Golnoosh Nour presents … Forough Farrokhzad

Introduction

 

Forough Farrokhzad is one of Iran’s most famous and influential poets. Her poetry and persona gave permission to me and many other Iranians to write openly and daringly about longing and desire. Forough Farrokhzad’s life was turbulent and transgressive, not just because she broke the social norms expected of Iranian women in the 1950s and 60s, but also because she published poetry which questioned the traditional structures of religion, marriage, and gender norms. Indeed, when she was a journalist in her youth, her pseudonym was bot shekan – ‘idol-breaker’. Although the publication of her poetry has been banned since the foundation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry is still a best-seller on Iran’s black market. She still has a very strong fan base in Iran, especially within the Iranian queer community and her younger brother, Fereydoun was openly gay and a famous entertainer. (Although, tragically, a few years after the Islamic Revolution, he was murdered in his apartment in Germany.) Like most Iranians, I also prefer to refer to Forough Farrokhzad by her first name, Forough.

Below is a picture I took from a street bookseller in April 2018, in the Tajrish Square of Tehran, selling The Complete Poetry of Forough Farrokhzad with ‘Private Letters’. It is in the same row as other popular books in the Iranian book market: Sohrab Sepehri’s Complete Poetry, and a Persian translation of Mein Kampf. The rows beneath the top row include some of Iraj Pezekshad’s novels, including his canonical masterpiece: Dayi Jaan Napel’on (Uncle Napoleon), Farsi translations of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince.

 

 

Forough was born in 1935 to a middle-class family in Tehran. Her father was Colonel Farrokhzad, and her mother, Touran Vaziri-Tabar. Forough was one of their seven children and soon earned a reputation for competing with boys and defeating them. She climbed walls, jumped, and ‘howled’. Once she entered school, she became infatuated with the poetry of Ferdowsi, especially his Epic of Kings, and other classical Persian poets, such as Hafez and Rumi. At the age of sixteen, Forough married Parviz Shapoor and within a year, gave birth to their son, whom she lost two years later in the custody battle due to her love affairs.
—-The opening line of the poem Sin is: ‘I have sinned a pleasurable sin’. Forough wrote this poem about her affair with Naser Khodayar, the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine, who published derogatory pieces about Forough after their affair ended abruptly in 1954, until Farrokhzad’s family asked him to stop. Shortly after this public shaming in September 1955, Forough had a mental breakdown and attempted suicide, after which she was hospitalised in Rezai psychiatric clinic and received electroshock therapy, which also resulted in some magazines and newspapers to mock her by describing her as ‘insane’.
—-Her first poetry collection The Captive (Asir in Farsi) was published in 1955. The Captive consists of forty-two poems, most of which deal with sexual desire from the female point of view in a sorrowful tone, all composed in classical Persian poetic form. She was so prolific that only a year after that she published her second poetry collection The Wall (Deevar in Farsi).
—-In 1958, her third poetry collection Rebellion (Osyan in Farsi) was published. Although this collection is quite similar to her first two collections and is usually lumped with them under Forough’s early poetry and erotica, there is a shift towards existential matters such as God, life, and death. In this collection, Forough starts to question the figure of God, whilst adopting a more celebratory tone when describing her sexual desires and adventures, unlike the previous two collections, she does not have an apologetic tone towards God, but rather a more interrogating one.
—-In the same year, Forough Farrokhzad met and fell in love with another celebrated Iranian writer and film producer, Ebrahim Golestan. Despite the fact that he was married, they embarked on an intense and passionate love affair.
—-In 1962, Forough made her cutting-edge documentary The House Is Black, about the patients in a leprosarium in a deserted town in Iran. This poetic and unflinchingly realist film brought her universal recognition by winning the Best Documentary Award in the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1963. Hamid Dabashi states that with this film, Forough Farrokhzad ‘set Iranian film on a creative path from which it has not diverged.’ Below are three photographs I took in 2018 from the screening of the film at Mosaic Rooms in London:

 

 

Forough Farrokhzad’s fourth poetry collection Reborn (1962) is distinctly different from the previous three collections in terms of form, style, and content. The poems are not composed in the classical Persian rhyme schemes, instead Forough has adopted the Nimaic blank verse – the poetic form in free verse pioneered by Nima Youshij that was dominating the Persian poetry scene. This collection and her fifth collection Let Us Believe in the Dwan of the Cold Season (posthumously published in 1974) elevated Forough’s reputation from a ‘sensual poetess’ to one of the greatest poets of Persian modernism.

On the 13th of February 1967, returning from visiting her mother, Forough swerved her jeep in order to avoid hitting a school bus. She was thrown out of the car and her head hit the cement. She died immediately at the age of 32.

