Art and Eros: A Classic Persian Poem Reimagined

Aqsa Ijaz on Yann Damezin's graphic novel, Majnun and Layla: Songs from Beyond the Grave

Retelling older works of art for the new horizon of experience makes the writer or artist an interpreter of the old and a creator of the new. Such art calls our attention to how it interprets the past work, comments on it, and in doing so makes its own existence possible, making the new independent yet inseparable from the old. Critics routinely focus on how faithful such texts are to their precursors, offering a rather myopic view of a tradition-shaping work, missing the more essential concerns:

Why do we re-tell certain stories over and over, sometime for centuries uninterrupted? What function this continuity with the past serves in negotiating the moral and ethical needs of the present? Why don’t we let the old stories fade away and only write new ones?

In her famous essay "Against Interpretation", Susan Sontag argued that instead of endlessly analyzing art, we should focus more on feeling it—what she called an “erotics” of art. Writing in the 1960's, when a certain notion of interpretation was in vogue, Sontag criticized this focus on breaking down the meaning of art, calling it an “open aggressiveness” that stripped art of its power to move us. She felt that intellectualizing art created a “shadow world of meanings” and distanced us from the actual experience of the work. What she wanted was for us to feel art in its raw, present form, without all the baggage.

In recent years, scholar Rita Felski has taken up a similar line of thinking in her books Limits of Critique and Hooked: Art and Attachment (University of Chicago Press). Like Sontag, Felski sees the limits of how we tend to approach art—constantly trying to "read into" it and over-analyze. But unlike Sontag, Felski doesn’t think we need to get rid of interpretation altogether. Instead, she wants us to acknowledge the role that love plays in how we engage with art—the kind of attachment that comes from the feeling of being drawn to certain works. Felski asks why we’re often so good at criticizing art but struggle to say why we love it. Her work isn’t about promoting a shadow-reading culture around art but about making space for articulating a deeper connection, for intimacy, within criticism.

As a scholar and translator who spends much of my time thinking about the reception, transmission, and experience of classical texts across different times and places, I find this debate fascinating. Every time we encounter a piece of music, a poem, or a painting, we experience it through our own lens—whether we realize it or not. There’s no such thing as a purely innocent or neutral reception of art because we’re always shaped by our own histories and cultures. This diversity of perspectives allows us to engage with art in ways that may reveal new, previously unnoticed possibilities. In this sense, as readers (whether casual or professional critics), we never experience the same text in exactly the same way twice. Sontag and Felski both claim that some forms of engaging with art focus too much on intellectualizing and ends up killing the emotional resonance of the work. They’re right to point out that this approach can be stifling. The academic frameworks we use to interpret art can box it in, limiting its potential to move and transform us. But I think we need to go beyond this narrow view of interpretation as just something critics do.

Many artistic traditions, both in the East and the West, allow art itself to take on the role of commentary—art responding to art, bringing new life into existing works. This kind of interpretation is, at its core, an act of love and renewal. It doesn’t stifle the work—it revives it. Certain texts from the past have a way demanding our attention no matter how many years or centuries pass. Felski calls this their unique "thereness," something that refuses to be dismissed simply because tastes or times have changed. These texts have a deep resonance that goes beyond mere cultural significance—they move us in ways that feel deeply personal. That’s why stories like Nizami’s Layla and Majnun, a medieval Persian classic, continue to have such a strong hold on our imaginations.

Yann Damezin, Majnun and Layla: Songs from Beyond the Grave (trans.

Thomas Harrison and Aqsa Ijaz). Simon and Schuster, 2023. pp. 184. $29.99 (hardcover)

French storyteller and illustrator, Yann Damezin, recently published a graphic novel reanimating the great Persian classic (in translation) for 21st century readers: Majnun and Layla: Songs from Beyond the Grave. The novel won the prestigious Prix Orange de la BD, an award granted to promising newcomers to the graphic novel scene, and it also stirred debates about how we interpret eros, specifically what we permit or deny in the representation of woman. Written in the French alexandrine metre with illustrations in the most remarkable play of colour-saturation and chiaroscuro, Damezin retells the age-old story of Qays, famously known as Majnun (the mad one), who, as Nizami tells us, was hit by “the indiscriminate sword of love” so deeply that he was entirely uprooted from the world of sanity as he knew it.

