Godzilla In The Margin Of History
Godzilla In The Margin Of History
A Book_length Poem
Elahe Rahroniya
Translation from Persian To English
Elahe Rahroniya
Cover Painting and Design
Elahe Rahroniya
Cartoonist
Behrang Gholamdust
Illustration
Elahe Rahroniya
2009_2010
Copyright belongs to the author and taking any advantage or adaptation from the books, photos or paintings will be prosecuted.
Introduction
Godzilla In The Margin of History is my first long poem. It was born with a difficult and painful birth, in the middle of Iranian mass protests in 2009 while people were being shot or executed and I was shivering and crying and screaming at home, after the days that I was in the streets myself and I saw with my own eyes that the regime was introducing the people’s protest as if they were supporting a loser saide of presidential election. And this propaganda was a huge fat lie. Because most of the people in the streets had never voted in that stupid election. So disappointed, the only thing I could do was to write, to keep myself alive. So writing and breathing have had the same aims to me at the time and after.
I have always been a poet and a storyteller. So these sort of works of mine, the story type poems or poetic stories just came to my mind unconsciously. Just like my poem-story book ‘The Non-union Versified Lovehood’ which has been written two years before, this time the waves of the words attacked me as a storyteller poem.
The characters of Godzilla and butterfly came from my experience in a relationship with a man who, like many other people in Iran, tried to survive in the way of silence. He hated what was happening in our land and society but didn’t have the courage to do anything, so he just tried to adapt himself with something that was destroying him and everybody else, and called this wisdom! He was a businessman and thought that dealing with everything and everyone is an art but he didn’t know that he was dealing with his life besides his family’s, and his land. And we all know that there are millions of people in this world that choose the same way as my Godzilla did, because it’s the easy way.
But why Godzilla? Godzilla is a mythical creature in Japanese literature that does not have a certain positive or negative character. Sometimes it destroys and sometimes it appears as the savior of people. Sometimes it lives in the water like an amphibian, sometimes on land and sometimes it sleeps for a thousand years in the form of a stone mountain.
So with me as a little revolutionary flying butterfly who had totally different points of view, our romance didn’t work and the bitter experience between me and my tall, fat boyfriend was transformed to a long poem which happened in our beloved land. Our beloved, beautiful and heavenly land that had started to freeze by the ice age of radical Islamic ideology and mullahs were killing and eating every creature just like carnivore dinosaurs.
Some years before, while Mohammad Khatami was making the show of The Dialogue Among Civilizations, the show which was supported by the western world and the Democratic party of United States that also supported Ayatollah Khomeini in the beginning (Russia was supporting the other side of the regime all the way), a part of the Islamic regime had understood that they can’t survive in the radical way, so they had to change their appearance as a liberal government, the change that is actually impossible in an ideology_based structure.
So there was a gap between those two main sides of the regime and their conflict that went on to the peak in 2009 was named The Green Movement. The conflict,which was only about power, neither liberation nor people.
Some people saw the green side of the regime as a hope for changing and joined them and some not. I never supported them because I was wise enough to know that they are all the same. I knew that dinosaurs just destroy our land and it doesn’t matter if they eat vegetables or meat. They eat and eat until they leave a dessert behind, because they are radicals and radicals don’t understand reasoning.
So this is my story of living in the ice ages and with dinosaurs. The story of a tiny butterfly who loves to fly high and free, and the story of an old beautiful heaven that got sick more than thousand years ago and totally collapsed into the devil’s hands in 1979.
Elahe Rahroniya(Noshad)
19.12.2023
Read an excerpt from this book:
For The Little Godzilla
From The Butterfly
Time: The last days of the Mesozoic Era or Dinosaur age and early years of the Ice age.
Place: A half frozen land in the Middle East.
… I swear on the softness of the Dog’s tail!
I swear on the powder of butterflies’ bodies.
I swear on the wing of the fly,
stuck on the forehead of that old swatter,
that torn swatter,
I prefer dogs
to all animals of the world.
Even if rabid,
I will buy a bullet, expensive
and shoot at its brain.
