The Great Anthem

Translator’s Note

Ahmad Shamlou is arguably modern Iran’s most renowned poet. Throughout his career, he stood for his people’s freedom from despotism and oppression, whether under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of the shah or under the oppressive Islamic Republic that replaced it after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. When I was asked in 2021 to speak on an American Studies Association panel about global solidarities with the struggle to end the Korean War, I looked to Shamlou’s 1951 poem “The Great Anthem”1 to help me link the ongoing Iranian freedom struggle with the call for a decolonizing peace in the Korean peninsula.2 It is one of his lesser-known poems, which I have translated into English here. This is the first published English translation of the poem in its entirety. In an essay following the translation, I provide context for the poem and argue that its trailblazing Third World internationalism remains profoundly vital today, even as conditions in Iran, Korea, and the world have changed significantly over the last seventy years.

The Great Anthem

To Shen-Chu,3 unknown Korean comrade

Ahmad Shamlou’s Third World Internationalism: “The Great Anthem” Then and Now

The Korean War has been called the “forgotten” and “unknown” war.13 As part of its Cold War crusade to maintain its global dominance and shore up its power in Asia against the Soviet Union, the United States went to harrowing lengths in Korea. Despite dominant narratives that bookend the conflict between 1950 and 1953, the war was in fact precipitated by the 1945 division of Korea, which had been initiated by the United States without consultation of the Korean people.14 What came to pass was an extremely asymmetrical war in which the United States led genocidal bombing campaigns in the country.15 The war left an estimated four million people dead, the vast majority of them Korean civilians.16 The killing of both North and South Korean civilians must be condemned and remembered. Given historical amnesia regarding U.S.-led atrocities during the war, however, it feels important to acknowledge that the number of civilians killed by U.S. forces and allied forces under U.S. command overwhelms the number killed by North Korean forces.17 There has never been a formal end to the war, and U.S. imperial militarism in the region continues today.18 Ahmad Shamlou’s poem “The Great Anthem” remains as testimony to this so-called forgotten tragedy.

The poem’s testimonial aspect, however, extends beyond the war. Shamlou addresses the poem to Shen-Chu, his comrade in Korea who is “unknown” to the reader—indeed “unseen” by much of the world. He links the war to global struggles against fascism, dictatorship, and imperialism: from Nazi concentration camps to the Greek Civil War to the resistance of the “free and daring prisoners of the South” against Western colonial and imperial powers. While Iran is never mentioned in the poem, Shamlou penned it during an upsurge of working-class mobilization in the lead-up to the democratic premiership of Mohammad Mosaddegh, mobilizations that clearly affected his thinking at the time of writing. In the early 1950s, as the Cold War was beginning, the United States targeted both Iran and Korea as the first test cases for a new era of U.S. imperialism. The Korean War marked the first significant military intervention by the United States in the Cold War. Around the same time in 1953, Iran became the site of the U.S. state’s first ever coup d’état against a foreign government. This CIA-engineered military coup overthrew the then prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had been democratically elected by the country’s parliament. U.S. leaders were angered that Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s oil, which up until then had been controlled by a private British corporation known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (predecessor of today’s BP). When Shamlou penned “The Great Anthem” in July 1951, a popular movement behind Mosaddegh and his National Front was already in full swing on the streets. As part of this dissent, Iranians resisted sending troops to the Korean War, forcing their government to stay out of the war.19 Their message resonated with Shamlou’s here: “our heart is with you.” Mass meetings and strikes were carried out by oil workers for better housing and wages and in support of oil nationalization.20 The poem’s reference to Downing Street implies this popular Iranian outpour against the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, as does the reference to Henry F. Grady, U.S. ambassador to Greece and then Iran in these turbulent years. In the months leading up to the poem’s writing, thousands of people protested in the streets for oil nationalization and for broader democratic elections and freedoms, signaling their desire to move away from the country’s dictatorial monarchy. As a result of Mosaddegh’s premiership and its popular backing, the reigning monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was stripped of much of his absolute power by May 1953.21 These protests affected Shamlou deeply, pushing him to write a poem in the spirit of global solidarity with the Korean people and the struggling peoples of the world. By the time the U.S.-led coup overthrew Mosaddegh in August 1953, the Korean and Iranian test cases had set the stage for a new era of U.S. imperialism, an era that included sites like the Vietnam War and coups in Guatemala and Chile.

