#ShareTheLight

Read Poet and Translator Elhum Shakerifar’s commission as part of the Visible Communities programme.

Throughout the autumn, I have been virtual translator in residence at National Centre for Writing, working on the poetry of Iranian poet Parinaz Fahimi. We tend to think of winter nights as long, but it is autumn that sees the days shorten; winter’s arrival signals their lengthening once again. Yalda, the winter equinox, is one of my most treasured days of the year. From Tajikistan to Turkey, via Afghanistan, Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan, friends and families gather on the longest night to share in a meal (chez moi, fesenjoon – a stew made of walnuts and pomegranate molasses) and to share poetry. To ease open the knotty questions that preoccupy us, as we slice watermelon, peel pomegranates and crack walnuts – fruit that are complex and time consuming to peel (much like translation can be), and that taste best when they’re shared. To be in community when the light is scarce. To remind each other that light is returning, slowly but surely.

This year, as last year, Yalda is bittersweet.

.زندگی “هندسه” ساده و یکسان نفسهاست

It is bitter for the ongoing and live streamed genocide in Gaza, 438 days of genocide, its violence enabling violence that is seeping into all corners of our lives, everywhere. It is bitter for the complete absence of media coverage of the violence in Sudan, its erasure enabling violence that is seeping into all corners of our lives. It is violent for those of us who exist in a multiplicity that is drowned out by noisy end of year ‘Best Of’s and Christmas celebrations, a dystopian kind of violence that is utterly exhausting.

On Yalda, we gather together to mark the return to light after the darkest nights, to celebrate lengthening days and the possibility they bring – even as we remain braced for the road ahead, aware as we can only be, of the road the world is currently on. Indeed, even the sky and its vast, mesmerising expanse, long a metaphor for freedom, has become shrouded in new meaning: it is where the violence of modern warfare descends from.

Yet, earlier this month, possibility was felt in the bewildering reality of the fall of the Assad regime on the 8^th December. The hope and energy rippling across Syria is electric, overwhelming to behold. It is made bittersweet by the (well known) brutality of the regime’s prison systems, the many lives it has claimed over the years and the (well known) prevalence of forcible disappearance under tyranny – a vicious weapon, locking families into the limbo of terror and unanswered questions across generations. To learn more, see Ayouni by Yasmin Fedda, produced by Elhum Shakerifar (2020)

Yet, Yalda’s light is an impulse towards life, towards living. So too is the protest of living against the death machines that surround us. It is Rosa Luxemburg pressing the flowers she found on prison grounds and sharing them with friends in letters. It is libraries across the UK gathering to #ShareTheLight to mark the reopening of the Spellow Library and Community Hub in Walton, Liverpool, that was torched during the racist riots in summer 2024. It is journalist Soliman Hijji celebrating his morning shakshuka, thanks to a rare delivery of eggs. It is 76-year-old Dr Laila Soueif playing with her granddaughter on the 75^th day of her hunger strike (80 at the time of writing) – putting her body on the line to call for the release of her son Alaa Abd El Fatah from his ongoing unlawful detention in Egypt[1].

I think often of Sohrab Sepehri’s long and graceful meditations on life. Fragments of his words echo through my mind these days, prescient and precise.

life is …

.زندگی “هندسه” ساده و یکسان نفسهاست

Life is the simple and constant “geometry” of breath.

The search for meaning encourages us to find patterns in life. Geometry. To find rhyme, resonance, meaning.

Over the past year, whenever I’ve been invited to a reading, I have read translations of Hiba Abu Nada’s poetry. Hiba’s life was cut short on 20^th October 2023; she was killed in her home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza by an Israeli air raid. She was 32 years old. I am pained to have encountered Hiba’s words only after her death, and wonder how long it would have taken us —in another world, one where we’d met serendipitously at a poetry reading in her hometown of Gaza or mine in London — to realise that we share a birthday.