They deserves to die with a bullet
not poison
and I’ll bury their corpse
with all respect.
My darling Godzilla!
I swear on the print of lipstick,
I left on the highest stair of your back,
I am the butterfly of your dreams…
………………………………………………………………………
I am addicted, addicted, addicted,
addicted
to the blast of madness of explosion,
addicted
to the unconscious particles of insomnia,
addicted
to the flounces of the skirt of volcano,
and to the pollen of a Fern’s* dress.
Maybe I am depressed,
but I honor the Dog!
And I will wag his tail,
beside the holy apostles of Buddha,
And I’ll sniff the white powder of bone,
even if there be no one to love
and dogs
all be rabid.
And I appreciate swatters.
And I’ll deflower
all the petals of holy Scriptures,
on the graves of amphibians.
And I’ll remember,
the smell of Zarathustra’s* kiss.
………………………………………………………………….
Godzilla says: “You are crazy! You are beyond psychosis!”
He is afraid of heights.
and jealous of me,
as he can’t fly like me.
Oh! So much I love flying high!
and the mountain top, smelling cloud
and giraffes which clean their noses with high branches.
And Godzilla…!
Do I love Godzilla?!?
………………………………………………………………………………….
I don’t go to demonstrations.
My voice becomes hoarse soon
and my body is so tiny,
so no carnivore can see me.
But I hate to just sit and watch.
I have sympathy for squirrels and sparrows
and for blind, lame cats
who have night out in garbage cans every night,
and honor plastic bottles.
And for the clean dachshunds
who fear shadows
and afraid of being eaten,
just stand behind the windows,
and shout: “ALLAH O AKBAR”
And the don’t know
That it makes the carnivores happier.
And the bears
who shooting at their big wide hearts is easy,
and the turtles,
who are hunted easily.
And the convicted vegetarian dinosaurs,
who become sandwiches
between the walls of solitary confinement.
I have written slogans
on all the flowers in my neighborhood,
and have taught them to fart loudly
when a carnivore passes them,
somehow its stench
neutralizes tear gas…
…………………………………………………………
How wonderful it could be,
if the lion
becomes the forest’s king again
and the sun on his back*
could melt all the ice.
…………………………………………………………..
Today two vegetarian dinosaurs were executed.
Hanged.
And I saw
in the last seconds,
how their long tails shook…
………………………………………………………
I go to the toilet
and push hard to shit my tears.
No spell lurks in the toilet.
I have heard that water
dispels all the hidden microphones
but I can’t cry.
Constipation has hardened my heart and eyes.
I push and push
until hate and anger
come out of my eyes like hail,
hit the toilet bowl
and break .
I fill my hands with toilet paper,
press it in my mouth
and scream
from the end of my colon.
The scream
of hate and anger.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
…The rust of this sword has disinfected my heart, Godzilla!
Anyone who becomes Caliph*
is red to my eyes,
the color of the carnivore’s turban.
……………………………………………………………………………….
We,more homeless than the “The Sons of Israel”
and more enslaved than Canaanites*,
eat frozen soil in our homeland.
with no fire.
Now
The fire temples are ice-houses, Godzilla,
Huge ice-houses,
but the poles don’t let us in their summit conferences.
………………………………………………………………..
Let’s get refuge in the forest Godzilla!
In Africa
In Equator
anywhere without enormous carnivores,
where there are sun and tree
And predators just hunt to relieve hunger.
Or, let’s become marine, Godzilla!
Where can we buy a gill to become a marine?
Maybe mermaids embrace us
Or maybe a warm planet,
which grimaces at the achievements of the ice revolution
and the martyr’s blood won’t be used
to irrigate anti-ice plastic tulips*.
Where the monopoly of oil wells
is not in the hands of the Ice ogre*,
and Uranium
doesn’t thicken the buttocks of the slut missiles
and Uranium
doesn’t shake the breasts of Al-qaeda*,
and Uranium
doesn’t poke the tool of Hamas
in the bottom of David’s tribe
and Uranium
doesn’t become the bow tie under the long beard of Taliban*
and…
Do you know such a place, Godzilla?
