"Khoda Bia Morzatesh" by Arshia Sazi

Primarily positioned to be a spoken word poem to advocate against the violence and bloodshed Mahsa Amini and many other Iranian women face at the hands of the Islamic government, Khoda Bia Morzatesh primarily uses intermedia to communicate the complex guilt Iranian-Americans see by watching these events unfold overseas. Additionally, the use of protest and war footage, both old and new, demonstrates how hardship and intergenerational struggle is commonplace for much of Iran and the Iranian diaspora.

When combined with accompanying music, the short spoken word poem provides numerous empathetic and unempathetic juxtapositions of words, sounds, and images. For example, unempathetic intermedia presents itself during the opening scenes from 00:00 to 00:50 when a quartet playing traditional-sounding Persian music is placed along protests and unempathetic symbols demonstrating injustice (Lady Liberty holding scales) and desolation (ocean waves). Throughout the story, sound and visual representations of ocean waves, pieced together through semantic correspondence, help demonstrate the incredibly isolating nature of viewing the violence in Iran from afar. The opening lines of the spoken word poem help establish this, saying, “Somewhere in the Atlantic, I float / not Iranian, not American / not belonging, a breathing contradiction” (00:55-01:10). Without the use of intermedia, the use of auditory and visual accompaniment to support the poem, the theme of desolation and isolation would have been incredibly vague and unspecific.

However, as Khoda Bia Morzatesh progresses, estrangement helps further communicate the complexity and nuance of the protests going on in Iran. For example, the second stanzas use intense unempathetic estrangement to portray the irony that women face oppression and injustice under the guise of “religious sanctity.” When describing how women like Masha Amini and Niki Shahkarami as “Dead at the hands of safety/ and religious peace,” images of violence and a woman is sitting in a police car flash across the screen. However, when mentioning Amini and Shahkarami, candid shots of them, as the poem calls them “legends and martyrs,” flash across the screen, showing how the Islamic Regime is convoluted in irony, which harms the lives of innocent women.

Much of the rest of the poem uses images of war and violence, both old and new, alongside the music of Pishdaramad Esfahan/Hezar Dastan to correspond with the brutal nature of the images. The structural composition of the piece, written in an Ab harmonic minor scale, evokes severe and tragic connotations. Although the use of deceased Iranians may seem unnecessarily violent, observing more desolation and death as the harmonic minor scale descends from 02:00 to 02:40 demonstrates the utter hopelessness an Iranian American sees when viewing conflict in Iran, as it is attached to decades of war and strife. Yearns for justice and tradition are often debilitating and accompanied by guilt (hence showing blood on the main character’s hands in 02:50-03:00, so the privileged living in America are forced to turn to art to participate in the advocation of a just, democratic government. As the main character realizes he cannot help physically, he picks up his pen and paper as the audience hears “Khoda Bia Morzatesh” (meaning God have mercy upon their souls). He hopes his art will help depict the injustices in his home country and bring peace to people that need it.