06 December 2007
Review
BEIRUT: She was a rebel and a rock star. She lived fast and died young. She was a revolutionary way before the rumblings of a historic rupture could be heard in Iran. She wrote more frankly about sex and more forcefully about desire than any Iranian literary figure before or since. And she paid a heavy price for it. She lost custody of her son. She was thrown into a mental hospital and given electroshock therapy. In print and for public consumption critics called her a whore with great relish.
Forty years ago, she was killed in a car crash at the age of 32, flung from her jeep, her head smashed into a concrete gutter. The accident brought the brief but bold career of Forugh Farrokhzad, established poet, emerging filmmaker, to a shocking end. It also stained her legacy with a veneer of tragedy.
To mark the anniversary of her death, the University of Arkansas Press has published "Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad," a slim, potent volume of poems that were originally released over a concentrated period of time, between 1955 and 1967, yet nevertheless illustrate expansive growth in terms of style, tone and subject matter.
Farrokhzad's legacy casts a huge shadow over both popular and critical Iranian culture. Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami named his film "The Wind Will Carry Us" after one of her poems, which includes the famous lines "May you be green, head to toe - / put your hands like a fevered memory in mine" (the poem is included in "Sin" but its title is translated, more bleakly, as "The Wind Will Blow Us Away"). Azar Nafisi, author of the bestselling memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran," fled Iran at the age of 13 clutching three books of poetry, including Farrokhzad's. The scholar Farzaneh Milani, who is preparing an extensive biography based on more than 100 interviews conducted over 30 years, recently wrote about standing in line for hours to pack into a Tehran theater, which was putting on a play drawn on Farrokhzad's life and work and where the average age of the feisty, majority female audience was well under 30.
But aside from two academic studies - Milani's "Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers," and Michael C. Hillman's "A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry" - there are precious few English-language translations of her poems that are still in print. According to Sholeh Wolpe, who cast "Sin" into English and is the first bona fide poet to translate Farrokhzad, even the black-market editions published in the original Farsi are heavily censored in Iran. (After 1979, writes Wolpe in her introduction, the Islamic Republic banned her books, ordered her original publisher not to print any more copies and when he refused, jailed him. His factory, meanwhile, burned to the ground.)
As such, the publication of "Sin" - coupled with the DVD release in 2005 of Farrokhzad's only film "Khaneh Siah Ast (The House is Black)" - is giving uninitiated English speakers an essential introduction to her work. And considered alongside the forthcoming feature film by Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat, based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novella "Women Without Men," that audience - or at least those removed and swayed by more reductive depictions of femininity as a force snuffed by black cloth - is about to have its view of Iranian women considerably enlarged and complicated.
Neshat is a controversial figure and the various readings of her work, often filtered through the lens of identity politics and inextricable from readings of Iran as foreign or unknown, are perhaps illuminating vis-a-vis Farrokhzad. From her stark photographs of veiled women pictured with guns and covered with scrawled lines of Persian poetry, including Farrokhzad's, to her lush video installations, Neshat's work has been warmly embraced in Western art circles. It has, at the same time, stoked some unease in Middle Eastern art scenes. Some feel she makes work only for the West, reiterates media cliches and reduces tricky themes (gender, sex, politics, violence) to over-aestheticized, digestible bits of otherness.
But that view conveniently sidesteps - and arguably mis-recognizes - the sheer gorgeousness and compositional sophistication of Neshat's art. Her cinematic adaptation of Parsipur's story about five mad women will probably be as heatedly debated around here as it is already hotly anticipated. And given the formal flourishes and grand passions that surge all over the pages of "Sin," one also wonders how the critical reception of Farrokhzad's work would turn if she were better known outside Iran, or had lived to expatriate, as Neshat did in the late 1970s.
Farrokhzad was born in 1935, the fourth in a family of seven children, to an overprotective, brutal mother and an indifferent military father. She was a most mischievous child and read voraciously. At 16, she was married off to a cousin, once removed. He was 31. Less than a year later her son was born. Though they lived outside the capital, Farrokhzad began traveling to Tehran and publishing poems in magazines there. She was referred to as a "poetess," her work was printed alongside silhouettes of nude women and rumors true and false of extramarital affairs made the rounds. She got divorced and lost all but rare visiting rights with her son.
In 1955, she published her first collection, "Captive," with lines like: "My fevered, raving poem / shamed by its desires, / hurls itself once again into fire, / the flames' relentless craving." She wrote combustible verses about sexual pleasure and in doing so trashed just about every known taboo about what a woman could voice, to say nothing of write, publish and publicly circulate.
The same year, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. A fellow poet began to visit her there and they became lovers. In 1956, she published "The Wall," a collection that included her most incendiary poem "Sin." (Opening lines: "I have sinned a rapturous sin / in a warm enflamed embrace, / sinned in a pair of vindictive arms, / arms violent and ablaze.")
Two years later, she published her third collection, entitled "Rebellion," which conveyed struggle and fatigue over lust and delirium. She also began a passionate, public affair with Ebrahim Golestan - filmmaker, proprietor of Golestan Studios and a married man.
She traveled to Europe, studied film production and in 1962 completed "The House is Black," a stark documentary portrayal of a leper colony that is haunting, intensely moving yet utterly devoid of poignancy.
The film won top honors at the Oberhausen film festival (coming perfectly full circle, it was reprised at Oberhausen in 2005 as part of curator Akram Zaatari's "Radical Closure" program). It also earned Farrokhzad a measure of respect from Iranian intellectuals, who read the work as an allegory for a society in advanced stages of decay, unable to cure itself rationally and throwing its lot to faith (these being the days of oil for arms, the shah's secret police and the rising profile of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini).
Then, in 1964, came "Reborn," a collection of 36 poems on which Farrokhzad's literary legacy is largely based. Twenty-three of those poems are reprinted in "Sin," and they are more weathered than the ones that come before. They speak of sorrows, disappointments, regrets and resignations. Yet some, such as "O Bejeweled Realm..." filter Farrokhzad's poems of wild passions into relentlessly caustic verse, throwing punches in all directions at social hypocrisy and political negligence.
The most powerful poems in this new volume, however, come last, from the posthumous collection "Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season," which was printed after Farrokhzad's death in 1967. Like the poem "Sin," these later verses are structured with an intricate geometry, in which certain words repeat but twist in resonance as the order, context or stress shifts (Wolpe deserves much credit for the fluidity and freshness of her translations). If, in her 20s, Farrokhzad was writing about desire as the thing that buds and ripens, then by her early 30s she was casting a rueful glance over its ruins. The crispness of her words and the enigma of her images - a subject "who winds her watch with childhood's logic of additions and subtractions," the kindness of a lover's lies, the dumb verses of defeated prophets, "how the branches of your fingers like five letters of truth left a mark on her cheek" - make "Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season" a work to be read and returned to often.
These late poems, like certain works by Charles Wright or Seamus Heaney, are meticulously built to be precise and elusive at once. They reach outside of the poet's own experience, beyond her headspace, her gender, her country of origin. Both pensive and urgent, they strive for the universal. If they fortify her work against readings based strictly on autobiography or identity politics, then all the better.
"Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad," translated by Sholeh Wolpe, is published by the University of Arkansas Press
