I am coming to terms with something that I’ve tried to deny, something I’ve been taught to deny. And so I have written a love poem. For Hizbullah. Like love that inspires poems often is, this love is not all rosy and sweet. It is complicated, tortured, frustrated, somewhat inappropriate, certainly scandalous, sometimes hesitant. It is irrational and overly rational. But still, it is love. A dear friend told me today, “Nobody ever really learns something without feeling something.” So, to Hizbullah, I offer this poem.Lucas received "a lot of hate mail" in response to it, which included "the ways you should be raped," suggestive that many of the hate messages came from men. Here's an interesting intersection of sex and politics: women who love Muslims in resistance and men who hate them. I take it that many of the emotionally negative responses to my remarks on Iran, also from men only, come from the same intersection, that is to say, how men feel about my regard for my Persian Prince.*
Lucas says, however, that hate messages are "outweighed by messages from people who are also struggling to come to terms with their support of Hizbullah by learning more about who they are, what they have done, and what they believe," and so are they in my case as well. I don't know what these messages in conflict will add up to, but surely they are part of a war of position.
* The term is mainly my allusion to Machiavelli and Gramsci, whose thoughts frame my understanding of Iran, its masses, and its opposed factions of leadership and make me entertain a hope for a passive revolution in Iran, as well as it is due to my love of alliteration, but it is also intended to speak in several other registers, obviously, including love and irony.
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