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rumi roaming

rumi roaming

contemporary engagements and interventions

By Gita Hashemi

 rumi roaming: contemporary engagements and interventions originates in the desire to bring a decolonial Rumi-ness to our present contexts and communities. Living in pandemic isolation, many of us drew solace from Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet-sage. While Rumi is a best-selling poet in North America, the boundary-breaking and situated nature of his work is often lost in colonial appropriations and (mis)translations. Rumi roaming juxtaposes new translations of some of Rumi’s ghazals with contemporary creative non-fiction, poetry, scholarly essays, photo essays, and videos that engage with his work through decolonial reflections on language, human connections, place, and spirituality.

Inspired by Rumi’s own early trajectory across Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey and the spiritual urgings of his ghazals, curator and editor Gita Hashemi draws attention to diverse geographies of Rumi’s circulation and brings together contributors from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines to intervene in the processes of cultural and spiritual appropriation and depoliticization of East-to-West translation. Rumi roaming invites us to think about Rumi in small caps and as a dynamic cross-cultural force within contemporary contexts of translingual poetics and translation politics, global displacement and relation to land and water, Indigenous language revitalization and diasporic language reclamation, and interrogations of spirituality, healing, and social justice.

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Reviews

An encounter with Rumi is akin to chasing an elusive melody; one is perpetually left yearning for more. Yet, within the pages of rumi roaming, we are graced with a masterful intervention that confronts the crises of our modern age—a crisis rooted in language and its intricate dance of translation. Seamlessly weaving modern renditions of Rumi's ghazals with a tapestry of contemporary creative nonfiction, melodious poetry, scholarly musings, immersive photo essays, and haunting videos, this collection addresses a void I've perennially sensed in my engagements with Rumi's diverse oeuvre, from poetic verses to visual tapestries. The Algorithmic encounter that concludes this journey offers a wry nod, a poignant irony, underscoring the pressing relevance and urgency of such a groundbreaking endeavor.

Zainub Verjee, artist, critic and scholar, Governor General's Award recipient and Member of the Order of Canada

Rumi roaming is the long-awaited work that finally addresses some of the most questionable aspects of the popular Rumi. That the popularity of Rumi’s bestselling translations in English remains unaffected by a rise in racism towards people who share his region and culture is a clear indication that the best-selling translations are failing profoundly, a failure felt most acutely by people of Persian and Central Asian origin. Sensitive to post-colonial problematics of translation and without avoiding the most challenging and potentially offensive aspects of Rumi’s oeuvre, in rumi roaming a diversity of creative thinkers bare their souls in the spirit of the poet himself to connect directly and transparently with their audience about how his poetry resonates with them in the present moment. This multi-media volume is far more sophisticated and nuanced in its vision of Rumi than criticisms that have focused simply on the stripping of Islamic references in popular translations. Rumi roaming provides a much richer and more creative re-reading of Rumi than has been previously available.

Jawid Mojaddedi, professor of religion at Rutgers University and translator of The Masnavi for Oxford World's Classics

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About the author

Iranian-born Gita Hashemi is an award-winning artist, curator and writer, a refugee, a displanted settler who works from T’karonto, the “Dish With One Spoon Territory,” the homelands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat nations, most recently the territory of the Mississaugas of Credit. She lives near Wonscotonach (burning bright point) river, on unceded land that is subject to the 2015 Rouge River Tract Claim by the Mississauga First Nation. Her home in Shiraz was near Khoshk (dry) river.