“Woman, Life, Freedom”: How Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom developed their feminist poetry anthology
Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom at the "Famous Five” monument in Calgary, Alberta.
Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom are the editors of a new poetry anthology from Guernica Editions titled Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution. We spoke with them to discuss the background for this remarkable collection in support of the ongoing revolution that began in 2022, how they selected the poems, and the results they hope to achieve with this volume.
What's the Idea: Thanks for meeting to talk about your poetry anthology, “Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution.” What inspired you to create this book?
Bänoo Zan: I started it because there's a revolution going on in Iran, and this is an ongoing revolution. You may call it a cultural as well as a political revolution, the latest phase of the feminist movement in Iran. It's against the ingrained misogyny in our culture and religion. At this stage, it's targeting the most visible manifestation of this misogyny, which is the compulsory hijab.
And now, just to give you background, the elimination of the compulsory hijab has always been one of the main demands of the women's revolution, or women's movement, in Iran. It started with prominent cases; for example, with Táhirih, who was a theologian and one of the earliest followers of the Báb. She was born around 1814, and in 1848, she unveiled in a public place, which created an uproar.
In 1936, Reza Shah Pahlavi issued the unveiling decree, or the Kashf-e Hijab decree. Even before that time, a number of women in Iran, especially in Tehran, had started removing their hijabs on their own. But then in 1979, when the Islamic revolution happened and the compulsory hijab decree was issued, the March 8, 1979, International Women's Day protest, which was the only time that Iranian women came out in large numbers to celebrate International Women's Day, turned into a protest against compulsory hijab. So women were the first group that protested some of the policies of the Islamic Republic.
Then in 2022, when Mahsa Amini was killed, it sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, which is ongoing and has had far-reaching consequences. It has changed, even to this day that we are talking, the face of Iranian cities. Many women refuse to cover themselves according to the state mandates and conservative Islamic interpretations of the way women should be dressed.
“I formed this idea to have an anthology with the belief that Woman, Life, Freedom is not a national revolution, but it speaks to women around the world and everybody who believes in equality, including men and other genders. ”
I'm a feminist and I'm a poet, and I believe that poetry and art should inspire positive change in the world. I don't believe in art for art's sake and never did. When this significant phase emerged in the feminist movement, I saw it as part of the international feminist movement. I consider the Woman, Life, Freedom movement to be a very significant phase that many Western feminists did not anticipate, with the exception of one that I know of, Germaine Greer. She had anticipated it more than 20 years ago.
I formed this idea to have an anthology with the belief that Woman, Life, Freedom is not a national revolution, but it speaks to women around the world and everybody who believes in equality, including men and other genders.
I see a trend in Western and Canadian literature of avoiding political issues of the time. Canadian poetry is excellent in many ways, but it has gone far too much away from what I consider to be the mission of poetry. It has ended up in extreme experimentation without having a clear message coming out of it. I wanted to create this anthology to bring together poetry that is meaningful and is protest poetry, poetry of solidarity and poetry against dictatorship, which I think is the mission of poetry.
Cy Strom: I was really pleased when Bänoo asked me to edit this with her, partly because I have a great deal of confidence in Bänoo as organizer, as judge of poetic excellence, and as an activist in poetry. And this is an activist poetic project. Poetry, after all, as Bänoo said, has a role in documenting human history — its great events, the wishes and desires of people, their hopes and fears, and peoples’, individuals’, even nations’ experiences.
I'll back up for a second. Who is Mahsa Amini? She was a young Iranian woman of Kurdish background from one of the Kurdish regions of Iran, a town called Saqqez. She was visiting Tehran with her family. She wasn't, as far as we know, protesting even, and she was wearing a hijab. She was picked up by the morality police. I suppose that in any society that has such an institution, those who would volunteer for such a position — morality police — are probably among the worst of the population. By analogy, John Milton, when he wrote Areopagitica about censorship, left us as his deciding argument, “Who do you think is going to be the censor?” The same may go for morality police.
