What is this phenomenon called Googoosh? No home in Tajikistan is without her tapes. When she came out of Iran after 20 years of silence and gave her first concert in Canada, the Iranian diaspora exploded. The conspiratory theorists saw her as an explant by the reformist regime inside the country. She was let out to persuade us that things are really changing back home. Or was it a way of getting those desperately needed dollars back into the country. True or false, such accusations are essentially irrelevant. The Googoosh phenomenon in the contemporary Iranian scene has to be seen to a great extent independent of the wish of this or that person.
Her first concert in Toronto was ecstatically received. She followed these by a US tour. Among her new songs was Zardosht (Zoreaster). “Why must I not sing” – she sang in that powerful, and now matured, voice to a rapturous crowd in London last January, as part of her European tour. “I will sing the voice of the children of war, the weeping of the mothers”. Elsewhere she sings:
In the winter
In the rain
My town is all spring,
All birds
News came
Bad news.
In the broken city gate
There is no one to ask these strangers
Where everything is birds
The hunter’s hand is hunting for a throat.
While the hunter lies in wait
Love is confined to the house.
In another:
It is raining
On the enslaved earth
On the dried up pot
Beside the prison bars.
A look at the audience in that London concert goes some way to explain the Googoosh phenomenon. It was entirely secular. Only a handful of headscarves. Even those believers who have little love for the Islamic Republic (and there are many) were strikingly absent. Many were middle aged but with a surprising number of the young – people who could only have a second hand memory of what Googoosh stood for. This was secular Iran – mostly affluent. The minimum £30 ticket, sold out in a few days, filtered out the refugees. But search their homes or minicabs and there too you will find a tape or CD of pol (bridge). What does Googoosh stand for that makes the reaction to her so vivid – whether for or against?
The ballad occupies a special place in the heart of the Iranian people – young and old memorise it, sing it at home, in parties, in picnics, everywhere. Googoosh was part of a handful of singers (Dariush comes to mind) who represented secular modernity in pre-revolutionary Iran. Without the vulgarity. They used the ballad (tasnif) to express what could not be expressed in print. Some singers allied themselves with progressive poets who used the ballad to convey their message of protest to a huge audience. Using allegory they spoke against injustice, against inequality. In gole gandom (wheat flower) Dariush echoed the peasant:
The wheat flower (seed) is mine
All I plant is yours
A hands-breadth of land is mine
All I own is yours.
The ballad, a popular art form became a vehicle of a populist protest [1] In pol, by Iraj Jonnati Attai’ Googoosh asks:
Let us divide our loneliness …
Let our hands,
between you and me
become a bridge to link us
The last word a double entendre also meaning “to sacrifice”.
Why should I be scared of the night shadows
You gave me the sun to keep.
It was perhaps no coincidence that Googoosh used this song as an encore.
Elsewhere the poet tells us to abandon our “wooden horse”. In Mah-pishuni – a mythical figure in Iranian poetry who brings happiness – Atai’ asks us to forget the myth. Mah-pishuni is among us, is in our own strength. In mordab (Googoosh lamented the wasted energy of youth dried up in prison, using the analogy of a river stagnating under the desert sun having sunk in the ditches dug in its path.
The old songs were among her best. It was obvious that a large part of the audience clamoured for the happier songs, those with rhythm and dancing. Here too the gulf between the inside and outside of the country was evident. In an Iran politicised to its very core, Googoosh can only circulate in clandestine tapes. Her live voice has been banned, excluded by dictat since a woman’s voice corrupts. Popular song disappeared – banned as “banal”. But men were allowed to sing classical songs. Women were totally silenced. Enforced silence replaced the voice of women.
“Why can I not sing?” laments the silenced singer, who chose to stay behind. I wish I could sing for you alongside all the others back home, she added, in prose. Why must I be forced to sing to an audience who only want to hear the joy and not the sadness that engulfs my country, I read in her voice. I could have added why have you price-excluded those over here who might have responded to those messages – still true today, 20-30 years after you first sang them?
Mehdi Kia
Footnote:
1. See interview with Iraj Jonnati Atai’. iran bulletin winter 1994.