An Elegy for the Lost Identity

This house is steeped in sorrow.

Its bricks are hewn from the heaviest minerals of the earth –

Bricks fashioned out of memories.

Memories that are our sole wealth in exile.

Heavy bricks, yet invisible,

Weight without form,

Presence without a body.

I became a light, like many more before me and like many more hereafter,

A light that slowly fades away,

And if lucky,

Only a trace remains.

I once had a name,

Shaped like the tall stature of a woman!

Fervent and warm,

With hair neighing like horses in the wind.

I once had a name,

Like a child in a meadow,

Barefoot chasing butterflies.

Now, I’m but a lucid light –

Whose name the sands of time have swept away.

Like my forebearers and those yet to come,

I have risen from my own ashes;

I have gone forth to war against the dark spectres of Oblivion,

And with a body scored by wounds,

Have sought refuge

In the womb of my desolation.

I am unmoored,

Adrift within this alien city.

This city that is not mine,

Nor does it claim me as its own.

The maw of this city is vast,

The maw of this city is deep,

And I, like all the others,

Fight to hold fast to my name.

P.S. This poem is written for the sorrows and struggles of exile, and losing all that defines a person as who they are.

Dr. Behnaz Amani

I‘m from the Middle East, the cradle of civilisation, yet ironically the place that each day reminds me of this part of Dante‘s Inferno Canto iii "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here". As a woman, a poet and a literary scholar, I can paint the 21st-century human condition and his/her hopes, endeavours, devastations, and beliefs with my words; my audience can see each like an Alice who dares to enter the rabbit hole. I am a former political prisoner of Iran’s recent revolt Woman, Life, Freedom who spent almost two months in Gharchak Women‘s Prison and only bailed out due to her uterus cancer. I used to teach English Literature at the university but after my imprisonment, they expelled me from university and prohibited me from publishing anything academically or non-academically. Thanks to dear Mr. Charles Bernstein and other American poets who ran a petition for me, my voice was heard first by PEN America and then by PEN Germany.