So, she was picked up. She was tossed into a van with some other women. In that van, she began to be beaten until she was finally beaten to death. It took a few days, but she was beaten to death. We don't know the circumstances directly, although there is discrimination against ethnic minorities, Kurds included, in Iran. She was probably insulted and there seemed to have been, in the days immediately after her death, news coming out, whether reliable or not, from other women picked up and kept in the van with her that she simply talked back to the people who were persecuting her there, to these police. Her death released pent-up pressures in Iranian society, where, after all, many of the urban young women are deeply dissatisfied.
“This was the sort of pent-up explosion that broke out very suddenly upon the death of Mahsa Amini. She became the completely unwilling figurehead, but she’s a brave woman, that we know. Her family too.”
Bänoo tells me that the police interrogators, for instance, after having spoken to some of the young people they've arrested, spoke out in astonishment that “these people are not our people. We don't know who they are, how they got to be this way. They're nothing like what we expected Iranians to be.” There's a split in the society, cultural and in terms of political and other aspirations, and in terms of how the people want to elect their leaders, run their lives, and express their religion. This was the sort of pent-up explosion that broke out very suddenly upon the death of Mahsa Amini. She became a completely unwilling figurehead, but she was a brave woman, that we know. Her family too. The families of martyrs of this revolution were suppressed. That is to say, they were not allowed to mourn in public, as bereaved Shiite Iranians normally do.
What's the Idea: Was there a reason that her family was specifically oppressed?
Bänoo Zan: All families of victims of the state violence are under pressure. A lot of times, even the families who are asking for justice end up in prison. They end up being tortured because that's the way that the state keeps its operation undercover. It doesn't want the world to know what happened. It is not only the protestors or activists who are killed or are imprisoned, but their whole family, relatives, and friend circles are targeted by the state.
What's the Idea: Protesting or rebelling is not an individual choice by any means, then. It affects you, your community, your loved ones, everybody in your life.
Cy Strom: The protester becomes a non-person in that society as far as the government is concerned. They can’t be mourned or acknowledged, but they're acknowledged outside of Iran as martyrs and heroes.
What's the Idea: Thank you for sharing that background. You speak of art being specific and targeted, and for a purpose, which is very powerful. Can you say more about that? My impression of modern North American art is a fear of being political, or of including references that may be too specific in fear of the work becoming dated.
Cy Strom: Our histories are timeless, after all. The history of a prominent person, a nation's history, a population's history, is timeless. Literature and, really, in terms of [looking] at the course of literature, poetry, documents this. It's a timeless medium for human accomplishment and experience.
Bänoo Zan: I would say even though this looks like a specific theme, women's oppression happens everywhere in the world, even in North America. Violence and discrimination against women have different manifestations. And interestingly, some non-Iranians, men and women, came out really strongly in support of this movement because we face different forms of it around the world. This volume is a testimony to that. This theme is universal and a lot of people, a lot of very good poets, have responded to that.
What's the Idea: In doing research about this revolution and this movement, it seemed like it took a significant hold in Canada, to bring it back here quickly, with protests in places like Richmond Hill, Ontario, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and I'm sure Toronto, and other major urban areas. And after all, this book is coming out of Canada.
Bänoo Zan: The idea for this book was formed in Edmonton, Alberta. At that time, I was in Edmonton because I was the writer in residence at the University of Alberta. We attended the protests there, and we connected with Iranians and non-Iranians who were participating in that protest.
What's the Idea: It’s remarkable because Edmonton must be, in many ways, almost as far as you can get from Iran.
Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom in Edmonton, Alberta, at the Woman, Life, Freedom protest in autumn 2022. The events in Iran that echoed around the world sparked the idea for this anthology.
What's the Idea: After you had the idea, how did you go about developing this project and getting it started?
Bänoo Zan: Mahsa Amini was killed on September 16, 2022. I talked to Cy and then we proposed the idea of the anthology to Guernica Editions on September 30, and on October 5, they responded, “Yes.”
