Baghalam Kun Laʿnatī, Baghalam Kun: Durnā-yi Sībirī, bardāsht-i duvvum Persian 2025

“Hold Me, Damn It, Just Hold Me!” by Ali Foumani takes flight on the wings of “The Siberian Crane” by the same author. This play is an unavoidable metamorphosis from monologue to dialogue, a point where solitary voices move toward one another and transform into conversation. The characters react to enforced silence and systematic erasure by invoking the silenced. They engage with the absent, fight against forgetting, and revive erased memories within the space. “Hold Me, Damn It, Just Hold Me!” is a dialogue with dialogue itself. It’s a remembering of remembering.
The play “Hug Me, Damn It, Hug Me” by Ali Fomeni, published by Asemana, explores loss, forgetting, and the possibility of rebuilding dialogue. Continuing the theatrical world of the author’s previous work, “Siberian Crane,” this play portrays a transformation from monologue to dialogue, where separated voices move toward one another and regain the possibility of being heard.

In this work, the characters resist imposed silence and systematic erasure by summoning the voices of those who are absent. They engage in conversations with lost memories and with those who are no longer present, attempting to revive forgotten experiences and vanished moments. Ultimately, “Hug Me, Damn It, Hug Me” becomes a dialogue about the very nature of dialogue itself: an effort to return to the possibility of listening, remembering, and reconnecting.

The title and atmosphere of the play are connected to the symbol of the Siberian crane, a bird whose story of survival has become a metaphor for loneliness, waiting, and the search for companionship. Omid (“Hope”), the last surviving western Siberian crane, traveled to Iran alone for years after the death of its mate, Arezou (“Wish”). An attempt to find a new companion emerged with the arrival of a captive-bred crane named Roya (“Dream”), but this relationship also remained incomplete, becoming a symbolic image of solitude and separation.

Ali Fomeni, a poet, writer, and theater director, began his literary activities in the 1990s and 2000s. His poetry and fiction have appeared in literary publications, and his first poetry collection was published in 2013 by Nogam Publishing in London. In addition to writing and directing plays, he has staged works by authors such as Anton Chekhov, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett, and has spent more than two decades working in the fields of literature, social sciences, and performing arts education.

Asemana has previously published two other plays by Fomeni: “Siberian Crane” and “Yusuf, Josef, Giuseppe.” “Hug Me, Damn It, Hug Me” is a work about memory, loss, loneliness, and the human search for rebuilding connections that have been broken by silence and forgetting.