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Text and the Body in a Poem by Simin Behbahani

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mahdi Tourage
Mahdi Tourage*
Affiliation:
Colgate University, New York.
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Abstract

This paper is a phenomenological study of one of Simin Behbahani's better known poems, “Raqqaseh,” which is about the nightly ritualized dance of a dancing girl in a tavern. It will argue that the tavern in this poem could be viewed as a cultural container for socially dangerous representations and impulses, like the metaphoric sexualized body of the dancing girl. The tavern could also be viewed as a semiotic register for the symbolic representation of the dominant normative social discourse. By viewing the dance as performance, the communicative association of the symbolic significance of the dancing girl's body and the tavern and its audience will also be discussed. This paper will argue that the reader too is implicated in the performative function of the text.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1: Simin Behbahani , February 2008 , pp. 61 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2008

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Footnotes

I would like to humbly dedicate this paper to Simin Behbahani, who is best described in Farzaneh Milani's words as: “A Poet who ‘Never Sold Her Pen or Soul.’” See Nora Boustani's review of Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa, eds. and trans., A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems, Simin Behbahani (Syracuse, 1999), in The Washington Post, 10 June, 2006, A16. I would like to especially thank Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi for his insightful comments and constant support and encouragement over the years.

References

1 Behbahani, Simin, Majmu'a-yi ‘Ash‘ar (Tehran, 1384 AH/2006 CE), 56–59Google Scholar. The line numbers are noted in the text of this paper in parentheses. All translations are mine.

2 Derrida, Jacques, Apporias, trans. Dutoit, Thomas (Stanford, CA, 1993), 9Google Scholar.

3 I have taken this term from Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari's, Felix work: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minnesota, 1987)Google Scholar.

4 Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1982)Google Scholar.

5 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9.

6 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), 115Google Scholar.

7 Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 I am taking this extended definition of signifier from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's theory of signification. See Lacan, Jacques, Écrits (Paris, 1966), 501–502Google Scholar.

9 See Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. and ed. Strachey, James (London, 1953–74), 13:34Google Scholar, 65, 95.

10 Freud, Standard Edition, 4:277–338, 5:339–508.

11 Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation, trans. Savage, Denis (New Haven, CT, 1970), 93Google Scholar.

12 For example, he notes the relations of power between men and women, young and old, parents and children, teachers and students, priests and laity, and an administration and a population. See Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir (Paris, 1976), 136Google Scholar.

13 See Lacan, Jacques, Les séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre II: Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, 1954–1955, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain (Paris, 1978), 375Google Scholar.

14 Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993), 3Google Scholar.

15 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 2; also see Butler, Judith, “ ,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen, Case (Baltimore, 1990), 270Google Scholar.

16 Butler, “Performative Acts,” 272.

17 Benveniste, Emile, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Meek, Mary Elizabeth (Miami, 1971), 218Google Scholar, original emphasis.

18 Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics (New York, 1983), 198Google Scholar.

19 This is one way that Butler explains performativity. See her Bodies that Matter, 2.

20 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 13.

21 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 12.

22 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 12–13.

23 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120–130Google Scholar. I am fully aware of Spivak's concerns about the misunderstandings and misappropriation of this term by various groups and interests. However, I believe that the use of this term in this context is quite appropriate.

24 Here, I am using desire in its psychoanalytical/semiotic sense as postulated by Jacques Lacan, who views desire as unsatisfiable. Desire is thus not a relation to an object, but a relation to a lack; it is recognized only when it is articulated in language. Since it can never be fully articulated, desire is forever bound up with the play of signifiers, and its realization is continually deferred. See Lacan, Écrits, 512.

25 In fact, Behbahani has a different well-known poem entitled the “The Prostitute's Song.” See her Majmu‘a-yi Ash‘ar, 21–23. For an excellent translation of this and other selected poems of Behbahani, see Milani and Safa, A Cup of Sin, 128–129.

26 This is a gesture of frustration and regret, perhaps for a sexual encounter with the dancing girl that can never be.

27 Schneider, Rebecca, The Explicit Body in Performance (London, 1997), 5Google Scholar.

28 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 3.