Cy Strom: We thought that was timely and brave. After all, they're a small Canadian literary publisher, although they publish things other than purely Canadian literature and works. But it was brave of them, actually, to take on an international poetry anthology whose contents hadn't yet been written.
What's the Idea: Is it unusual for a publisher to accept a proposal without a manuscript?
Bänoo Zan: Yes. Yes, it is. And that speaks to their vision.
Cy Strom: And their confidence in Bänoo. They don't know me very well, and so kudos to Michael Mirolla of Guernica Editions. He helped us organize all this. We wanted to read the poems blind, without knowing the names or origins or locations of any poet whose works we were reading so we could make a properly objective choice and choose on the basis of pertinence and quality. Michael helped us do that using a tool called Submittable, which Guernica uses for submitting literature. He compiled all the poems that were submitted and substituted numbers for the names of the poets. We announced our call [for submissions] and then we waited a year before opening the box up.
Bänoo Zan: Basically, if we go back, first the Submittable was created. The window for submission was a year, from March 2023 to March 2024. But during that time, we reached out to many people, magazines, and organizations, and sent the call out to them. We spent a lot of time doing behind the scenes work, and I'm sure people also shared with their networks. For one year, we just waited and reached out to people.
After the year, each one of us looked at the anonymized poems separately and scored them. Then we compared the scores. I seemed to be a tougher scorer [than Cy]. Then we talked about the poems that I had scored low and Cy had scored high. Through this discussion, we accepted some of them. All of this, not knowing who the writers were until after we made our decision. Cy has interesting numbers about people who submitted and things like that.
Cy Strom: 140 poets submitted poems, and the total number of poems submitted among those was about 255. We eventually accepted, again, reading blind simply on the basis of pertinence, and aesthetic quality — validity as art —17% of the poems, about one in six. There are between 40 and 45 poems, I think, in this book. Two are Bänoo’s poems, where we cheated. We didn't read those blind.
What's the Idea: Were they submitted in the window, at least?
Bänoo Zan: Not even in the window, no. I wasn't thinking of having my poems in this collection, but Cy in the end said, “Maybe you should have some poems in there too.” I said, “I can't be the chooser of my own poems,” and he said, “Send me five or six poems,” and he selected the two that went into the book. He has a different story, though.
What's the Idea: What's your side of the story, Cy?
Cy Strom: I don't remember selecting those two. So, these two are poems written in others’ voices and they're actually almost sort of documentary pieces. They're both turned into poetry, of course, but one is a kind of transcription of the agonized search of a father for his son imprisoned in Iran — a true document, actually — who is under torture. The other is a woman's account of her whipping for not wearing a hijab. That ends the book with the woman having gone through the punishment process, being whipped, being admonished, then, probably still in the company of the people who had whipped her and judged her, removing her hijab and walking off. That ends the book, and that's the perfect ending for this book. The two poems are excellent poems, and they belong precisely where they are in this book, but I actually hoped that a poem of Bänoo’s written in her own voice would appear in the book too. And this perhaps may be why we remember this a little differently.
What's the Idea: They're powerful pieces and they're so different. I’m a big fan of movies, and these poems felt like documentary-style poems that are using somebody else's voice, similar to what documentary movies usually do. I think of poetry usually as intimate expressions of your own experience or your own thoughts, feelings, etc., so this dynamic use of somebody else's voice and experience in these poems was very interesting.
Bänoo Zan: Thank you.
Cy Strom: We set out, again, to be fair and proper and to organize our minds around this, because theoretically it's very hard to judge poetry. After all, poetry is an individual expression. It moves off in any direction. There are no rules. There are obviously genres of poetry with very strict rules, but universally speaking, there are no rules. The rule is what the poet creates.
What's the Idea: Did you set any guidelines, or was it an open submission for any type of poem?
Cy Strom: We made a point of asking for poems that were pertinent. I'll read some of my recollections of what we asked for in the call. We expected, I wrote here: prayers, examinations of the poets’ own consciences, celebrations of life, lyrical musings, bitter curses, autobiographical fragments, visions of a better future — anything that uncovers the dimension of the people's experience in Iran, or outside of Iran, of this women's revolution.
