Haji As Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque - Roger Sedarat (The Word Works)

Today's book of poetry:
Haji As Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque.  Roger Sedarat.  The Word Works.  Washington, D.C.  2017.

Winner of the 2016 Tenth Gate Prize

"We are but puppets; heaven but the puppet player."

-- Omar Khayyam

"Well I got the fever down in my pockets.

The Persian drunkard, he follows me."

-- Bob Dylan

In Haji As Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque Roger Sedarat is the trickster at full throttle.  Haji As Puppet is out to confront every stereotype there is between the Mid-East and Texas.  Sedarat is fearlessly inspired as he takes his Iranian-American heritage and romps.

In the first poem Today's book of poetry will share Sedarat's co-conspirators/indicters include Marjorie Perloff, Kenneth Goldsmith, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Picasso and Ezra Pound.  Sedarat people's his work with contradictions and hope until his true purpose is revealed.  As his buddy Ezra would say "make it real," but Sedarat, the standing on his head modernist says no, "Let it be real."

You'd be easily fooled into a casual and comfortable lull reading Haji As Puppet if you only followed the comedy, Sedarat has one hell of a sense of humour.  But these poems are so much richer than mere humour.  Sedarat isn't asking, he is telling; when he says "Let it be real."

Haji's Blue Guitar

Unlike so many mischief-makers,

Haji's the antitheses of trickster,

flavourless factoid, mimicry of mundane.

Having read, with great indifferent interest

Marjorie Perloff''s Unoriginal Genius

and Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing

he allays all anxiety of influence,

surrendering to the lines of Stevens' poetry

on seemingly pre-programmed strings

of his own blue guitar,

travis-picking the master's first three sections

as he circulates copies of Picasso's famous painting

to remind the audience

how the original old guitarist

played against a background of blue

expression of the artist's grief,

x-rays revealing three figures

behind the visible oil paint,

ghostly bones of a close friend's suicide.

But those were different times.

Even Stevens' blue inversion

declaring the guitar a thing unto itself

ultimately changed things

upon the blue guitar.

Not so with Haji,

for whom things as they are

remain just as they are.

Thus he attempts to replicate

this reductive spirit of self,

received reality in the 21st century,

rewriting Pound's modernist maxim,

"Make it new: underpinning most verse

with an admonition of the tradition

inherited in his own time

Let it be real.

...

Is Sedarat claiming the ground between recent Noble Prize winning bard, Bob Dylan and Omar Khayyam?  Is Sedarat setting up camp between a Persian poet of the past and a Jewish born, born-again minstrel from Minnesota?  Well, yes.

Sedarat's Haji As Puppet is political and confrontational, his unassailable reason as wide in breadth as his unapologetic black humour.  How can you not rejoice when Willie the Shakes' Caliban goes to Harvard via the CIA and Nietzsche appears on the set of Paul Newman's classic "Cool Hand Luke?" Sedarat is setting a full plate with his "Orientalist Burlesque," this is no Genie-in-the-bottle Persian Night.  Sedarat is beautifully seditious, he wants these poems to crack the colonial wall.

When The Puppet

Made His Way West...

he got caught by Israeli soldiers,

hung up in mockery

on the Great Wall of Gaza

beside Banksy's balloon girl.

Despite taunts

from children

on both sides

of politics

he insisted

on his sermon:

"In 1987, when defense minister Yitzhak Rabin in Israel

ordered soldiers to break the bones

of protesters waving the Palestinian flag,

Haji longed to walk the streets

holding two halves of a watermelon,

ubiquitous signifier of displaced country,

green skin, red fruit, black seeds, and white rind

reproducing the real thing.

But when Haji samuri-sworded his melon,

a white dove flew onto the streets of Gaza,

its neck bleeding from an inadvertent cut.

After flying through smoke from burning tires,

it crashed into the image of an olive branch covered

with graffiti on a billboard."