For centuries, poets from East and the West have interpreted this story by retelling it in diverse aesthetic mediums. From the medieval poet from the Indian subcontinent, Amir Khusrau to early modern Afghan poet, Abd al Rahman Jami, from England’s Eric Clapton to the Sufi musicians of  Zendeh Dilan, the story of Majnun and his maddening love for his young school mate Layla has inspired artists in most powerful ways. Whether they interpret it by way of a response (javāb) to their literary predecessor, such as Amir Khusrau’s retelling,  as the expression of their own personal longings such as Clapton’s channelling of his anguish (he fell in love with his best friend’s wife) in his famous song Layla, or the searing Sama ‘ (Sufi audition) performance of Zendeh Dilan in which women dervishes whirling away embody Majnun’s ecstasy in the most moving dance form of the Islamic tradition –– in all of these powerful retellings of Nizami’s poem, we see Majnun’s figure and his heart-wrenching soliloquies to be at the center of the performance. The act of interpretation in all these cases is deeply informed by the interpreter’s emotional attunement with the pathos-laden character of Majnun. However, in Damezin’s new retelling of the poem, this long-standing enchantment with Majnun and his lyrical agony is deliberately interrupted to give way to foregrounding Layla’s character.

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Layla is a woman, a lover whose perspective rarely came through in the reception history of the poem (though Nizami wove it beautifully in his poem) beyond Majnun’s idol-worshipping of her figure, relentlessly drawing attention to his own suffering. To be sure, the unbridled force of Majnun’s passion, his child-like helplessness in the face of it, and his complete identification with it have inspired some of the most poignant mystical expression of our deeper spiritual longings in the past eight centuries throughout the world. But in allegorizing Majnun’s devotion to Layla as signifying what Rumi’s reed-flute embodies in her song—our desire to reach the divine, our origin (asl)— the reception tradition has considered Layla only an accessory to Majnun’s mystical exaltation. Damezin reorients this reception tradition of experiencing the story through Majnun’s dominant perspective and makes Layla the primary narrative point of view:

“Her distress remained sealed in her soul.

For modesty and honor are a muzzle

with which man has covered the mouth of woman.

Alas! To whom could I confide my sorrow?

Becoming mad with love is a man's privilege!

My despair must remain underground

and even my pain must be frugal.”

In his interpretation of Nizami’s poem through an artistic moulding of language and colour, he invites us to experience what it is like to be Layla, a woman whose own silent navigation of emotions was continually muffled in the melody of Majnun’s suffering. Here, we meet Nizami’s famous star-crossed lovers across the threshold of life and death: in the event of not being able to attain his beloved, Majnun dies at the close of the beginning of the poem, whereas Layla lives on to tell the tale. The retelling’s imaginative reach in setting this love story within the genre of macabre is terrifying, provocative, and beautiful simultaneously. Where Damezin’s medieval Persian predecessor, exploiting Islamic eschatology, ends his story with a dream informing that Majnun and Layla were united in the hereafter, Damezin himself moves beyond that vision, exploring that very hereafter as the point of departure.

Damezin retelling stages the story within the ambit of their essential separateness. In this exclusive emphasis on separateness, the reader is not invited to root for the lovers’ ultimate reunion, but for Majnun to come to terms with his own darkness, his own demons that he continually projects on Layla from beyond the grave. Only by placing the lovers on the unbridgeable chasm between life and death does the artist claim her character from Nizami and makes the case for Layla’s individuality, her take on the whole love story, and what she must do in the face of such a demonic passion that demands her to give up her life and join her beloved in death.

It is not only Majnun’s songs that force Layla to unite with him in death; he offers her the divine seat of worship, as he implores her (almost as if he is holding her feet from the within the grave) to leave the realm of the living and join the dominion of the dead. In the following verses, Majnun reports to her from the other end of time and tells her, crossing the threshold of blasphemy, about how she will be welcome there:

[The place’s] gates are of horn, ivory, and opal

Myriad birds live in its rooms. Their beaks

Are of diamond, their plumage of brushed gold.