Bänoo Zan: We also said in the call that we would be interested in poetry that connects this movement with other similar movements. We got a poem by a poet from Afghanistan, because women’s movements in these two countries are very similar in the fight against patriarchy and in the form that it takes in our part of the world.
“We had already agreed that whenever there was a huge discrepancy in scores, we’d pay particular attention to that poem. There’s got to be something interesting going on there.”
Cy Strom: We required that submitted poems be pertinent, and although there were many excellent poems, we had to reject some on the grounds of not really being to the point. I think poet number one, [of] the poems that I opened, [had submitted poems] set in Iraq and written about an Iraqi Jewish matriarch. Beautiful poetry translated from Arabic, but regrettably, we couldn't take those.
In any case, we asked for pertinence, but I also thought, at least, that we don't want to solicit what is, or used to be called, “agitprop,” narrow propagandistic pieces. So we made a point in our call to remind people interested in submitting that whatever virtues their poetry contains, we would consider and welcome any work on various themes that were obliquely related, and not necessarily directly, as long as it touched on the requirements for this anthology.
And actually, it’s in that area, I think, where Bänoo would score a poem sometimes as a one [very low] and I would score nine [very high]. By the way, we had already agreed that whenever there was a huge discrepancy in scores, we'd pay particular attention to that poem. There's got to be something interesting going on there. These were, I think, exceptionally beautiful, often lyrical, poems that weren't marches, they weren't sloganeering, they weren't calls, but they, in some cases, say, portrayed the kind of psychological workings of the events on the poet's mind or the poet's own personal relations. Two of them, actually, were about young women's relationships but viewed, in fact, in the light of events in Iran and what they promised, or how the promise might be betrayed in the end.
What's the Idea: Did any poems stand out as exactly what you were looking for, or, on the other hand, did any poems stand out as not what you expected at all, but still really captured the idea?
Cy Strom: Category two is the category that I was describing a moment ago. One of those poems, by the way, a longish poem, which, in fact, uses the word “hallucination” in its title, is a kind of hallucinatory piece that ranges through characters and incidents and situations from Persian myth through to the everyday, the quotidian, the perfectly normal — like [its mention of] a brand of soap that was popular in Iran — to thoughts and regrets. Much of the language is in terms of regret. “I fear this. I'm concerned with that. I regret...” You're suspended as a reader, if you pay attention to this poem, somewhere between heaven and earth. You don't know when you are moving from myth to the daily, from the personal to the universal, the political. Read it carefully: you will see how much it really is an artifact of a revolutionary era, you might say. But you need to have some patience while reading. It will grab you, though. I mean, if you have a taste for poetry, whatever you think of the themes, it will grab you.
I think that this is a well-known poet who wrote that, is that not right?
The cover of the anthology “Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution,” with the titular phrase written in Persian on the wall depicted on the cover.
“When you ask for women’s equality, you should be ready to treat people equally.”
Bänoo Zan: Several books have been published with this title, “Woman Life Freedom,” and some of them are compilations or anthologies of different kinds. But those are insider anthologies, in the sense that the editors reached out to people they knew. We wanted to go the opposite way. We wanted to reach out to anybody we could, because these kinds of insider works leave out a potential group of people who probably could submit better work. They also don't engage the outside writing public in a way that is democratic and equal, which we thought was the spirit of this movement.
When you ask for women's equality, you should be ready to treat people equally. The people who submitted were such good poets who had done a lot of research and knew the subject so well, that if you'd remove the names, you would probably think those poems were written by Iranians. Sometimes you would think that the poems were written by a woman [when actually they were written by a man], and those are interesting interplays.
