An Evasive Aesthetics: Appropriation, Witnessing and War in Shadi Angelina Bazeghi’s Flowmatic

Abstract

In this article, I investigate how Shadi Angelina Bazeghi writes about the Iran-Iraq War in her poetry collection Flowmatic (2020). Bazeghi assembles several different kinds of texts in Flowmatic, and one of these texts is a testimony by an Iranian soldier-engineer who worked as a programmer setting up at system to identify the bodies and body parts of fallen Iranian soldiers. Both the words of the soldier’s testimony and the act of programming and data processing have found their way into the poem; as appropriated text and as the poem’s overarching aesthetic mode. Using the soldier’s witness account as a prism, I will look at three aspects of the poetry collection: 1) how the testimony is appropriated, 2) how Bazeghi is witnessing though appropriation, and 3) how she writes about war from a feminine point of view. I argue that Bazeghi through the evasive aesthetics and the heightened appropriation in Flowmatic challenges how women can witness and write about war.