 

 

Hamid Dabashi describes Forough Farrokhzad as ‘the most celebrated woman poet in the course of the Persian poetic tradition and a seminal modern Persian poet, regardless of gender.’ Farzaneh Milani says about Forough that ‘her work has been among the most popular in modern Persian literature.’ Shaahin Pishbin explains that ‘Farrokhzad challenged, or even threatened, the normative values of her culture; innovative and exemplary, her place in the canon of modernist Persian poetry is well-established.’
—-Erotic poetry has always been an integral part of Persian literature. Passion is a common theme in the works of ancient Persian poets such as Hafez, Rumi, and Khayyam, but Forough Farrokhzad is the first woman who published her erotic verse. She is considered to be the pioneer of poets who wrote about female desire through the female gaze in Iran.

 

 

Note: Although I have translated a poem from Forough for this essay, all English translations of her poems have been taken from Sholeh Wolpé’s book Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad:

 

 

The Captive (1955), The Wall (1956), and Rebellion (1958)

Pleasure, in particular sexual pleasure, is one of the main themes of Farrokhzad’s early poetry, although this pleasure is often stained by a fear of God in her first two collections, in Rebellion, she started to adopt a more interrogating and fearless tone towards God and religion, for instance, the final stanza of Rebellious God is

Tired of being a prude, I’d seek Satan’s bed at midnight
And find refuge in the declivity of breaking laws.
I’d happily exchange the golden crown of divinity
For the dark, aching embrace of a sin.

Despite her early poetry being dismissed and mocked as traditionally-versed erotica, some of Forough Farrokhzad’s early poems are modern, feminist, and transgressive in terms of content in that they unashamedly explored and expressed female sexual desires in the 1950s and often questioned traditional concepts such as religion and marriage. A good example of this is a poem called The Ring, from Forough Farrokhzad’s debut poetry collection The Captive (1955). The Ring is a belligerent critique of the institution of heterosexual marriage. In the last stanza, the woman who has been married and congratulated and celebrated due to her marriage and ‘lustrous’ gold ring, is now mourning her status que and defines marriage as ‘slavery’:

… this band –
so lustrous and aglow –
is the clamp of bondage, of slavery

 

Reborn (1964)

Forough Farrokhzad’s fourth poetry collection Reborn (1964) is drastically different from her previous collections in that it has a modernist structure, and in terms of language and the use of literary devices it is much more innovative and original as it is full of eccentric extended metaphors, tangible vibrant and eerie imagery, and linguistic witticisms that have become a part of Farsi. Below is an instance of a strong extended metaphor and image from Those Days:

Those days are gone.
As uprooted plants wilt in the sun,
those days, too, rotted in sunlight.

—-In this collection, her lengthiest, Forough Farrokhzad’s feminism comes across as more confident and confrontational, especially with one of her poems called Wind-Up Doll in which she blatantly questions male authority, female subordination, and gender binaries:

one can cry out: I love!
In the oppressive arms of a man
one can be a robust, beautiful female

—-A few lines after this blunt criticism of the heterosexist power structures, she critiques the close-mindedness that can be caused by religion:

One can spend a lifetime kneeling,
head bowed,
before the cold altar of the Imams,
find God inside an anonymous grave,
faith in a few paltry coins.
One can rot inside a mosque’s chamber

Forough Farrokhzad’s renouncement of the institution of marriage and her blatant criticism of religion constitute only a few political elements of her poetry. Indeed, Jasmin Darznik correctly describes Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry as ‘at once political and poetic, particular and universal’.

 

 

Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season (1974)

Forough Farrokhzad’s fifth poetry collection Iman Biavarim be Aghaaze Fasl-e Sard (Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season) was written in 1965 but was posthumously published in 1974 and solidified her reputation as one of the greatest poets in Iran.
—-The first poem in the collection is the title poem, a great example of modernist poetry due to its content and techniques. The sense of doom, apocalypse, frustration, disappointment, and gloom in this long free verse has been expressed through unique and cryptic images. Jasmin Darznik has likened this poem to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Below is an extract:

Hollow human.
Hollow, trusting human.
Look at his teeth singing as they chew,
and his eyes devouring as they stare,
and how he passes the wet trees:
patiently,
heavily,
lost,
at the hour of four,
at the very moment his blue veins,
wrapped about his throat like dead snakes,
pound his angry temples
with those bloodied syllables:
Salaam.
Salaam.

Many believe that this poem, and the whole collection was a dark prophecy of Forough Farrokhzad’s sudden and tragic death; especially the famous final poem of the collection The Bird Shall One Day Die and its final lines that have become a Persian proverb:

Preserve the memory of flight.
The bird shall one day die.