Poetry is a place of imagination. Literature should let us imagine the other, how it feels to be the other, going through others’ experiences. And I think this anthology really was in the spirit of literature. I would say I didn't have any preconceived notions of a certain group of poems to receive. I didn't have any specific poems in mind so that not receiving them would disappoint me, and then receiving them, I would say, “That's great.” Of course, a lot of them were directly related to the figures in this movement. What I wanted to happen was to create solidarity in writing for a good cause and through good poetry.
Cy Strom: It's hard to write a good poem that functions, say, as sloganeering, war cry, or anthem. When I saw a few of those — I think that some of the submissions on that theme [or] of that style of poem were not especially strong — but when I saw one of those that was quite strong, I would identify that as one that demanded our consideration immediately. There aren't so many in the book. It's hard to write a good one, and they would get tiresome if you were exposed to too many all in the same collection. The collection ranges really widely.
What's the Idea: The variety of subject matter and styles contained within this anthology makes it very readable and very entertaining, on top of being important and educational and inspirational, which should draw readers in, in my opinion, for all the right reasons.
Bänoo Zan: Thank you.
What's the Idea: Several poems were written by the same authors. Was that a happy surprise? Did it matter to you either way? And was it something that you only discovered when you found the names of your accepted poems?
Cy Strom: No, we knew [there were] multiples. Michael [Mirolla, from Guernica] counted a submission batch as a single number. So what we did then was identify each poem by the poem's number and the batch number that Michael gave it, [which meant] we knew when a poet had submitted as many as three poems. We also knew when we had chosen more than one poem, whether happily or regretfully, by a single author.
Bänoo Zan: We wanted to be inclusive, but we also didn't want to discriminate against poets who actually wrote three excellent poems that we felt belonged in the book.
What's the Idea: I wonder if the long submission window gave the authors the opportunity to think about their poems, research, and grow more inspired. It wasn’t a short window where you needed immediate inspiration, which might have been the case for a lot of anthologies.
Bänoo Zan: I think it's Guernica’s process. They schedule anthologies well ahead of their publication date. This actually worked in our favour because when we approached Guernica, the revolution was at the beginning stages, but as editors, we got poems that are relevant to different stages of the still-ongoing revolution. So we got a good collection that talks about the beginning, connects it to other similar movements, and captures it again at the date submissions closed. This process gave us a wide-ranging group of poems.
Also, I have to say that a lot of Iranians, like many other culturally marginalized communities in the West, keep to themselves. Many Iranian and Afghan poets in the diaspora keep writing in our own languages. They're not connected with the English literary world as such. Very few of us are. The year-long submission window gave the chance to those people who write in other languages to collaborate with translators, which is a long process. Also, those poets from our part of the world who do write in English may not have had the opportunity to submit to our anthology at the start of the revolution, as they were either directly or indirectly involved in it and affected by the upheavals. Having the submission window open for one year may have given this group enough space to submit.
“The course of the revolution was charted in the submissions we got... We’re charting a year and a half of turbulent and meaningful events in Iran in this anthology.”
Cy Strom: Bänoo earlier mentioned an Afghan woman poet who wrote a poem that's a beautiful, lyrical poem, a deeply mournful piece. It's mournful, I guess, rather than pessimistic. The mood is a very delicate and ephemeral mood, you've got to say. In any case, it was composed in Berlin. This is an Afghan woman, a lawyer, I think, from Afghanistan, living in Berlin where there is a small cultural organization that aids immigrant and refugee poets to connect with [German poets] and to translate their poetry into German. Her poem was written in Dari, one of the official languages of Afghanistan, closely related to Persian — to Farsi — translated first by an Iranian exile living in Germany into German, translated then into English by a German woman who studied in the UK and who's deeply involved in this poets’ organization, and then edited and refined by the two of us. It's one of my favourites. I'm very happy with some of the lines in that poem. So, that's the journey that one of these poems went through. And others were translated too, of course.
As Bänoo said, and it's a very interesting point, given the long timeline, the course of the revolution was charted in the submissions we got. I will guess that some of the good poems that are simply, you might say, paeans to Mahsa Amini, were possibly written at the start, before the movement had taken much of its form. They might not have been, but you might well expect that.