“The Great Anthem” illustrates an early example of Third World internationalism, a phenomenon that took flight in the second half of the 1950s, years after Shamlou wrote the poem. The poem expressed such internationalism precisely at a time when both Korea and Iran were treated as laboratories for subsequent U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War. While today many refer to the Third World as the Global South, Shamlou used the phrase “prisoners of the South” to honor anticolonial rebels across the Third World.22 We might therefore understand the poem as a displacement of the East/West divide inaugurated by European colonialism and instead see it as a south–south connection: a poet “of the south” speaks to a distant brother who is also of the south.23

Even as the poem acts against the racism and imperialist violence of Western powers against Koreans, some references gave me pause during the translation process and their complexity is worth exploring. Shamlou’s description of Shen-Chu as “my dear yellow-skinned brother,” for example, touches on a fraught history. On the one hand, the term yellow is a racial slur against East Asian peoples, which has its roots in European colonial discourses. It remains a derogatory term today. On the other hand, the reference also resonates with the ways in which Asian American revolutionaries in the United States would briefly reclaim yellow in the late 1960s as part of a broader ethos of Third World resistance. For instance, “Yellow Power” became a symbol of this ethos in the 1960s, as revolutionary poets like Amy Uyematsu write:

Shamlou’s invocation of the term is informed by a similar coalitional ethos. Still, despite this short-lived reclamation among Asian Americans, it is important to acknowledge the term’s larger racist baggage. Some readers may understandably feel alienated by the reference, even if they are moved by Shamlou’s pioneering of the idea of Third World solidarity—a new idea at that time. Further, with regard to the reference to the eyes of Shen-Chu’s newlywed wife, I thought of how eye shape figures within a broader harmful history of the exoticization of Asian women and I wondered how the reference here might play into this history. Yet, I also reflected on whether there was a complexity within the reference that went beyond this familiar trope. In likening her eyes to the roofs under which the Korean people will fight the U.S. occupation, Shamlou’s metaphor arguably invokes the racialized body as a source of militant struggle and pride rather than as an object of shame, ridicule, or conquest the way it was invoked in Western colonial and imperialist discourses. Ultimately, however, Shen-Chu’s wife appears only as a peripheral device in a poem that rests on masculinist notions of brotherhood. This is indicative of the broader heteronormative script within which Third World internationalist projects often took place, and that reproduced patriarchal hierarchies and oppressions.25 Shamlou’s gender consciousness did evolve, however, throughout his later work.26

A major aspect of the poem is the spirit of militancy that runs throughout it and that exemplifies Shamlou’s broader understanding, especially in his early work, of poetry as resistance. In Shamlou’s well-known poem “A Poetry That Is Life,” Shen-Chu is named again as someone with whom the poet “fought shoulder to shoulder” with his verse. In this poem he writes:

Shamlou’s view that poetry had a role to play in people’s struggles for equality and justice also propelled him to translate non-Iranian poets and writers into Persian—including Langston Hughes, Octavio Paz, and Federico García Lorca—as a form of solidarity with movements across the world.28

How does “The Great Anthem,” a poem that Shamlou wrote when he was twenty-five, figure within his larger political and aesthetic evolution throughout the rest of his life? Two years after he wrote the poem, Shamlou would become a member of the Tudeh Party, a major Iranian communist party highly active in those years. He was imprisoned for one year after Mosaddegh’s ouster due to his political activities.29 Following his release from prison, he left Tudeh, having become disillusioned with its leaders and the party’s alignment with the Soviet Union. Even though he retreated from a direct involvement in politics throughout the rest of his life, much of his poetry in the following decades still reflected his socialist sympathies. This included poems he wrote in honor of socialist revolutionaries. In 1979, after Iranians had overthrown the shah, he remarked, “In our age, a true and successful revolution is one which results in the complete liberation of the hard-working masses from the servitude of capital and solves the problem of profiteering among men. I mean a ‘revolution’ cannot be in any other shape and form. . . . It cannot have any other definition or adjective or preposition.”30 This remark must be understood in light of the revolution that had just happened in his country. Given the democratic aspirations of many of the revolution’s participants, Shamlou’s words warned that a “true revolution” would evade his people if the elites of the Islamic clergy were to consolidate power and build an oppressive new system that kept capitalism intact. Indeed, this is precisely what happened, and, in the summer of 1979, the poet started an opposition journal called Ketab-e Jom’eh that denounced the oppression of the new regime.31 He faced censorship in the coming years and remained an outspoken critic of the Islamic Republic until his death. Everyday people in Iran continue to take inspiration from Shamlou. As an example, his verse “I am not your enemy / I am your denial” became a rallying cry for protesters in postrevolutionary Iran who have resisted the authoritarian Islamic Republic and demanded democratic freedoms.32 In sum, Shamlou’s broader trajectory shows that he sympathized with a socialism that enshrined the freedom of human thought as part of its revolutionary project.

