In cities, towns, and villages throughout Iranian Azerbaijan ˓āshiqs (professional poet-musicians) entertain audiences in coffee houses and at weddings. ˓Āshiqs compose and perform songs in a variety of poetic forms. The longest of these forms is the oral narrative poem called the dāstān in the Azeri dialect of Turkish. In his presentation of these tales, the ˓āshiq observes a standard protocol, yet within this established format, he has room to improvise, to stretch some segments of his entertainment or to cut other parts short. It is this flexibility within the framework of an established presentation format that keeps these oral narrative poems from growing stale in the mind of the performer and in the perception of the audience.

This paper will briefly describe the ˓āshiq, his training and performance. Then, one segment of a dāstān will be analyzed to show what its components are, and how they can be manipulated by the performer.

In a twenty-four-year writing career that began in 1945 with the publication of the story “Pilgrimage” in Sukhan magazine and ended in 1969 with a heart attack at age 46, Jalal Al-e Ahmad established himself as a major voice in modern Persian fiction. His first and best known collection of short stories, The Exchange of Visits, appeared in 1946, followed in short order by Our Suffering (1947), Sihtār (1948), and The Unwanted Woman (1952), which was reprinted in 1964 with two additional stories. A fifth collection of stories entitled The New Generation remains unpublished, although a sampling of stories from that collection entitled Five Stories was published posthumously. The first of five longer pieces of fiction, Tale of the Beehives, was published in 1955. Three years later The School Principal appeared. Then, in 1961, came The Letter ‘N’ and the Pen, followed in 1968 by The Cursing of the Land, of which several chapters had previously been published separately. A final novel, A Stone on a Grave, remains unpublished.

I concluded my previous paper on this subject with the remark that the people of Boir Ahmad, faced with the depletion of their pastures, the unavailability of new land, the difficulty of obtaining higher education, and the low wages earned from migrant labor, were looking toward the future trusting a merciful God to open, as they say, five doors for each one that was closed. That was in 1971. Since then, doors have indeed been opening up for the people of Boir Ahmad, a process which is filling them with new expectations for the future, but which is also changing basically the structure of their traditional way of life. These changes are most pronounced in the western and eastern parts of Boir Ahmad, i.e., in the nearer and farther environs of the administrative centers of Yasuj and Deh Dasht. In the present paper I shall describe these changes, using as an example a village 36 kilometers to the northwest of Yasuj, the Deh Bozorg Sisakht, commonly called Sisakht, the largest village of Boir Ahmad (pop. in 1976: 2596).