Persianate Unfamiliarity: A Qaṣīda by Shawkat Bukhārī to Imam al-Rizā

Modern scholarship has most often employed the concept of the Persianate to designate a transregional ecumene, sphere, or world, as well as the processes that shaped and sustained this ecumene.¹ To be (or become) Persianate was to belong and partake in the Persianate ecumene through forms of affiliation, identification, and exchange that could include language, literatures, and politics, as well as Islamic (and non-Islamic) networks, institutions, and norms.² Many studies of the Persianate focus on the early modern period, since this was the time in which “Persian reached the zenith of its geographical and social reach” (Green 1).³ This “High Persianate period,” as Matthew Melvin-Koushki terms it (355), also featured the development of a Persianate poetic movement that aimed for freshness and novelty; hence, some participants in this movement described it as tāza-gūʾī (“speaking afresh”).⁴ One way in which poets claimed to make poetry fresh was through expressing bīgāna (“unfamiliar”) ideas: ideas that no poet had yet brought into the bounds of verse.⁵ In turn, they might claim that they themselves, as poets, had become unfamiliar and gharīb (“foreign,” “exiled,” or “strange”) to the people and places of home. The poetics of unfamiliarity might appear to be separate from or even opposed to the forms of belonging and exchange that in many ways characterized the Persianate ecumene. Instead, I argue for theorizing the poetics of unfamiliarity as an integrally Persianate phenomenon.

As a way into this question, I focus on the initial section of a qaṣīda (“ode”) by the Persian poet Muhammad Ishāq Shawkat Bukhārī (d. 1695 or 1696) in which Shawkat describes both himself and his poetics in terms of their unfamiliarity. To explore what Shawkat means by this, I approach unfamiliarity as a product of distance. One meaning of distance in the qaṣīda is physical separation: Shawkat's unfamiliarity to the people of his home is achieved in part through his having traveled away from them. Indeed, Shawkat dedicates the qaṣīda to Imam ʿAlī al-Rizā (d. 818), a revered descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who was buried at Mashhad (in Iran) and to whose shrine Shawkat had undertaken a pilgrimage from his native Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan).⁶ But I suggest that it is also necessary to understand Shawkat's unfamiliarity in relation to a poetics of distance. A distance between verbal expression and meaning is at work; Shawkat communicates new ideas with as little reliance on words as possible. Shawkat leverages the familiarity of the Persianate poetic tradition to generate this distance: assuming the reader's knowledge of this tradition allows him to leave unstated the layers of meaning and chains of metaphorical association that subtend his poetic arguments.⁷ I argue that there is a dialectical interplay between familiarity and unfamiliarity in the qaṣīda, since participating in the Persianate poetic tradition is what enables Shawkat's poetics to find fresh and imaginative distance from that tradition.

Persianate Exile

The first thirty couplets of Shawkat's qaṣīda constitute a loosely knit thematic unit in which one recurring thread is a multivalent exploration of unfamiliarity. I analyze here couplets that give a sense of the kinds of distances that Shawkat has crossed and that have made him an unfamiliar, foreign figure, including distances in physical space and in his poetics.

The qaṣīda describes Shawkat as having become unfamiliar (bīgāna) to his own country, vacillating between home (vaṭan) and exile (ghurbat), as in couplets 10 and 11:

رویم به سوی غربت و دل جانب وطن

افتاد کاه من به میان دو کهربا

خلقی فتاده اند به طعنم که از وطن

بیرون چه آمدی و مسافر شدی چرا⁸ (499)

My face, toward exile

and my heart,

toward home—

Between two bits of amber

fell my straw.⁹

People have fallen upon deprecating me,

saying:

“Why did you come out of the homeland,” and

“Wherefore did you become a traveler?”¹⁰

Later, the qaṣīda takes up the idea of exile again, characterizing Shawkat as gharīb: a foreigner or one who has been exiled (507). The distance between home and exile might be read in terms of Shawkat's “life-truth” of having departed from Bukhara and traveled to Mashhad in pilgrimage to the Imam's shrine.¹¹ This journey took him from the region of Tūrān (roughly, present-day Central Asia), which was then under the neo-Chinggisid Ashtarkhanid dynasty, into Iran, then under the Safavid dynasty.¹² In Mashhad, Shawkat joined a poetic circle patronized by the Safavid official Mīrzā Saʿd al-Dīn.¹³ Although he did eventually continue his travels, he never returned to Tūrān. Shawkat's dedication of the qaṣīda to the Imam (to whose praise the poet transitions after couplet 30) lends support to an interpretion of Shawkat's foreignness and unfamiliarity as resulting at least in part from his pilgrimage and the distance—even exile—from home that it entailed.

The unfamiliarity that Shawkat claims as a result of his exile can be described as Persianate in two main ways. First, the Persianate can be conceptualized as an ecumene that encompasses Bukhara and Mashhad: Shawkat has left home but has not left the Persianate ecumene.¹⁴ Second, the distances that Shawkat has traveled and that have made him an exile and a stranger do not make him an unintelligible figure. As Mana Kia has argued, the Persianate entails a shared “hermeneutical ground” (197), and Shawkat's self-characterization as having gone into exile for the Imam reflects his engagements with this hermeneutical ground. For instance, there are rich Persianate poetic precedents for such tropes as suffering out of devotion to the Imam¹⁵ and turning to the Imam as one who has been exiled.¹⁶ This shared hermeneutical ground also allows Shawkat's assertion of being in exile to connect the poet to Imam al-Rizā himself. The Imam (who was born in Medina) journeyed to eastern Iran, where he died, and he is thus known for having been exiled.¹⁷ To assert the experience of exile in a qaṣīda to the Imam links the poet with the target of his praise. Considering the Persianate both as an ecumene and a hermeneutical ground enables us to see that the Persianate not only comprises the familiarity of home and the unfamiliarity of exile but also provides the terms that make the unfamiliar intelligible.

Familiarity with Unfamiliar Meanings

If travel through physical space causes Shawkat's distance from home, it is not the only cause of this distance. Couplet 7 offers an esoteric interpretation of Islamic sacred sites and, by implication, of pilgrimage:

آئینه دار یثرب و بطحا نمی شوم

از دیده و دل است مرا مروه و صفا (498)

To Yathrib and Batha,

I hold up no mirror:

Marwa and Safa come from

my eyes and heart.

Yathrib and Batha refer to Medina and Mecca, respectively; to hold up a mirror to them would be to assume the role of an attendant who makes it possible for them to gaze admiringly at their own reflections. By disavowing this role, Shawkat calls into question the need to seek the sacred in locations outside himself. Similarly, Shawkat claims that Marwa and Safa—the sacred hills at Mecca, between which pilgrims travel—come from the faculties of his eyes and heart. Wordplay strengthens this claimed self-sufficiency, as صفا (ṣafā) can also mean “purity,” while (were it not for the meter) مروه could be read as muruwwa (“chivalry”); that is, the names of the hills may be reinterpreted as the poet's own qualities. Gleaning a sacred topography in the poet's ethically coded faculties and qualities prompts, in turn, an understanding of pilgrimage beyond exoteric sites. This poetic gesture resonates with couplet 25's claim that poetry has set Shawkat into a kind of motion:

از بس بود مدار من از پهلوی سخن

باشد به خانه ام ز نی خامه بوریا (500)

My circling is around the sides of poetry,

so much so

That my house's reed mat is from

the reed of my pen.

The reference to circling around poetry's sides recalls the circumambulation of a shrine (like that of the Imam), offering another way in which the qaṣīda imagines forms of pilgrimage—in this case, poeticizing as pilgrimage—that need not involve physical travel.

