“Where Is the Friend’s Home?”: New World Landscapes in Sohrab Sepehri’s Poetic Geography

Abstract

Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), the Iranian poet, painter, and translator, wrote during the tumultuous decades before the Islamic revolution in Iran (1979), concurrent with global decolonizing movements. At a time when many of his contemporaries were active participants in the “Committed” literary movement and wrote ostensibly political poetry, Sepehri’s work was considered apolitical and thus marginal in the revolutionary discourse of the time. This article demonstrates how his writing in fact worked towards decolonizing the mind of the Iranian subject by creating his own unique language of revolt–a language that refrained from engaging in the East-West binarism of this discourse. His language of revolt comes out of his subversive view of culture and through his frequent travels to global literary spaces while simultaneously de-centering these spaces. I analyze his poem "Address" in tandem with its visual representation by Abbas Kiarostami to present the embodiment of his poetic geography.