Many also claim that this dark collection was a prophecy of Iran’s political future, especially in the light of the Islamic Revolution as the poem is imbued with dark political symbolism, particularly one of its most well-known poem I Pity the Garden. The fable of the garden of Eden is one of the most famous fables from the Quran, and it is not just a part of the narrative of Christianity, but also an integral part of Islamic and Middle Eastern discourse. In this thought-provoking and dark poem, Forough Farrokhzad criticises and ‘pities’ the garden that constitutes the narrator’s family. This garden that is ‘dying’ includes nuclear familial figures such as ‘father’ ‘mother’ ‘brother’ ‘sister’ and the narrator who is observing and mourning the decay and emptiness of it. Below is an extract from I Pity the Garden:

Mother is a sinner by nature. She prays
all day, then with her “consecrated” breath
blows on all the flowers, all the fish
and all over her own body.
She awaits the Promised One
and the forgiveness He is to bring.

My brother calls the garden a graveyard.
He laughs at the plight of grass
and ruthlessly counts the corpses of the fish
rotting beneath shallow water’s dead skin.
My brother is addicted to philosophy.
He sees the healing of the garden in its death.
Drunk, he beats his fists on doors, and walls,
says he is tired, pained, and despondent.

My sister was a friend to flowers.
She would take her simple heart words
– when mother beat her ¬–
to their kind and silent gathering.

She now lives on the other side of town
in her artificial home, and in the arms
of her artificial husband she makes natural children.

Just like any other text, Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry is also open to interpretation. The intensity, urgency, and immediacy of her poems make them even more so. Whatever readings of her poetry, one thing’s for sure: her poetry, vision, and persona created a new way of seeing, writing, and expressing that is as necessary today as it was in the 1950s. Her untimely death always begs the question of what might have been had she lived longer.

 

Rome 1956. Forough (on the left) with her ‘artistic soulmate’ Behjat Sadr (on the right). Behjat was an Iranian Modernist artist who died in 2009.
Photo Source: Photo Source: (last accessed: 10/10/2018)

 

Referenced and cited works:

Meetra A. Sophia, ‘Forough Farrokhzad: Twelve Poems; Notes and Translation by Meetra A. Sofia’, American Poetry Review, 35.1 (2006)

Michael C. Hillmann, A Lonely Woman: Forough Farrokhzad and Her Poetry (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987)

Hamid Dabashi, ‘Why Iran Creates Some of the Best Films’, BBC Culture (16/11/2018)

Jasmin Darznik, ‘Forugh Farrokhzad, Her Poetry, Life, and Legacy’, The Women’s Review of Books, 23.6 (2006)

Jasmin Darznik, ‘Forough Goes West: The Legacy of Forough Farrokhzad In Iranian Diasporic Art and Literature’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6.1 (2010)

Forough Farrokgzad, The Captive (Tehran: Amir Kabir Press, 1955)

Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season (1974)

Forough Farrokhzad, Rebellion (Tehran: Amir Kabir Press, 1958)

Forough Farrokhzad, Reborn (1964)

Forough Farrokhzad, ‘The House Is Black’ (Studio Golestan, 1962)

Forough Farrokhzad, The Wall (Tehran: Amir Kabir Press, 1956)

Mahrokhsadat Hosseini, ‘Feminist Culture and Politics in Iranian Women’s Post-Revolutionary Poetry (1979-2017)’ Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2.7 (2018)

Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992)

Farzaneh Milani, Words, not Swords: Iranian women writers and the freedom of movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011)

Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Shaahin Pishbin, ‘Forough Farrokhzad and the Persian Literary Canon’, Iran Namag, 1 (2017)

Amir Hussein Radjy, ‘Overlooked No More: Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian Poet Who Broke Barriers of Sex and Society’, The New York Times (30/01/2019)

Sholeh Wolpe, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2007)

 

 

