Nassim’s Testament: the poet’s introduction

Something the Colour of Pines on Fire, a pamphlet collection by British-Iranian poet Vahid Davar, was published by Matecznik Press in 2022. Here is Vahid’s introduction to his long poem Nassim’s Testament, extracts of which are included in the pamphlet.

An asylum seeker, I went to Liverpool in 2013. I had just fled from a burning homeland, scorched and almost smothered. Having had my fill of vexations, in my new netherworld I found myself too weak to stand in dole queues, too helpless to withstand the ‘INVADERS NOT REFUGEES’ daubed on a wall on Great George Street. I needed an alter ego to share my baggage with, and in my distress, I started to envision my dead poet friend, Nassim, and his reactions in different situations I found myself in. Nassim had taken his own life six years before my arrival in Liverpool. I asked myself ‘what if he could force himself out of the country that pushed him toward suicide and take refuge elsewhere?’ In the three years that I was toying with my conflicting answers to the question, Liverpool had already taken me in. So I undertook to resurrect Nassim with the same words I was going to use to pay a tribute to Liverpool. The poem, which was later named Nassim’s Testament, needed to be a playful dirge, and that was why the poem played itself out like a wake. The poem has the manner of a wake in that it laments, tells tales, cracks jokes, performs dances and experiments with various modes of poetic expression. Nassim’s Testament is about the mourner and the mourned pulling off feats in their asylum odyssey from Shiraz to Liverpool. The setting is a nowhere on a fault-line, formed of the two cities. Therefore, there is no such thing in the poem as a land to grow roots in. Instead, the two main speakers of the poem are suspended in mid-air, being able to develop only aerial rootstocks in every impossible direction to join hands with fellow displaced writers, such as Byron, Shelley, and Joyce. This is an epic of relation as opposed to epics of separation which were written in antiquity to promulgate a given people’s legitimacy and delegitimise their neighbours as demons, so to speak. Being a bilingual poem of diaspora, Nassim’s Testament is a Persian poem written from left to right for its English audience, and an English poem appearing from right to left for its Iranian readers.

One of Vahid’s poems can be found in the ‘Poems’ section of the website.