                     *

Haji's black face, painted with used motor oil, reflects

western images of the Middle East. When he arrives

turbaned on a camel with a cartoon saber, he's not so

much trying to subvert the gaze of network news as

reiterate the status quo. (It's a dirty job, but somebody's

got to do it.)

...

Haji As Puppet allows Sedarat to loose Haji, his sensational everyman, onto the unsuspecting reader. It is a gift.  Haji gleefully kicks the crap out of racist stereotypes that we have long accepted as reason in the west.

Sedarat is relentless as he catalogues those places where cultures and race collide.  His disdain at our collective ignorance is justified with the sharp edge of every single poem.  Roger Sedarat romps through contemporary pop culture and the history of the world with equal candor and perception.  If we are lucky Haji As Puppet will not be Haji's last poetic appearance.

Haji's Waterboarding

     I've lost it all my life all lost--

     the sky the earth the moon all lost.

     Don't hand me wine. Pour it in my mouth.

     (I've even lost the way to my mouth.)

                                               -- Jalaluddin Rumi

At one with a pitcher of water,

he channels Rumi,

the Other pouring wine

down his gullet, a vessel

without agency,

"the hand"

sans possession--

like the French that killed

the spirit of the letter

along with the author--

waterboarding the bastard

who insists he's empty

of all meaning.

Inspector:     So...Monsieur Haji, you are z'ee front for an

                     American poet, no?

Haji:             (No reply)

Inspector:     Perhaps your throat is too dry to talk. Maybe you

                     would like some water. Perhaps you will drink it,

                     how do z'ey say, in the American manner?

(One gloved hand pinches the nose, the other pours a pitcher of 

water down the throat.)

Inspector:      Et comme ca, we shorten the poetic line z'ee

                      breath, no? (Haji gasps for air.)

Inspector:       Dites-moi, qui est Monsieur Sedarat?

Haji:               I do not know the man.

(Inspector relentlessly pours pitcher after pitcher of water down

Haji's throat.)

Haji:                "Okay okay!" (coughing) Please! No more! I did

                        meet him once....before.

Inspector:         Before what?

Haji:                 He died as romantic martyr...for poetry.

Inspector:         So Monsieur Haji. We are finished for now. We 

                         arrive at your post-confession. I think at this

                         point you...how do z'ey say, get the pitcher?

...

Roger Sedarat's Haji As Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque is one of those books that could easily be required reading in a course on modern geo-politics, gender studies, poetry, Middle-Eastern relations, and so on.  Haji As Puppet is essential stuff, especially at this point in history

Sedarat takes a giant step towards demystifying the Persian world and debunking the west's lazy thinking.  That's a lot to do in a book of poems.

And he'll make you laugh.

Roger Sedarat

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Sedarat is an Iranian-American poet and translator, author of three previous poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio UP's 2007 Hollis Summers' Prize; Ghazal Games (Ohio UP, 2011); and Foot Faults: Tennis Poems (David Robert Books, 2016). A recent recipient of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, he teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York.

BLURBS

"From the opening act of this provocative literary burlesque, the reader will recognize the startling truths behind this timely and biting satire. Roger Sedarat's commentary about empire, its devious hold over our appetites and narcissisms, over our ignorance and phobias, confronts us with our complicity in our own manipulation, making us uncomfortable and accountable. HAJI AS PUPPET is political theater at its most entertaining, at its most daring."

     —Rigoberto González

"Roger Sedarat has created what I consider one of the greatest masterpieces of the Iranian-American canon. HAJI AS PUPPET is a psychedelic romp through ancient Persian psyche all the way through modern Iranian hellscapes via the American imagination. This piercing Middle Eastern minstrelsy is unapologetically raw in its collisions with race, gender, sexuality, and pop culture. Sedarat truly understands the punk soul of Persian satire, and the way conviviality lives with calamity and pandemonium razes ritual. This is not your baba's Rumi—and thank goodness!"

      —Porochista Khakpour

Roger Sedarat

"Iran"--One word poem (with introduction) by Roger Sedarat

Video: Haji Sedarat

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