Others describe in terrible detail the events themselves, what it is to witness a corpse, and the meaning of death for the authorities and for the protesters. Others describe protest, they call out protest chants, you might say. Others, possibly written towards the end, actually reflect on the direction in which this movement is going. Will it succeed? Am I worthy of it? The poet asks sometimes, “Have I already given up hope when the people there have not?”
So we're charting, I guess, the year or so, in fact more than a year, because we opened up our window of acceptances probably about five or six months after the murder of Mahsa Amini and the outbreak of this revolution. We're charting a year and a half of turbulent and meaningful events in Iran in this anthology.
What's the Idea: That's an amazing opportunity to capture a revolution in real time. I'm curious about the framing structure of the book, which is broken into five sections: Beginnings, Defiance, Struggle, Witness, and Futures. How did that come about?
Cy Strom: It emerged organically. At some point, I began with a different set of thematic titles. I began organizing the poems thinking that it's obvious we had some significant themes that we ought to focus on, or that we ought to allow the reader to focus on, at least. Our grouping under some of these headings was completely natural. Some might have been a little arbitrary, but it's valid, I think it holds up.
How did our grouping help you to follow and understand and appreciate the poetry in this book?
What's the Idea: I found that for me, somebody who was relatively being introduced to some of these ideas, I was already getting so many different voices within the anthology, which could be overwhelming to a certain extent. I also had to really think about the struggle and the importance of resistance, which, to be honest, for myself is not something I'm incredibly familiar with. As a Canadian, I haven’t necessarily needed to demonstrate in the same way that we're seeing in Iran. So for me, the structure provided a blueprint of how the revolution started through to the fight itself, and then how the struggle continues, and doesn't end. So it was a natural and helpful framework for me.
Bänoo Zan: I’m glad it worked.
Cy Strom: That's what we hoped it would do. I wrote a little bit about this in the introduction that I wrote to the book, on the theme of witness. And partly that was because I was delighted by voices that were not Iranian voices, or ethnic Persians or Kurds from Iran, who could write authentically about this subject.
And there is such a thing as being an engaged and authentic witness. It's very difficult actually, especially if you try to write from an outsider's perspective. Sometimes you might narrow your perspective: You think of these as news events. You focus on an individual or [on] some thing, and you might not grasp the proper, full meaning that's both valid aesthetically and in terms of messaging. There are witnesses, though, [whose poems do demonstrate this validity], say, people who, as you can sometimes tell in the poem, are looking at the events from the outside, as an outsider: “The Globe and Mail lands on my porch,” something like that.
One writer wrote about her experiences in university classrooms outside of Iran, [that] we now know were in Canada, where feminist issues intersected with what she was thinking of and what engaged and concerned and horrified her in Iran. There are Iranian voices too, poets who, in their poems at least, aren't quite sure how to situate themselves, living in the West and not participating fully in what's happening in Iran, experiencing doubt, guilt, exhilaration, and positioning themselves, I suppose — just because they have difficulty finding their way around this, and as outsiders, in a way — as witnesses, as outsiders and insiders. Some of these are very poignant poems.
Bänoo Zan (pictured above) spent hundreds of hours developing, curating, editing, and contributing to this important collection of poetry defined by feminism, empowerment, and truth. (Photo credit: Alex Usquiano)
What's the Idea: Bänoo, was this a personal project for you? Can I ask, were you Iranian born and then you moved to Canada?
Bänoo Zan: Yes, I've lived most of my life in Iran. As you can tell from my accent, I'm not a native English speaker, which means I was born and raised in Iran. I landed in Canada in 2010. I went through this intense period of feeling as an outsider. I still have that feeling.
One of the things that inspired me to come up with the idea of this anthology is that marginalization has different forms. There's an intense kind of cultural marginalization that happens when as an immigrant you are not considered an active participant in shaping the culture of your adopted country but are seen as a consumer of other people’s pronouncements on issues of importance that affect you. Even though I have been actively involved in the poetry scene and the poetry community, I have received this message in many forms: “Don’t expect us to consider your issues. We have already decided which issues are important here, and we have also figured out the solutions for them. We don’t consider you an independent thinker. You are valuable to us only as a dumb follower. You are not allowed to disagree or have opinions of your own.”