Couplet 8 attributes Shawkat's distance from home to his familiarity with unfamiliar meanings; the distance is a poetic distance:

بیگانه کرده است مرا از دیار خویش

تا گشته ام به معنی بیگانه آشنا (499)

It made me unfamiliar to

my own country

When I became familiar with

unfamiliar meanings.

But what does familiarity with unfamiliar meanings entail for Shawkat? For an answer, it is helpful to consult Shawkat's poetic collection beyond the qaṣīda. Shawkat repeatedly emphasizes the distinction and, in fact, the distance between verbal expression (lafẓ) and meaning (maʿnī); for instance, he contrasts the familiarity of words with the unfamiliarity of meanings (408). In another couplet, Shawkat claims that he has become a foreigner because of the distance that he has crossed from verbal expression to meaning:

ز فکر دور خیالم غریب شد شوکت

میان معنی و لفظم هزار فرسنگ است (168)

My imagination's far-flung thoughts

made Shawkat into a foreigner—

Between my meaning and expression

are one thousand leagues.

Here, Shawkat uses the language of physical distance (leagues) to mark the distance between meaning and expression in a couplet. This distance between meaning and expression suggests that to attain unfamiliar meanings requires going beyond what is stated explicitly; indeed, for Shawkat, the poetics of unfamiliar meanings resists being heard by any ear (262).

In couplet 28 of this qaṣīda, similarly, Shawkat suggests that a poetics of unfamiliarity eludes exoteric expression, since the poet claims to be unfamiliar (bīgāna) to (his own) voice:

حیرت ز بس که سرمه ی خاموشی من است

بیگانه ام چو چینی تصویر از صدا¹⁸ (500)

Dazzlement is the collyrium

of my silence—

so much so

That I am, like the porcelain

of a painting,

unfamiliar to my own voice.

In the poetry of Shawkat's time, porcelain was often associated with noise, because it is delicate and makes a sound when breaking.¹⁹ However, the porcelain in couplet 28 is in a painting and therefore silent. At the same time, the couplet describes the poet himself as being in a state of ḥayrat: a dazzlement that has plunged him into silence.²⁰ It is fitting that ḥayrat acts as the collyrium (kohl) of the poet's silence, because collyrium beautifies and brightens the eye, but it was also thought to cause muteness when ingested. The association of collyrium with beautification links it to painting, while suggesting that the silence here is a bright-eyed, clear-seeing silence. This assertion of collyrium-adorned muteness resonates with Shawkat's desire to inscribe the Imam's threshold with his kisses in couplet 30:

خواهم که نقش بوسه ی رنگین خود کنم

گلمیخ آستان شه کشور رضا (500)

I want to make the inscription

of my colorful kisses

Into the rose-shaped nails

of the threshold

of the country's king, Rizā.²¹

This colorful inscription with the mouth represents a kind of language that does not require being voiced.²²

The idea of a poetics that is unfamiliar to its own voice suggests communication through what is unstated. Two of the poetic devices that Shawkat uses in the qaṣīda enable the concision (ījāz) of his poetry, communicating as much meaning as possible in as few words as possible and thus maximizing the distance between meaning and expression. The first is īhām (literally, “deceiving”), by which the poet plays with two or more of a word's meanings. The second is what Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has described as the strategy of “treat[ing] metaphor as fact”—using a preestablished metaphor as the basis for creating new metaphors, connecting images, terms, and concepts that may appear to be disparate (37).²³ These devices engage Persianate intertextuality to generate unfamiliar meanings by means of the familiar.²⁴

Polysemous Proximity and Distance

Through īhām, a single term in a couplet evokes multiple meanings. Conventionally, īhām involves tricking the reader by seeming to offer a “close” (qarīb) meaning for a term, the meaning that would be likeliest to occur to the reader. However, the intended meaning in īhām is more distant (baʿīd) and foreign or strange (gharīb)—that is, less likely to come to mind.²⁵ Shawkat's uses of īhām require that his readers keep the more distant, less obvious meanings of words in mind, along with the meanings that may seem more directly relevant. That is, whereas conventional definitions of īhām suggest that the reader should disregard the closer meaning, which is deceptive, in order to discover the more distant meaning, which is what the poet truly intends, Shawkat tends to play with multiple meanings at once. For example, couplet 1 reads:

از بس که ریخت رنگ جنون بر سرم هوا

سودا به پای بست ز مغز سرم حنا (498)

Love laid the foundations of madness

upon my head—

so much so

That, from my head's brains,

melancholy bound henna

upon my feet.

