An author unafraid to defy midcentury attitudes about her gender. “What is important is humanity,” she said, “not being a man or a woman.”
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When a radio interviewer suggested to the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad that her verses could be characterized as “feminine,” she rejected the notion.
“What is important is humanity, not being a man or a woman,” she said. “If a poem can get to that point, it is no longer connected with its creator but with a world of poetry.”
Farrokhzad was one of Iran’s pre-eminent mid-20th-century writers, both reviled and revered for her poems, which often dealt with female desire. Throughout her life she struggled with how her gender affected the reception of her work in a culture where women were often confined to traditional roles, but where there are few higher callings than the life of a poet.
In the afterword to “Captive” (1955), her first poetry collection, Farrokhzad wrote, “Perhaps because no woman before me took steps toward breaking the shackles binding women’s hands and feet, and because I am the first to do so, they have made such a controversy out of me.”
Her death in 1967 at 32, in a car crash, was regarded as a national tragedy, making the front pages of Tehran’s newspapers.
Iran’s leading literary journal, Sokhan, wrote after her funeral, “Forough is perhaps the first female writer in Persian literature to express the emotions and romantic feelings of the feminine gender in her verse with distinctive frankness and elegance, for which reason she has inaugurated a new chapter in Persian poetry.”
After the overthrow of Iran’s secular monarchy in 1979, the Islamic Republic banned her poetry for almost a decade. But that censorship only elevated her appeal to new generations of Iranians, who saw in Farrokhzad — often referred to simply as Forough — an icon of artistic, personal and sexual freedom.
“I can only compare her in America to a movie star or a music celebrity, because no poet here would reach that kind of status,” said Farzaneh Milani, author of “Forough Farrokhzad: A Literary Biography” (2016) and a professor of Middle Eastern culture at the University of Virginia.
Forough Farrokhzad (pronounced FOR-ugh Far-ROHK-zad) was born on Jan. 5, 1935, in Tehran, one of seven children of Mohammad Farrokhzad and Turan Vaziri-Tabar. Her father was an army colonel and her mother a homemaker. She studied painting at the Kamal al-Molk school.
At 16, Forough fell in love with Parviz Shapur, a distant relative 15 years her senior, and married him over her parents’ objections. They moved to the southern city of Ahvaz, where Shapur worked for the Ministry of Finance. They had a son, Kamyar, a year later.
It was around this time that Farrokhzad began publishing her poetry. In a deeply traditional society, marriage gave her a degree of freedom, her first biographer in English, Michael C. Hillman, wrote in “A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry” (1987), using a variant spelling of her first name. With her husband’s support, Farrokhzad traveled frequently to Tehran. She published her first poems with the prestigious literary journal Roshanfekr. But she was unhappy in her role as homemaker, writing in the 1955 poem “Captive”:
I think about it and yet I know
I’ll never be able to leave this cage
Even if the warden should let me go
I’ve lost the strength to fly away.
Three years into her marriage, Farrokhzad left her husband, whose family would cause her great pain by forbidding her to see her son. She declared her determination to give herself over to her true “lover,” poetry.
Her poem “The Sin” exposed her to public ridicule. Much-quoted, it opens, “I sinned a sin of pleasure,” and describes her affair in 1954 with Nasser Khodayar, the editor in chief of Roshanfekr:
In dark and quiet seclusion
Absently I lay beside him.
His lips poured lust on mine,
And I rose from the sorrow of a crazed heart.
After the affair ended abruptly, Khodayar presented an unflattering portrait of Farrokhzad in a series of short stories in the magazine. Farrokhzad’s family implored him to stop. A month later, in September 1955, she suffered a mental breakdown. After attempting suicide, she was put in the Rezai psychiatric clinic, where she was subjected to electroshock therapy.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Muslim World Today.