Silencing Poetic Journalism

            On Wednesday night I received a message from Bänoo Zan confirming that she’d received the review of Shab-e She’r that I’d sent her on Monday. I’ve been writing reviews of Shab-e Sher for my blog at www.christian---christian.blogspot.com since 2013 as well as publishing them with newz4u.ca but Bänoo didn’t become Facebook friends for another year. I began sending her my reviews in the form of links to newz4u.ca in 2016. By my count I have sent her twenty-six reviews. She has read them all and has sometimes sent them to others and has often talked about how they have helped her become a better host. She has also mentioned my reviews on a couple of occasions to the audience at Shab-e She’r and praised them as a contribution to promoting the event.

            But on Wednesday night Bänoo’s tone was different. Suddenly she reminded me that MLA guidelines say that no more than 20% of one’s writing can come from quotations. I’m not sure why she feels that MLA is relevant for a literary review, since those guidelines only apply to some academic papers like most of the essays that I write for my courses at U of T. 
            She added that she did not think I should quote unpublished poetry because it might ruin the poets' chances of having those works published. I suggested that the reverse is more likely true. She said that I need permission to quote people.

            Considering that this had never come up during any of our many hug-punctuated friendly conversations over years of me writing these reviews, I commented that I found it interesting that she would bring it up now. I said it was interesting because two days before that I had commented on something she had posted on Facebook. She had said that the SNC Lavalin case had disturbed her in that it had shown her that Canada is more similar to Iran than it would like to pretend. I had responded by asking for her to list Canada’s similarities to Iran. She said that in both countries principled politicians have been threatened into silence. She added that neither country is a democracy, since Iran is a theocracy and Canada is a constitutional monarchy.

            I assume she was implying that Wilson-Raybould had been threatened into silence and I told her that I don’t think anyone was threatened. I asked her to name a country that does not have these similarities as she perceives them but she didn’t really answer me. She just started saying how things are in other countries is irrelevant to the way that Canada should be.

            I argued that the comparison that she had made between Canada and Iran is a dramatic stretch and pointed out that Canada is the most democratic country in the Americas and the sixth most democratic country in the world. If being a constitutional monarchy were an impediment to democracy then Norway would not be considered the most democratic country on our planet. I admitted that there is lots of progress that still needs to be made in Canada but that she her comparison between Iran and Canada had implied equivalence. I added that the fact that Bänoo is here and not there suggests that the similarities between the two countries are of drastically different degrees.

            At this point she accused me of expressing a colonialist mentality and argued that I was expecting her and other immigrants to feel gratitude for being here and to not voice criticism. I don’t how she drew that from my comment. She is as Canadian as I am with every right to criticize the government and is under no obligation to be grateful. I made a simple comparison because I know that Bänoo came here because there was a serious danger of her going to prison in Iran for criticizing the government. It’s just a fact that such a thing could not happen to anyone here. She said that Canada collaborates with dictators in her part of the world to drive citizens from their homelands and that as a collaborator Canada is as much to blame as the perpetrators. I admitted that there is some degree of culpability on Canada’s part but not enough to make it “as much” to blame as the dictators.

            At this point Bänoo stopped responding and the first I heard from her again was two days later when she suddenly brought up these issues about my literary reviews. She claimed that she had been “uneasy” about my quoting other poets for a while.

She told me that just as she doesn’t want anyone to photograph anyone else without permission at Shab-e She’r she does not want me to quote others without permission. She did not offer though, as she does with the photographer at each event, to announce that if anyone at the reading does not want to be quoted they should let me know. That would have been a logical compromise. To expect me to walk around locating 25 poets at the event and to ask each one for permission to quote them would take half the night and I’d have no time to write a review.

I told her that if something had bothered me I would not have waited three years to bring it up. I said that the fact that it did not bother her enough before to speak about it while it suddenly bothers her now is very suspicious.

At this point she just said, “Enough of this! You are no longer welcome at the event!"

I was quite surprised. I said, “You really hate being disagreed with. It’s sad that you can’t see that you’re being petty and vindictive.”

Her final response was that I use trickery to get what I want and to silence others.

I couldn’t figure that one out at all. I told her that this would have been an entirely different conversation three years ago if it had been brought up outside of the context of being mad at me about something else.

By the time I’d tried to send this last message Bänoo had already unfriended me.

Ironically, she has silenced a voice that has avidly promoted her poetry series for the last six years. She has also cut off a conduit that has given the poets at her event a voice in the form of published reviews. This is a sad silencing of poetic journalism.