The most immediate meaning of rang here appears to be in the sense of the idiomatic expression rang rīkhtan, or “laying the foundations” (of madness); Shawkat and his contemporaries were fond of employing this idiom in their poetry.²⁶ Initially, the couplet does not seem to intend the more common meaning of rang as “color” (a literal translation of the idiom would be “scattering color”). Nevertheless, this meaning remains present, connecting the first and second lines: it is madness as color that enables Shawkat's brains to dye his feet with henna. The play on color is reinforced by the fact that sawdā (“melancholy” or “madness”) also means “black.” The henna that resonates with rang as color circumscribes the poet's feet; in the poetry of Shawkat's time, to have henna on one's feet can indicate being slowed down.²⁷ This latter meaning of henna, which conveys the impact that this transfer of color/madness has had on the poet, is equally necessary for the couplet to function.

Bringing out the multiple meanings of these words and idioms reveals the distances that the poet covers in the compressed space of a couplet, enabling a multilayered poetic argument to emerge. Love has set the foundations of madness on the poet's head while, at the same time, scattering the color of madness upon him. From his head, the color of madness—now in the form of melancholy, which is black—moves down to the poet's feet. Here, this color of madness appears as henna and, because henna slows down feet, it has the effect of slowing or stopping the poet in his tracks. By maintaining the multiplicity of meanings that a term can evoke, the couplet has the effect of encouraging a kind of reading that is attuned to less obvious, more distant meanings, without discarding those that may be closer at hand.

Inscribing the Mirror

Shawkat also concisely communicates new meanings by taking metaphors from the Persianate tradition as (unstated) poetic facts and using them to create new metaphors and poetic arguments. In this case, the couplet expresses only the conclusions that the poet has reached through engaging with the poetic tradition and leaves unsaid all the poetic material that supplied the premises of these conclusions. That is, taking the (familiar) metaphor as fact allows the poet to imply, rather than explicitly state, the basis for making an unfamiliar claim, widening the distance between meaning and expression in the couplet. In the qaṣīda, Shawkat showcases the capabilities of the hermeneutical ground on which he stands by drawing on preestablished metaphors in order to give different meanings to a poetically elaborated expression. For example, couplets 4 and 5 both reinterpret the expression jawhar-i āʾīna, which can refer both to a mirror's luster and to the marks left on a metallic mirror by polishing it:²⁸

بیرون نمی رود ز دلم ریش های غم

جوهر به تیغ ز آینه کی می شود جدا²⁹

از پیچ و تاب صاف دلان را گزیر نیست ³⁰

جوهر بود کتابه ی آئینه خانه ها (498)

These wounds of sorrow won't leave

my heart;

What blade could carve

the polish marks

from the mirror?

The pure of heart cannot escape

twisting and turning—

On the halls of mirrors,

polish marks are

the epigraph.

Couplet 4 draws on the familiar metaphor of the pure heart as a mirror, as well as the notion that suffering offers a means to purity. Taking the heart-mirror metaphor as fact, the couplet then equates the wounds of sorrow in the poet's heart with the polish marks on a mirror. The metaphor implies that the woundedness of Shawkat's heart displays his purity. It also underscores that his is no transitory state of sorrow—you could no more pluck the wounds out of his heart than you could carve the polish marks (or the luster) from a mirror. This sense of indelibility is strengthened by another meaning of jawhar as “essence,” establishing the polish marks as part of the mirror's essence.

