My mother tongue is burdened by the accent of exile (2020)
My mother tongue is burdened by the accent of exile is a sound, video and interactive work highlighting the loss and longing for ancestral cultural literacy, created by Golboo Amani in collaboration with Maryam Hafizirad and Mohammad Rezaei. Through personal interviews and poetic recitations this digital exhibition unpacks the fear of cultural erasure and the longing for ancestral kinship experienced by immigrants and diaspora.
As young children, Golboo Amani’s parents assigned her and her older sister poems to memorize and recite. These poems, which took the form of fairy tales, were about dark times and hopeful futures. They were given as gifts, and tied them to their ancestors and a motherland they have yet to experience. These were the offerings of immigrant parents who feared the impending loss of their mother tongue and with it their cultural heritage.
My mother tongue is burdened by the accent of exile is a visual and auditory recitation of “Pariya" by Ahmad Shamlu, the poem Amani was assigned to learn as a child. In collaboration with artist Maryam Hafizirad, the work responds to the Iranian tradition of poetry as a teaching tool for cultivating cultural literacy and language skills. The work addresses the linguistic mechanisms of inclusion and otherness, while also unpacking the poem’s meaning through various forms of translation and interpretation.
While popularized by iconic poets like Hafez and Rumi, poetry and oral compositions have long been the fabric of Persian culture. The tradition spans several millennia, and has been used to expound on philosophy, science and virtually every other field of scholarship. A conventional Iranian education included the memorization of poems and verses as part of standard education. Elders, including Amani’s parents, still recite the poems and proverbs of their childhood. In modern times, however, political turmoil produced poems that eluded the triggers of censorship through metaphor and fantasy. Ahmad Shamlu and his fairy tale poem “Pariya” is one such example.
This multimedia recitation of “Pariya” centres divergent articulations, marking them as the conditions of diaspora, and acknowledging the shifts in cultural literacy between a generation of expats and their displaced kin.
Graphic Design by Natasha Whyte-Gray.
