rosa jamali

Rosa Jamali (Born 1977) is a prominent Iranian poet, playwright, and translator with numerous published books.

She studied Drama & Literature at the Art University of Tehran and holds a Master's degree in English literature from TEHRAN University. Jamali is acknowledged as the most influential and pioneering poet of Iran since the 90s. Her works have opened new landscapes and possibilities to Persian contemporary poetry. In her early works; she describes a surreal world in which words have lost their meanings and have become jumbled objects within contemporary everyday life. She has adapted a kind of music from classical Persian poetry and imbued it with the natural cadences of speech, juxtaposing long and short sentences. In her recent poems, she creates some layers of intertextuality with Persian Mythology and mysticism.

Her poems have always been strictly engaged with the forms and conscious of styles in poetics, digressing in between various literary styles and traditions. experiencing condensed and language-based imagery taking its inspiration from the style of visionary writings of Persian transcendentalists.

She is also a very prolific translator with many books and anthologies of Anglophone poets translated into Persian.

Her seminal work; MAKING COFFEE TO RUN A CRIME STORY is a re-reading of male-dominated

classic love-hate poems, presented in a polyphonic dramatic structure. It creates

a post-modern narrative and focuses on misogyny and violence against women.

The style is fragmentary, with frequent changes in perspective and tone

depending on each episode's persona. The narrative techniques blend different

genres, such as scriptwriting, storytelling, folk plays, mourning passion pageant

plays, stand-up performances, performance poetry, and old epics. The refrains

and chorus recall Greek drama, featuring characters like Antigone or Medea who

defy the male-dominated society of ancient Greece. The poem also engages with

the portrayal of women in Sadegh Hedayat's literature, particularly the chopped off

woman in The Blind Owl; a major novella in contemporary Persian literature

known for its critical attitude towards women. Some parts of Jamali's poem are

narrated from the perspective of this very chopped-off woman.

THE SHADOW is a play by Rosa Jamali. The police are looking for a murderer, a

woman who has supposedly killed her husband. Later, the police find eleven

women who are quite alike. The setting is a room. Two women, dressed in black

and covering their hair with black headscarves, confront each other in one spot.

They were born on the same day and share the same name. They both married a

man named Parviz.

A challenge of identity forces them to kill each other. In the last scene, a third

woman, identical to the previous two, enters the same room and finds a piece of

paper which says: ‘The police have arrested 13 women who are quite alike, but

two have been found dead.'

Regarding the issues of women in Iran, THE SHADOW questions polygamy, which

is quite prevalent and legal, and intensifies women's obstacles in society.

‘Women against Women' is a frequent attitude taken by the male-dominated

society to suppress them. In terms of style, the play diverges between different

genres and can be categorized as absurd, tragicomedy, or crime.

GMT is one of her poems read in Postcolonial approach and discusses the wars of Middle East.

MY ROOTS and lots of her other poems are read in ecofeminism as environmentally friendly poetry.

Rosa Jamali has participated in so many poetry festivals and literary events worldwide. She is a Judge in a number of prestigious poetry Prizes inside the country and has written a number of scholarly articles on Poetry, Literary theory, and In her selection of essays titled "Revelations in the Wind", she discusses the Poetics of Persian Poetry.