Night of Ashura by F. Scott Hess
Exiting the cultural center after dark, my wife and I squeezed into a shared taxi to go home. After a few blocks on Tehran’s labyrinthine streets, we barely moved. The city’s avenues had come alive with processions, crowds lining the sidewalks, shrouded forms weaving among the cars stuck in traffic. Horns honked on every side as our driver yelled out the window at the motorists ahead of us, as if any could budge. He pulled his head back in the cab and threw his hands up in frustration, “Yah Hussein!”
Torch-wielding columns issued from narrow alleyways, marching slowly, navigating the clogged boulevard and chanting great huffing hosannas to the long-dead Imam, slaughtered at the Battle of Karbala in 680AD. The devotees struck themselves in rhythm with hands crossed against their chests, the combined sound like a corps of army drummers on muffled kettledrums. Double rows of twenty men tramped by us, swinging chain-whips on handles, whirling in time, the grit of metal snapping down on bruised and bleeding backs.
In the midst of one column lumbered a man, white shirt transparent with sweat and matted to the black hair of his chest and back, struggling under the weight of Nakhl relics; a wooden cypress shape bristling with steel weapons, a coppery horse, rusting birds, upright inscribed hands, glittering naqsh, mirrors and streaming peacock feathers, all balanced on a three-meter horizontal timber draped with precious embroidered termeh and weighing as much as a donkey. Tormented with effort, his face masked in martyr’s agony, the man bore this burden on his shoulders like a wounded warrior carrying a dying comrade, striving until he collapsed on the asphalt and another brawny zealot lifted the Nakhl from his back. A dozen processions flowed around our traffic jam, the night enflamed by legions of smoking torches, the firelight flickering off sweaty foreheads, rimming metal relics in orange-gold, caught cold on swirling chains and glimmering across blood crying from split skin.
Adolescent boys lead each procession, a fear of joy etched on their eager faces and their skinny arms hoisting banners stretched between two poles. These standards bore cryptic emblems stitched into black or green cloth, spears and shields and white scrolling calligraphy elegant as the feints of a master swordsman. Like billowing storm clouds these quotes and prayers floated past our cab, windows open to the spectacle, we two cocooned inside like stranded sultans.
Artist’s Statement
In 1992-93 I lived one year in the Islamic Republic of Iran, reportedly the first American male to enter the country after the Revolution and the Hostage Crisis. For the first time in my life, I kept a journal over a consistent period of time, and from those entries I’ve begun working on a series of stories about my explorations of the Iranian culture and countryside. “Night of Ashura” stems from one of those experiences.
F. Scott Hess is an artist and writer from Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the LA County Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institute, among many others. He is the recipient of the Theodor Koerner Award, Western States Art Federation award, a J. Paul Getty Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. A one-hour documentary by Shirin Bazleh, F. Scott Hess: A Reluctant Realist, was released in 2018. Hess is represented by Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, and is currently working on a memoir and a collection of short stories about a year spent in the Islamic Republic of Iran.