.زندگی “هندسه” ساده و یکسان نفسهاست

Parinaz Fahimi was a friend of a friend – someone I may also have met, serendipitously, at a poetry reading perhaps, or at a mutual friend’s house. But we never did meet in her lifetime; Parinaz died of cancer in exile, here in London, in 2016. Her only poetry collection was published posthumously in Iran and was much celebrated (now in its 3^rd print run) but it had never been brought into the English language, the language that was spoken all around her as she breathed her last breaths. While Parinaz’s collection includes poetry written long before her diagnosis, the poems that have most captivated me are the ones she wrote at the end of her life. These are poems that carry a strong sense of longing to a country she knows she will not return to. They’re poems where the Piccadilly Line becomes a place to imagine her future children. Where she opens a bakery on a roundabout to sell well-seasoned poems. Where she becomes the ants on the carpet of her grandmother’s kitchen to pick up crumbs from her fragrant cake baking. Her poetry’s nostalgia is carried by childlike wordplay and delight in the precious jewels of her memories. In sitting with these later poems and knowing that their words were written at the end of Parinaz’s short life, I’ve been very conscious of breath itself, as a measure of life, and as the tempo of a poem.

.زندگی “هندسه” ساده و یکسان نفسهاست

In her poem Not Just Passing, translated by Huda Fakhreddine, Hiba Abu Nada writes:

Yesterday, a star said

to the little light in my heart,

We are not just transients

passing.

Do not die. Beneath this glow

some wanderers go on

walking.

I reflect now that I was intrigued by Parinaz’s story, a poet forever stilled into a specific period of her life—much like Rimbaud or Rebecca Elson, whose writing I admire and turn to for their sharpened perspective, urgency, optic. When I think of Hiba’s words, and of her unjust fate, I am haunted by the grace and prescience of her poise and dignity in the face of a life in constant defiance of a death machine. The final words of the same poem echo back to us, underline the power of looking towards the light.

O little light in me, don’t die,

even if all the galaxies of the world

close in.

O little light in me, say:

Enter my heart in peace.

All of you, come in![2]

This Yalda, I will light a candle in the memory of these poets gone too soon, poets who were not just passing. Turning towards their light, they remind us to hold close the promise of every breath. They urge us, also, to take action – to share the light so that a brighter future can glow.

[1] Alaa is a British citizen; please join the call for his release by writing to your MP urging them to take position HERE.

[2] Arablit Quarterly

Elhum Shakerifar

Elhum Shakerifar is a poet and translator; most recently of the PEN Award-winning, Warwick Prize-nominated Negative of a Group Photograph by Azita Ghahreman, alongside poet Maura Dooley (Bloodaxe Books, 2018); the poem “A Glance” was a June 2024 Poem on the Underground. She is currently part of the 24/25 Southbank New Poets Collective. Elhum is also a producer known for bold documentary works that entwine the personal and the political; her credits include A Syrian Love Story (2015, Sean McAllister), Of Love & Law (2017, Hikaru Toda), Even When I Fall (2017, Sky Neal & Dara McLarnon) and Ayouni (2020, Yasmin Fedda); she is currently producing Ana Naomi de Sousa’s debut feature with BBC Films, Mohamed Jabaly’s new feature and Helene Kazan’s forthcoming multi-sensory artwork ‘Clear Night’. Elhum’s award-winning productions have garnered her accolades including a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut (2016), a British Film Institute ‘Vision Award’ (2016) and the Women in Film & TV Factual Award (2017). As a curator with particular interest in film from the SWANA region, Elhum has curated for London Film Festival (2014-21), Shubbak – festival of contemporary Arab culture (2015-19), Barbican (Poetry in Motion: Contemporary Iranian Cinema, 2019), BFI (Drama & Desire, the films of Youssef Chahine, 2023) and is on the board of the Palestine Film Institute, co-curating the Palestine Film Platform. Elhum runs the London-based company Hakawati (‘storyteller’ in Arabic) whose work you can follow at @TheHakawatis.

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