Couplet 5 offers a new way of understanding the mirror's polish marks as signs of purity. On one level, it reiterates the idea that suffering—twisting and turning (pīch-u tāb)—inevitably characterizes the pure of heart, and it continues the association between the pure heart and the mirror. But the couplet imagines the pure of heart as a group, equating them with the khāna (“hall” or, literally, “house”) of mirrors. In turn, assuming as fact the metaphor of their hearts as a house of mirrors allows Shawkat to elaborate the image of this house inscribed with an epigraph, which the mirrors’ polish marks come to represent.

Understanding jawhar as also meaning “pearl” adds another layer to couplet 5, since this association evokes the established trope of a thread's “twisting and turning” (pīch-u tāb) as it winds its way through the narrow hole of a pearl. Shawkat and his contemporaries interpret this image in different ways, but one suggestion is that twisting and turning like a thread makes one worthy of a pearl,³¹ as in this couplet by Muhammad ʿAlī Sāʾib Tabrīzī (d. 1676), Shawkat's celebrated older contemporary:

سر از دریچه ی گوهر برآوری فردا

اگر چو رشته بسازی به پیچ و تاب اینجا (282 :1)

Tomorrow you will raise your head

through the narrow gate

of a pearl,

If today you start

twisting and turning

like a thread.

Bearing this association in mind offers yet another interpretation of Shawkat's couplet. On the one hand, the couplet suggests that the pure ones’ twisting and turning produces the polish marks on their hearts’ mirrors, and that these marks act as an epigraph. On the other hand, considering the pearl as the reward for the twisting thread's pains also suggests that those who are pure have earned this epigraph through their suffering. Indeed, as Prashant Keshavmurthy points out, the pierced pearl can indicate “the bound language of verse” (48), from which it follows that the twisting and turning of those who are pure makes them into poets. Moreover, the epigraph appears as another form of expression that is available to the poet who is unfamiliar to his voice—in this case, a collectively inscribed writing, multiplied across many hearts.

Some scholars have interpreted the poetic transformations of Shawkat's day as resulting from the innovations of poets’ private minds and imaginations. Taking Sāʾib as representative of the broader poetic movement of tāza-gūʾī, for example, Alessandro Bausani argues that the protagonist in his lyrical poetry is difficult to identify “a meno che non si voglia dichiarare che qui il protagonista è il ‘cervello’ del poeta stesso che crea un mondo semimitologico di esangui fantasmi” (“unless you choose to declare that here the protagonist is the ‘brain’ of the poet himself who creates a semimythical world of bloodless ghosts”; 299). Similarly, Henry Bowles finds in Sāʾib's poetry the “realism of inner language” and “privatizing of truth” (115, 126). I have argued that the distances that Shawkat's qaṣīda cultivates result instead from a shared and communally elaborated poetic imagination: that is, a Persianate imagination. This assertion of cocreation does not take away from Shawkat's poetic power, but suggests that part of this power derives from treating the hermeneutic ground on which the poet draws as unstable, dynamic, and charged with possibility.

Shawkat's poetry shows us that the Persianate can be understood as what the poetic voice speaks in silence. Be it the multiple meanings that the poet generates through īhām or the metaphors that the poet takes as fact to make new poetic arguments, what remains unstated arises from and refers back to the Persianate poetic tradition. Geoffrey Hartman argues that figurative phrases “may be characterized by overspecified ends and indeterminate middles,” prompting interpretation so as to reconstruct the middle: “the strength of the end terms depends on our seeing the elided members of the chain . . . the more clearly we see them the stronger the metaphor which collapses that chain” (242). In Shawkat's qaṣīda, however, to see what is elided (or unspoken, unfamiliar to the voice) does not cause the figurative end terms to collapse into each other. Instead, to interpret a couplet in the light of the Persianate poetic tradition is to uncover the imaginative distances that the poet has generated through intertextuality, and to find that these distances may communicate something meaningful in all its newness, freshness, and unfamiliarity.