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p.s. Hey. And today the blog receives the great gift of this guest-post by the very wonderful writer Golnoosh Nour introducing the works and life story of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. I had never heard of Farrokhzad before, and maybe you have or haven’t, but, in any case, this is golden opportunity to explore her beautiful poetry, so please do so in your respective fashions. As always, it would be an excellent thing if you can say a word or two in the post’s regards to our generous guest-host. Thank you, and thank you greatly, Golnoosh! ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. Thanks for chiming in, man. ** Ferdinand, The generosity was/is all yours, sir. Everyone, A little corrective from your weekend’s host, Ferdinand: ‘In my intro I mistakenly called it a revenge porn film, I meant to say a revenge rape film. English is my second language so I tend to swop some syllables like C with S hence some mispelling in the text.’ Thank you so much again. It was a hit in all respects. ** Paul K – Wake Island, Hi, Paul. Thanks a lot for coming in here. It’s great to see you! I saw Chris’s mention of his episode and that thematic right before I launched the weekend’s post, and, yeah, synchronicity city. Excited for the episode. Huge fan and addictee of Wake Island, as I think you know. Thanks again, and big respect. ** David Ehrenstein, It’s something if you get the chance to watch it. ** Chris Kelso, Hi, Chris! That is rather astonishing that ‘Vernon Subutex’ was nominated for the Booker. Very, very weird. But good. Yeah, cosmic alignment or something on the Wake/Chris thing for sure. It would be dreamy to be on Wake Island, but he had Diarmuid Hester talking about my stuff not so long ago, so I suspect I am maxed out as a potential Islander for the time being. Thanks for thinking that! ** Dominik, Hi, D!!!! Well, you’re almost to the deadline, right (?), so there’s that little prize at least. My weekend? Well, Gisele Vienne and I are making a film of our now-retired theater piece ‘Jerk’, and I spent a day watching/supervising the last day of filming. That went well. I wandered about to see what the confinement is like and it seems pretty soft. A bunch of stores closed, but lots of people out and about like usual. I decided for some weird reason to scroll/fast-forward through a replay of the Grammy Awards, I guess to see what normal people listen to and to put some musical context to all the current stars’ names that I’ve read about but never heard. Jesus, what a dreary, watered down, retro bunch of conservative nothingness, except for a very few fun-ish things (Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Billie Eilish, and … yeah, just them). And I wrote some, etc. Okay not an amazing couple of days. Ha ha, lama farm, I’m so there. Love giving Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Black Pumas, Doja Cat, Post Malone, Bruno Mars, and Anderson .Paak permanent laryngitis, G. ** Bill, Oh, you met Jon Rose! Wow, that’s interesting. Good stuff, his. The lockdown is annoying but, so far, it could have been worse. A bunch of Parsians did storm out of the city on Friday, but not as many as in previous lockdowns. The streets are still reasonably packed. ** ian, Hi, ian. I’m hanging in here, you? Spring is springing here too, a little fitfully, but still. Our little lockdown ‘reward’ is that our curfew got changed from 6 pm to 7 pm. Oh, gee, that makes everything totally okay! Ha ha. ** Jack Skelley, MaJACK Mountain! Hey, that’s not bad. Am I the first to tag you as such? Should I copyright that? Strangely, or not (?), I remember some of the Disneyland trips when I was blasted by acid better than some of the clean and sober visits. I hereby order you to spend at least an hour this week eating Mexican food — meatless — and then astral projecting the taste into my mouth. Wait, that sounds scary, never mind. You can ‘go your own way’ to quote the worst incarnation of Fleetwood Mac. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Well, at the time, during their early days, Dury, Costello, and Lowe were put in the punk category by quite a number of people, and I don’t remember any of those three complaining. Other than ‘Vernon Subutex’, which I quite liked, I haven’t read any of the later Despentes books, few if any of which are translated. People I know here say her work is not as exciting as it used to be. ** _Black_Acrylic, Aw, you look happy in that picture, and very daylit. Very nice to gander at. Oh, man, thank you for the alert about the Styrene doc being on youtube. I’ll go watch that post-haste before it gets taken down. Yeah, thanks a lot buddy! Everyone, The new documentary about the very great Poly Styrene is up on YouTube, fuck knows for how long, so I strongly recommend hitting this link and watching it ASAP if you’re interested. ** John Newton, Hi. No, I’ve never met her as far as I know. Well, I guess if she and I were very likeminded, collaborating might be possible, but I’m pretty spoiled by working with Zac who almost seems to share the same brain with me sometimes, so I don’t know if I’d want to collaborate with someone where there isn’t a deep innate mutual understanding. Mm, maybe Catherine Breillat’s fiction would qualify as in the same realm? I’d have to think about it to suggest others. Nothing pops into my head instantly. Good luck with your busyness. I’m going to angle for busyness this week. Best way to get through a lockdown for sure. ** ae, Hi. Oh, no, I haven’t received that package yet. I really want to, though. Hopefully any second. Thank you a million for sending it. I’ve gotten pretty good at staying sane through lockdowns. If I wasn’t a writer and okay with solitariness, I might go nuts, though, it’s true. May any incompetence around you this week melt. ** Okay. Please spend the local portion of your day with Golnoosh’s lovely post. Thank you. See you tomorrow.