It seems as if the cultural conversation that Canadians have among themselves, despite acknowledgments of diversity, doesn't include immigrants. It includes the second-generation immigrants. It is as if Canadians tell us, “When you lose your accent, when you forget the language of your ancestors, when you lose access to the literature written in your own home country, then, ‘Welcome to our group.’”
It's very hard to highlight the importance of events in other parts of the world and how they impact Canada and the West in general. Immigrants don't have only a linguistic accent. We have a political and a cultural accent. For example, feminism in the West is now a bit confused. At the beginning, feminism was, and still is, about women's rights and women's struggles against patriarchy. The feminists in the West at some point decided that, for example, the hijab is a symbol of empowerment. Whereas, for most feminists in Muslim-majority countries, the hijab is the most visible symbol of oppression. There's no way around it. As the Iranian case has demonstrated, most women living in Muslim-majority countries, if offered real meaningful options, wouldn't choose the hijab.
“One function that this book is performing for Iranians is self-critique. It kind of shatters the stereotype of Middle Easterners and Muslims not being critical of our own religions and our own cultures.”
So the Iranian case [of protests against the hijab] really confused the West, to say the least, and there were attempts at trying to justify the hijab, saying, “Those who protest against the hijab are motivated by the West.” There is nothing Western about self-critique. We've always objected to this imposition, as evidenced by history.
We've had interesting experiences when we were reaching out with the call. One function that this book is performing for Iranians is self-critique. It kind of shatters the stereotype of Middle Easterners and Muslims not being critical of our own religions and our own cultures. This anthology and the movement that inspired it prove that we have always criticized our culture and our religion, and struggled to change them. The factor that doesn't allow us to change organically is the dictatorships in place. We love freedom. We love to have choices. We don't want to be confined to inflexible ideologies of the past.
Iranians and Muslims who contributed to this anthology are self-critical. We're criticizing our culture and our religion. And we should be supported in this critique by well-meaning people. Nowadays, if you want to criticize the hijab, the Western progressives will not allow it! But why not? It's an idea. The hijab is a manifestation. It's a religious practice, and a political expression. We should be allowed to criticize anything that doesn't answer the current realities.
We are caught in the middle of this confusion. Censorship in the West happens through our own peers. As Mona Eltahawy, the Egyptian feminist, says, it's as if some well-meaning people want to save or rescue our own culture and our own religion from us, as if that is more important than us.
Cy Strom: May I read the last page of the final poem in this anthology, one of Bänoo’s poems? It's the one that is a narration of the woman who is whipped for not wearing her hijab. The woman is speaking in Bänoo’s voice here as poet.
“It was finished.
We left.
I didn't let them think it hurt.
We went up to the office of
the public-executioner-judge.
I removed my hijab.
The woman said: Please put it on
and pulled it over my head.
The judge said:
If you want to live differently
you can live abroad.
I said:
“This country belongs to all.”
He said:
Yes, we're not happy either, but it's the law.
I said:
“Let the law do what it can.
We'll continue our resistance.
We left the room
And I removed my hijab.”
Bänoo Zan: The Iranian regime can best be described as a totalitarian theocracy. It is totalitarian in the sense that it reaches into the most private and personal aspects of people's lives. Because it's a theocracy, they speak in the name of God so you can't fight it. I mean, if you fight it…
What's the Idea: Then you’re breaking the word of God, not just the law.
Cy Strom: That contention allows narrow and violent people to oppress others while thinking that they're fully justified and allowed, and there's no proper control over them but the divine sanction that they are realizing, [that] they think they're following.
What's the Idea: Did the idea for this anthology change throughout the process?