Reading “The Great Anthem” today in light of the poet’s journey, then, is a testament to anti-imperialist solidarity without endorsing the current oppressive Iranian state as a paragon of anti-imperialism. Neither can the poem be exploited as an endorsement of the current oppressive North Korean government, given Shamlou’s broader journey. These would be anachronistic readings and, at worst, insincere readings that erase the poet’s broader legacy and principles. Rather, reading “The Great Anthem” today in light of the poet’s journey testifies to the pressing need for solidarity across the Global South and the world broadly in the face of today’s overlapping crises of global capitalism—including climate catastrophe, interimperialist wars, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the refueling of authoritarianism and Far-Right movements the world over. Shamlou’s address to Shen-Chu is the address of Iranians in struggle then and now to Koreans in struggle who continue to work for social, economic, and political justice across the peninsula and diaspora. These include the movement against continued militarism in Korea, exemplified by ongoing protests against the U.S. military buildup on Jeju Island—a contested geography marked by multiple imperialisms and colonial violence. They also include the uprisings of Iranians in the last several years against the Islamic Republic and for social, economic, and gender liberation, part of their broader longtime struggle against both domestic despotism and foreign imperialism.

The world is witnessing an uptick in popular resistance to these conditions. The year 2019 witnessed a global wave of mass protests, unprecedented by some accounts, where uprisings against the interconnected forces of neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and colonialism burst onto the world stage in places as diverse as Chile, Iraq, Iran, Ecuador, Sudan, Algeria, Hong Kong, and France.33 Those movements continued in 2020 and 2021, with the historic uprising for Black lives in the United States and renewed popular resistance across Palestine for liberation from Zionist colonialism. In September 2022, the world witnessed yet another rebellion in Iran against the regime, sparked by the death in police custody of Jina (Mahsa) Amini who had been arrested for so-called improper veiling, and led by women who called for bodily autonomy as part and parcel to Iranians’ broader dreams of freedom. Shamlou’s words and “The Great Anthem’s” internationalist spirit come to us across the decades and urge us to see the global connections between these uprisings.

As part of this, “The Great Anthem” also urges us to resist ongoing imperialisms. Here, I speak both to the dominance of U.S. imperialism and its military alliance NATO in the world order, as well as the imperialisms of rising global powers China and Russia in global capitalist markets and geopolitical affairs. Russia’s current disastrous war in Ukraine is one example of these destructive interimperialist rivalries.

In sum, reading “The Great Anthem” today compels us simultaneously to remember our past as we witness our present and to act. The poem compels us to remember the Korean War. And as we honor that memory, it prompts us still to sing that “living song” against today’s deathly cacophonies of imperialism, authoritarianism, and war, a song for fundamental equality among peoples. As Shamlou implores:

Alborz Ghandehari is assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Utah. His research centers protest movements in Iran and Southwest Asia/North Africa, as well as movements in the region’s migrant diasporas. His forthcoming book, Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle, will be out with Northwestern University Press in Fall 2024. The book puts oral histories with contemporary Iranian feminist, labor, and student organizers in conversation with resistance literature and art to explore Iranians’ ongoing struggle for radical democratic self-determination and its solidarities with popular resistance movements worldwide. Ghandehari is also a performer and poet who has performed at festivals including Salt Lake City’s Spectra and Living Traditions.