the revolution and that has surprised the government,” she says hopefully noting that it is a global movement.

 “It’s not just women but men with feminine sensibilities who want to resolve situations without violence and give rights to human beings which have been denied to women since time immemorial,” she adds. She considers herself a spiritual being but does not follow organized religion and feels that this is a realization that many in Iran are reaching that they can be Muslim in spirit without having to follow power-hungry mullahs.

“Religion by itself isn’t bad, but it has the tendency to get hijacked by men who want to use it to their own ends. One of my poems ends with the line ‘God weeps behind the mask we have tattooed on his face' and that’s what I feel is happening where religion has become the cause of what it warns us against,” she concludes.