Bänoo Zan: For me, the idea stayed the same. When we reached out to Guernica, they said that usually for their anthologies, they have only one editor, but I wanted another editor to collaborate with me on this project. I already had the idea of working with Cy because he's a fabulous editor and a polyglot. He reads on arts and culture in different languages every day. And he's clearly not an Iranian.
Cy Strom (pictured above) served as co-editor of this volume. He hoped the poems in the anthology would “uncover the dimension of the people's experience in Iran, or outside of Iran, of this women's revolution.” (Photo credit: Bänoo Zan)
I thought that having two editors for this anthology would be a good choice because if I were the only editor, that would mean the poems would be written for and then chosen by an Iranian, so everybody would be ultimately writing for me, an Iranian. But I wanted people to write for the world, not for Iranians only. We also had no other criteria except poetry. We didn't choose the poems based on the identity of the submitters.
We didn't want only Iranians to be in this book. One of my critiques against the Iranian diaspora in the West is that they are culturally isolated. They are self-isolating. They mostly hang out with each other, go to Iranian cultural events, Iranian poetry, Iranian whatnot. There's a huge community, but as a community, they're not interested in the world around them. I find this lack of cultural curiosity unacceptable in Iranians [here], as they are highly educated professionals.
I wanted Iranians to get out of our isolation. We wanted an anthology in English, knowing that most Iranians write in Persian. We wanted to say, “Iranians, it's time you write for the world.” I also wanted other people not to distance themselves from Iranians. I didn’t want them to say, “This is an Iranian issue, so I don't want to get involved. I don't want to add my voice.” I wanted to send the message that you can and you should add your voice. So non-Iranians are writing for me, and Iranians are writing for Cy. The contributors know that there are two editors, one is Iranian, one is not. One is a woman and one is a man. So, you have to write a good poem that appeals to people with diverse identities, genders, nationalities, languages, and cultures.
Literature should appeal to the world. A lot of literature is being produced and published and performed in communities closed upon themselves. People with the same ideology, the same lifestyle, the same attitude, and even the same language. But that is not the literature that connects the world across differences. It's a happy coincidence that we are published by Guernica Editions because their motto is “No borders, no limits.” Literature has no borders and no limits. And hopefully this attempt inspires more Iranians to write for the world and more of the world to write in solidarity with Iranians. I wanted a two-way communication to happen in this anthology.
Cy Strom: I agree. I have nothing to add to that. It satisfied my hopes entirely. I think that our hopes were wildly optimistic, and yet they were realized.
What's the Idea: Was there anything that you wanted to highlight that you learned from creating this book? And what are you working on now as a result of it?
Cy Strom: We learned that we can work together effectively on a complex and difficult project. Bänoo has plans, with an offering for me, I think, on one of her projects.
Bänoo Zan: We may collaborate more again on similar projects. I was asked to be the editor of a special issue of a Canadian magazine with a slightly different theme. And I suggested to collaborate with Cy for that. Because I liked our collaboration on this one. I liked going out of my comfort zone and I think that the project is much better for it. Cy is a phenomenal editor and has a fabulous work ethic. Each one of us has already spent hundreds of hours on this project. He worked as hard as I did, and he was committed to this project as much as I was. It was a pleasure to feel that I'm not alone in this project. I really liked it.
[To Cy] Thank you.
What's the Idea: To have that immediate solidarity and support is sometimes a rare thing on projects like this, and it's so important. It must have been great to have that validation and support throughout the process.
Bänoo Zan: Yes, it was.
“Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution” is available directly from Guernica Editions, and is available to order through national chains and local bookstores.
Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom are going on tour to promote “Woman Life Freedom.” Here are some of the dates where you can meet them and support them directly:
The Edmonton launch is happening April 13 2025 at Audreys Books.
The Vancouver launch is happening April 15 2025 at Book Warehouse.
The Toronto launch is happening Sunday May 18 2025 at Another Story Bookshop.
Interview recorded over Google Meet on March 16, 2025.
All photos are the property of Bänoo Zan unless otherwise credited.
Edited by Matthew Long and APT Editing