Hundred shades of amber shine in their eyes.

With a melodious voice, they sing one by one

The ninety-nine names of our lord.

To which I have added the name that is yours

To exalt you and render you honor.

As he adds her name to the ninety-nine names of Allah, he makes it difficult for her to say no to this reunion. He appeals by playing  on her heart strings, her curiosity, and her vanity all at the same time. But Layla, Damezin notes, must decide by looking beyond all beyond the force of Majnun’s madness. Even as she manges to break through all the shackles of her tribe, she still has to claim her own freedom (her own life) from the intricate knots of Majnun’s sirens. When Majnun begs her for the great part of the narrative  in painfully visual depiction of his suffering to cross the threshold and unite with him, she decides on the following and breaks a new ground for her character to be remembered in our very own age:

“For you believe you await me at the top of a palace:

It is only an illusion, a reflection in a mirror.

You say you have seen swarms of golden-winged birds

Singing for God, of his splendor and power.

Once you can accept the weight of your shroud,

Understanding the error in which you wallow,

You will hear not a hundred names; but only one.

That name is silence. It contains all others.”

Even as Majnun continues to sing from the great beyond, it is clear that Damezin’s retelling foregrounds that elusive sound of silence that engulfs Layla’s character as a distinct mode of speech (the image is Layla walking into the horizon.) The name he wants Majnun to remember is silence, wherein all is contained. In doing so, Damezin decenters the cacophony of Majnun’s unending proposals and illuminates Layla’s agency as a woman who sees through the illusion of Majnun’s earthly passion. The counter song is not so much lyrical duel with Majnun as one would expect of our medieval heroine, but an invitation to explore the realm of silence, where the unspeakable resides and love beyond endless self-reference prospers:

“Then Layla fell silent. Walking as she talked.

She had already covered much ground

And distanced herself from her family and clan…

And thus she walked without turning around

She kept on going, facing the horizon.

From dusk until dawn and throughout the day

Each step taking her further from her prison.

Going where, seeking what, no one ever found out…

Neither a bird nor wind ever pierced this secret.

No being ever saw her again.

No doubt an angel knows

But will not say.

For to those who know how to see, the flame

Of mystery burns in silence and darkness.

This story is finished: I rest my pen.

To hear an echo, you must learn to hush.”

In retelling Nizami’s love poem from Layla's distinctly assertive point, a point of view that resists the grave, Damezin interprets the medieval text without sacrificing the eros. Not only his words are steeped in the experience of sound and sense of Layla and Majnun’s suffering, his colors too are representative of how he as an artist experiences the inner world of the characters. The saturation of his colour spectrum gives us the dynamic temperature and intensity of emotions that the characters feel. The reds turn into oranges and yellows as the temperature falls and go blue, purple, and indigo as their emotional world becomes fierier. The tears are drawn in black, reflecting the darkness that makes Layla shed them from her eyes, and her freedom is depicted by painting levity from the grip of gravity.

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Damezin disrupts traditional readings and modes of criticism and invites a richer, more nuanced engagement with the text. This approach not only engages Nizami’s poem critically, but also liberates it from the rigid frameworks of conventional critique, allowing it to resonate with contemporary audiences in new and meaningful ways. Retelling as a mode of interpretation, though it diverges from the confines of academic reading, underscore the importance of personal attachment in our engagement with art. It reveals how the act of interpretation itself can be a dynamic, transformative process that bridges past and present, tradition and innovation. Through this continuous retold and reimagined dialogue, we are reminded that “critique” in various cultural traditions and specific narrative and visual forms is an exercise in transvaluation, revision, and escaping the fixed authority of the past without cutting off from the love of the present; it retains what is valuable in the old while making something new. Damezin’s Majnun and Layla presents the most recent example of this vibrant tradition.

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Aqsa Ijaz is an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. With a PhD from McGill University, she specializes in classical Persian literature, focusing on the multilingual reception of the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami of Ganjeh in South Asia. She is also one of the architects for the Global Past Research Initiative at the Department of Historical Studies.