Article

Culture

Freedom of Belief

16 September 2023

5 min read

Translating heart-languages

For two Iranian women, home and danger are often synonymous. Belle Tindall shares why they translate a defiant message.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

An illustration of a woman with dark long hair looking to the right.

'Miriam'

Open Doors.

This weekend (16th September) marked the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini. Mahsa, also known as ‘Jina’, was a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was arrested by the Iranian ‘morality police’ and tragically died while being held in police custody. Her (alleged) crime was a violation of Iran’s strict dress code, as she was caught in the city of Tehran without her hair adequately covered.

News of Mahsa’s unjust arrest and harrowing death quickly spread throughout the world, building a momentum of grief, shock, and defiance.

Of course, we mourned the tragic loss of a precious life. A woman was lost; a daughter, a sister, a friend, a person. Mahsa’s life was taken away and we watched the world grieve as if she belonged to us all. Billions of hearts were breaking at the loss. However, accompanying such deep grief was a profound sense of rage. We were faced with the reality that women in Iran aren’t safe. On the contrary, they are in danger of arrest, violence and death – all at the hands of those who are supposed to protect, all under the guise of that which is meant to empower. In Iran, as in so many countries, a woman is simply a dangerous thing to be.

Another people group who find themselves living in continual danger in Iran is its Christian population. In a population of 86 million, 1.2 million are believed to be Christians. With Christianity perceived as a threat to the State and an insult to Islam, Christians in Iran are often severely discriminated against. What’s more, the Human Rights charity, Open Doors, have observed that the tightening of the Penal Code in 2021, the force of which was keenly felt in the way in which protestors of Mahsa Amini’s death were so harshly dealt with, are making things increasingly difficult for Christians.

So, to be an Iranian woman is hazardous. To be an Iranian Christin is hazardous. It therefore goes without saying that to be an Iranian woman who is also a Christian – well, such an identity comes with such difficulty, it can be hard to fathom. For such women, home and danger are often synonymous. Which is why the stories of Miriam and Stella, two Iranian women who are secretly translating the Bible into their own languages, is so astonishing.

‘Miriam’

Miriam is Iranian, but she also belongs to the fifty per-cent of the Iranian population who do not speak Farsi/Persian (the national language) as their first language. Azeri, Kurdish, Baluchi, Armenian Gilaki, Luri, and Arabic are all spoken throughout the country. Therefore, despite Farsi being the official language of Iran, almost half of the population aren’t fluent, while millions of Iranians are visually illiterate in the Farsi script.

Miram, who despite it not being her first language, has learnt to speak and read Farsi to a high level, became a Christian through secretly watching online classes on Christianity. Being married into a strict Muslim family, Miriam kept her Christianity a secret from her husband. That was, until he walked in on her watching one of her classes. Despite the immense dangers she faces as a result of the minimal rights that a Christian woman holds in Iran, Miriam decided that she would be honest with her husband about her new-found Christian faith. Miriam still marvels at the unexpected response from her husband, who said,

‘I know you are a serious-minded woman and if this is important to you, it’s OK.’

Out of curiosity, Miriam’s husband joined her in watching the online classes, until he too became a Christian.

For the past three years Miriam has been secretly working on translating the Bible from Farsi into her ‘heart-language’ (for the sake of Miriam’s anonymity, she has kept her ‘heart-language’ confidential). She tells us that she is willing to take the profound risk of doing this work because,

‘We are not allowed to study our heart languages in Iranian public schools. This is a limitation for our people. Iranian leaders use my people as political tools. I wanted to do something good for my people. I have this language specialty and experience, this expertise, so I can help my own people. People like my mother can read this book.’

Being the first person from her community to do such work, Miriam states that,

‘Despite having two children and knowing that my life is at risk for believing in Jesus in Iran, I cannot even imagine leaving this work unfinished. I must complete this work and see the result.’

'Stella'

A woman with dark hair looks straight at us.

'Stella'

Stella is also Iranian, and also speaks a ‘heart-language’, one that is shared with even fewer people than Miriam’s.

After tragically losing her husband in 2013, Stella had to battle her late husband’s family to keep custody of her then seven-year-old son. As the battle continued to rage on, Stella fled Iran with her son, leaving behind her entire life in order to keep hold of her child. As a refugee, Stella’s life is not without its ever-present difficulties as she is continually fighting to stay in the country that she and her son have now called home for ten years.

Stella became a Christian twelve years ago, while she was in the middle of the fierce battle to keep hold of her son while mourning the loss of her husband. As sorrow and desperation raged around her, Stella simply knelt on her floor and spoke into the silence ‘if you are God, save me’. She has been a Christian ever since.

Just like Miriam, Stella is secretly working to translate the Bible from Farsi into the language of her community. With tears in her eyes, she says,

‘There is no other job that your boss is God. I love my mother language. I'm telling the poetry; I write the context. I write the sentence, I record it… I am thinking about my mum, my father, my childhood. And everyone that doesn’t have it (the Bible) right now. I really want to bring God to my town and my people.’

Stella can’t return home, but she is nevertheless determined to work for the spiritual well-being of those whom she was forced to leave, regardless of the immense risk.

The heart language that both Miriam and Stella speak of, and are translating the Bible into, is the vernacular that binds their communities together in their home country of Iran. But to me, hearing these stories; the term that Miriam coined feels loaded with depth of multifaceted meaning.

The language with which they speak of their faith is unfused with resilient hope and faith-fueled boldness.

