ADVANCE REVIEW OF RUMI ROAMING

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

Rumi roaming masterfully shines a light on the complex and contradictory legacies of Rumi both past and present, and inevitably, the future. Artists, scholars, and activists bring themselves to the figure of Rumi and grapple with the various dimensions of Rumi's life, social context, and literary outputs, especially as it has interjected their lives, such as his poetry that evoked love and longing, sexist, and patriarchal stories, and calls for revolution. The essays, poems, and art in these pages are multi-dimensional, multi-linguistic, and global. They challenge easy ideas of translation and transmission. Though Rumi remains a popular spiritual icon today, this volume and its contributors showcase that this popularity should not be taken at face value but needs to be interrogated and disentangled. The contributors to the volume and Hashemi have done a great service in taking this important and difficult first step for us the readers, but as with any mystical path, including that of Rumi's, the rest depends on what we the readers do with this knowledge.

― M. Shobhana Xavier, professor of religion and diaspora at Queen's University
and author of The Dervishes of the North: Rumi, Whirling, and the Making of Sufism in Canada

Coming to bookstores in winter 2025 from SubversivePress and Guernica Editions, 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.

rumi roaming is produced by SubversivePress. We acknowledge and thank the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of this project.

We are currently accepting pre-orders.

CONTRIBUTORS

Carly Butler (she/her) is a settler artist in Canada of British and Iranian descent. She currently lives and works on Vancouver Island in Ucluelet on the traditional territory of the Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ. Her interdisciplinary practice reinterprets nautical knowledge around navigation and survival to reflect on longing, regret, and nostalgia. CarlyButler.Com

charles c. smith has written and edited sixteen books. He studied poetry with William Packard at New York University, edited three collections of poetry and his poetry has appeared in Poetry Canada Review, the Quille and Quire, Descant, Dandelion, Fiddlehead and others. His recent books include: travelogue of the bereaved (2014), whispers (2014) destination out (2018) and searching for eastman (2021).

Ehab Lotayef is an IT Manager, poet, writer, and activist. He moved to Canada in 1989 with a degree in electrical engineering from Egypt. He has volunteered with and served on the boards of local and international social justice NGOs for decades. His publications include the bilingual poetry collection To Love a Palestinian Woman (2010), the play Crossing Gibraltar (CBC, 2006), and numerous op-eds in Canadian papers.

Elena Basile, born and raised in Italy to an English mother and an Italian father, writes, researches, and teaches in Tkaronto, Treaty 13. She has spent most of her life writing about the entangled layers of language, culture and place that make belonging possible, collaborating with artists and writers along the way. She is currently working on decolonizing her own approach.

Fatemeh Keshavarz, born and raised in Shiraz, is Director of the Roshan Institute Center for Persian Studies at University of Maryland and author of award-winning books including Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi, Recite in the Name of the Red Rose and Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran. She is a published poet in Persian and English and an activist for peace and justice.

Transdisciplinary artist, curator and writer gita hashemi is a refugee from Iran is based in T’karonto, the “Dish With One Spoon Territory.” She lives and works near Wonscotonach (burning bright point) aka Don River, on unceded land that is subject to the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation’s Rouge River Tract Claim. Her home in Shiraz was near Khoshk (dry) river. Gitaha.Net

Hajar Hussaini is from occupied Kabul. Disbound, her debut poetry collection, is published by University of Iowa Press. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Skidmore College, and is translating the Afghan novel Death and Its Brother. She envisions a prosperous Afghanistan where women are free and children are smiling.

Jayce Salloum, as if an itinerant geographer of conflicted territories, observes the world and creates/collects images/texts to make meaning from. A grandson of Syrian immigrants, raised on Sylix land, now on the territories of the Xʷməθkʷey̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Səíl̓wətaʔł. Recognizing and acting on this is an everyday practice, but let’s face it, he could do a lot more. Vimeo.Com/Salloum

Mahdi Tourage is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Social Justice and Peace Studies at King’s University College, London, Ontario. He is the author of Rumi and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism (2007) and the edited volume Esoteric Lacan (with Philipp Valentini, 2019). His publications have appeared in Iranian Studies, International Journal of Zizek Studies and Body and Religion Journal.

Masoud Eskandari (1961-2023) was born in Tehran, and migrated to Canada in 2008. He held MFAs in photography and documentary media. He had worked as an artist, art director and instructor and participated in many solo and group exhibitions, most recently at Art Gallery of Hamilton. He was interested in social landscape in photography and poetic-philosophical videography.

Founder of Jasad Dance Projects, Meryem Alaoui is a dancer-choreographer from Morocco, living in Toronto. Her work is often an invitation towards a softer and sensorial experience of dance. Through her work at Jasad, she aims to increase the visibility of North African/Arab/Middle Eastern contemporary dance artists in Canada and internationally.Jasad.Ca

ML Papusa Molina, PhD, was born and currently lives in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. She is happily retired as Executive Director of the Kanankil Institute. Once in a while she teaches dialogical social inquiry, swims, and writes her opinion on social justice issues. She consults at the international level on collaborative-dialogic practices.

Nika Khanjani is an Isfahan-born, Houston-raised, NYC-skooled filmmaker, writer and somatic-based trauma healer residing as a guest on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kéha Nation, known as Tiohtià:ke or Montreal. She is the librettist for the opera Vanishing Point, adapted as her most recent film.

Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, archivist, and editor. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, an art and publishing experience with a particular focus on work in and about translation, as well as a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. PinsapoPress.Com

Radha D’Souza is critical scholar, writer, lawyer and social justice activist from India. She teaches law at the University of Westminster in London, UK. She is co-producer of art projects Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (Amsterdam, 2021) and Comrades Against Extinction (Helsinki, 2022), both based on her book What’s Wrong With Rights? (Pluto Press, 2018).

Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, PhD (Duke University) was born in Havana in 1958. He is the Co-Director of Howard University Gallery of Art, and the author of Aestesis Decolonial Transmoderna Latinx_MX (2019). He exhibited at Haceres Decoloniales, Galeria ASAB, Bogota; and BE.BOP 2013, Berlin; and received grants from Critical Minded, FONCA, and Lyn Blumenthal Video Foundation. LabCartodigital/Moarquech

Tim Masso and Hjalmer Wenstob are brothers from the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations. Tim has been a language advocate and language learner since he was nine years old. At only 19 he is in the final year of a bachelor’s of Education degree with a special focus in Nuu-chah-nulth language revitalization. Hjalmer is a renowned visual artist, specializing in both two- and three-dimensional Nuu-chah-nulth art, as well as many collaborative projects surrounding the language. Annika Benoit-Jansson is Hjalmer’s partner and mother to their two beautiful children, Huumis and Cinkwa. Inspired by the work Hjalmer and Tim do together, Annika has been learning the language for over two years, and is in her final year of the language revitalization program, with the goal to teach her children their traditional language.

Trish Salah is the author of Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. Her poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies. An associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, she edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, and has guest edited special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Arc Poetry Magazine.

Zainab Amadahy lives in Nogojiwanong, Ontario, Canada and has authored works of fiction and nonfiction including Wielding the Force (2012), Resistance (2013) and Life on Purpose (2017), and published in magazines including Muskrat. Now semi-retired, she has worked in community arts, nonprofit housing, Indigenous knowledge reclamation, women’s services and migrant settlement. SwallowSongs.Com