Dispatch by Khatereh Sheibani
Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967) was the most renowned female literary figure in modern Persian literature. In the 1950s and 1960s, Farrokhzad was a lonely woman in a patriarchal society. Now, in the next century, Iranian women are still fighting against patriarchy, religious fanaticism, and inequality —but they are not alone anymore. Their voices calling for equality and freedom has become a nation chanting: “Women, Life, Freedom.” Farrokhzad’s spirit has once again sprouted from the Iranian soil. She is multiplied this time, into millions of women as she professed:
دستهایم را در باغچه میکارم
سبز خواهم شد
میدانم، میدانم، میدانم
و پرستوها در گودی انگشتان جوهریم
تخم خواهند گذاشت
I plant my hands in the garden
I will grow
I know, I know, I know
And sparrows will lay eggs in my ink-stained hands
Throughout her life, Farrokhzad employed poetry to refashion female identity and visibility. Born in Tehran into a middle-class family of seven children, she attended public schools through the ninth grade and thereafter received some training in sewing and painting. She married when she was seventeen. Her only child, the boy addressed in “A Poem for You,” was born a year later. Less than two years after the birth of her son, her marriage failed and Farrokhzad was forced to yield custody of her son to her ex-husband’s family. After this loss, she pursued her artistic life by writing poetry, making and editing movies, and acting in films. Through her poetry she voiced her feelings about conventional marriage, the patriarchal traditions affecting women in Iran, and her own situation as a wife and mother who was no longer able to live a conventional life.
As a divorcée poet in Tehran, Farrokhzad attracted much attention and considerable disapproval. She had several short-lived relationships with men—her poem “The Sin” describes one of them. She found some respite in a nine-month trip to Europe, and in 1958 she met Ebrahim Golestan (1922-2023), a controversial filmmaker and writer with whom she established a relationship that lasted until her death in an automobile accident at thirty-two years of age in February 1967.
Forugh Farrokhzad was an honest woman—honest to her beliefs and her feelings—an earnest poet, and an original filmmaker. Her life and her work were not in contradiction with one another; she lived as candidly as the images depicted in her poetry appear. Her poetic language was simple and warm, hence it connects with the reader intimately. Her presence is felt intensely in her poems and in her film: the rhythm, the voice, and the imagery are quintessentially melodious, subjective, and self-reflexive. Her poetry trespassed the male-dominated boundaries of Persian poesy through her fresh, feminine, and erotic language. In her poetry, dichotomies such as dark and light, happiness and sadness, life and death, being in love or liberated from love exist side by side, in an ironically harmonious manner.
Unlike her poetic contemporaries, Farrokhzad made a point of confounding the patriarchal expectation that female artists should conceal their sexual desires and confine their attention to social issues. For example, Parvin E’tisami (1907–41)—the most famous Iranian poet before Farrokhzad and still considered by traditionalists as ‘the acceptable’ female poet—fulfilled the expectations of the patriarchal society: her (available) poetry is traditional in form and diction and didactic in nature. In her posthumously published poetry, that was carefully selected and possibly censored by her family, E’tisami neglects the poetic self for critique. In contrast, Farrokhzad’s poetry is bold and controversial with an unmistakably feminine perspective. As a rebellious woman in a Muslim country in the 1950s and 1960s, Farrokhzad expressed her true feelings about love and sexual desire, which, as both Michael Hillmann and Farzaneh Milani point out, remained a central theme in her poems to the end. Of all her poems, ‘Gunah’ (Sin) is quoted most often.
Farrokhzad’s poetry compares to M. Omid’s poem هر جا دلم بخواهد (Wherever I Want), in which the poetic self describes a female body erotically and claims that he could touch whatever part of her body as he pleases. However, the similar sexual imagery depicted by M. Omid was considered acceptable by the readers since it was written by a male poet.
هر جا دلم بخواهد
چون میهمانان به سفره ی پر ناز و نعمتی
خواندی مرا به بستر وصل خود ای پری
هر جا دلم بخواهد من دست می برم
دیگر مگو : ببین به کجا دست می بری
با میهمان مگوی : بنوش این ، منوش آن
ای میزبان که پر گل ناز است بسترت
بگذار مست مست بیفتم کنار تو
بگذار هر چه هست بنوشم ز ساغرت
….
In her life and poetry, Farrokhzad did not abide by the norms of her patriarchal society or by poetic conventions,2 and remained controversial until the end of her life. Milani analyses the feminine elements in her work:
Describing her emotions and the experiences of both her body and her mind—avoiding semantic obliquity, obtrusive stylistic devices and traditional artifices of concealment—[Farrokhzad] explores patterns of heterosexual relationships in an unprecedented manner. No other Persian woman has offered more detailed and candid description of such relationships, or a more individualized, less restrained portrayal of men. The substitution of abstractions for individuals or the subordination of characters to types—a literary tradition practiced too often—has no appeal for this poet. Even the criterion of objectivity and its techniques are repeatedly abrogated.3
Milani asserts elsewhere4 that Farrokhzad’s personal and sincere feminine voice ‘seldom leaves the Iranian reader impartial. It evokes either strong attraction or keen aversion.’5 Especially in the mid-1950s, when the poet gained national and to some extent international fame, the reaction to her poetry in Iranian journals and newspapers was frequently unsympathetic. Hillmann recalls one example written by Sirus Parham, under the pseudonym ‘Doktor Mitra’:
Ms. Farrokhzad has implicitly considered the right of ‘sexual freedom’ the most vital and essential right that a woman should seek from society. Consequently, she has endeavored to incite women against men, assuming that the ‘massacre’ of men will do away with all of women’s social deprivations and thus women will be completely free!6
Farrokhzad’s internal poetic gaze and frank feminine descriptions were controversial and offensive to her society, but they made her into a poet with universal human concerns. Ignoring the thick political atmosphere of the Tehran literati, she found sophistication in everyday life and transformed it into a simple poetic language, precise and clear. In doing so, she crossed cultural and political thresholds into ontological human concerns.
Endnotes
- I have used Hillmann’s translation in A Lonely Woman, p.77. ↩︎
- I examined Farrokhzad’s poetry in its relation to Kiarostami’s film stylistics and not in regard to her life or the detailed autobiographical aspects of her poetry. For more information on these, see Hillmann, A Lonely Woman. ↩︎
- Milani, Farzaneh, ‘Forough Farrokhzad’, in Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), Persian Literature: Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies (Albany, NY, 1988), p. 370. ↩︎
- ‘Paradise Regained: Farrokhzad’s “Garden Conquered”’ in Michael Hillmann (ed.), Forough Farrokhzad: A Quarter Century Later (Austin, TX, 1988), pp. 91–105. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 91. ↩︎
- Hillmann, A Lonely Woman, p. 84. ↩︎