Their words when they speak of their home are dripping with resilient affection, obvious frustration and forgiveness.

The way in which they speak of themselves, and their dangerous task, is undeniably defiant and astonishingly selfless.

Review

Art

Culture

26 July 2024

5 min read

Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d

Artist Richard Kenton Webb converses with the blind poet in his former home.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white illustration shows a man holding a walk stick standing among tomb-like structures.

The blind poet. Charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Richard Kenton Webb.

‘Waiting to Speak to Milton’ shows the artist Richard Kenton Webb on a rain-swept night waiting in a valley for a car whose headlights can just be seen at the crest of the hill. For this image he has imagined himself waiting for a lift from John Milton to discuss the poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. As the opening image to Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles it is appropriately positioned in the porch by which visitors enter the cottage.

This image of light appearing in the dark night of the soul symbolises the beginning of Webb’s journey with Milton and his late poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. This has been a 10-year journey that Webb began following a conversation with his son in front of John Martin’s mezzotints for Paradise Lost at the Tate. Following on from his son’s encouragement to begin work, over that period, Webb says Milton has been a companion like Virgil to Dante guiding him through the narrative of his own life including the dark nights of redundancy and lockdown. The result has been 128 drawings, 40 paintings and 12 relief prints forming A Conversation with Milton’s Paradise Lost, a commission of 12 drawings in response to Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas, for the Milton Society of America, and the 13 drawings forming this exhibition, A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes.

Milton proved an effective companion because he, too, had passed through his own dark night of the soul. He arrived in Chalfont St Giles to escape the Great Plague of 1665 after the Republican cause to which he had dedicated more than a decade of his life - being Oliver Cromwell’s unofficial spin doctor - had collapsed around him with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. He had been lucky to escape with his life following imprisonment and the banning of his books. In addition, he had lost his sight, his beloved second wife, much of his money and all of his influence.

Despite these traumas, Milton was able to express his love for his Creator wonderfully in Paradise Lost, which was completed at the cottage in Chalfont St Giles, and Paradise Regain’d, which was inspired whilst there. In both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton deploys his rich verses and visions of spirituality and the forces of good and evil to reflect on the Restoration of the Monarchy and the loss of the English republic, doing so by means of Biblical stories concerning Jesus and Samson.

Browse Webb's exhibition

A black and white illustration show a person crouching in the corner and lifting as it was a stage drape.

Modes of Apprehension by Richard Kenton Webb – charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Inside a history cottage, black and white illustrations hang on the wall.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

A black and white illustration shows a two people close together on a pinnacle.

The Pinnacle by Richard Kenton Webb - charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

In Webb’s view, “Paradise Regain’d is about overcoming impossible situations” while, in Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Redeemer shows “Samson, the blind and foolish man”, “that we can always find hope in our living God even when society does not”. These poems moved Webb out of despair to discover hope because he knew they were heading towards redemption. As a result, he sees Milton as “a great English poet who gives hope, which in itself is a creative act for these difficult times”.

Although the story of Samson pre-dates that of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, Webb’s painting series begins with images inspired by Paradise Regain’d, just as Samson Agonistes followed Paradise Regain’d when both were jointly published in 1671, because Jesus’ resistance of temptation ultimately redeems those, like Samson and Adam and Eve, who were unable to resist.

These are images set against a dark background with the exception of the final Paradise Regain’d image with its white sky depicting a paradise within as Jesus has overcome temptation, is in full communion with God and is about to begin his ministry by calling his first disciples. The images move from the trauma and test of temptation – whether involving hunger, greed, lust, threat, pride or ambition – to a calmness of mind that is equipoise and liberation and which also enables the destruction of false temples.

They are images in which movement is arrested in still moments which form theatrical tableaux. These, like medieval and early Tudor morality plays, involve the viewer in an epic struggle between good and evil, involving temptation, fall and redemption. Webb’s use of charcoal and white chalk on paper emphasises the binary nature of this struggle. Being formed of charcoal and chalk, despite his use of contemporary equivalents for the temptations, the look and feel of Webb’s images also accords well with their exhibition setting, in rooms of low ceilings, uneven white walls, dark beams and furniture.

Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own.

As Paradise Lost was the first illustrated poem in the English language, Milton’s poetry has, as Kelly O’Reilly, Director of Milton’s Cottage, has noted “inspired many of our greatest artists, from Blake to Turner, Dore to Dali”. Webb, who consciously works in the continuing tradition of Blake’s visionary art, is extending the tradition of illustrating Milton’s poems. It is appropriate, then, that, by exhibiting these drawings in Milton’s Cottage, they are placed alongside examples of illustrated editions of the poems, plus other paintings and prints relating to Milton.

Milton’s works are not only a repository of rich verse, which also gifted over 600 new words to the English language, but are also a conversation with scripture, its stories and their interpretation, plus the social and political ramifications of the Reformation in the British Isles. Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own and linking those powerfully to the themes of Milton’s poems.

The key image, in this regard, is the first in the Paradise Regain’d series (‘Modes of Apprehension’), which sees Jesus in the wilderness turning up the corner of the wilderness backdrop, as in a theatre, to reveal another dimension or reality to existence and experience behind it. Hope is discovered in the midst of desolation, resilience found in the face of temptation. In these ways, Webb achieves his own hope for these works, that, “by responding to Milton’s universal themes of creation, destruction, temptation, love and loss”, he “can help new audiences find fresh ways to engage in Milton’s legacy”.

A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Cottage, 3 July – 8 September 2024.

Visit the exhibition web site.