by Brian Griffith and Zhinia Noorian
Parvin E’tesami (1907–1941) was a major female poet of the early twentieth century, whose art brought unprecedented change in the world of Persian literature. She published her first several poems in Bahar (Spring) magazine at age 13, and on graduating from secondary school in 1924, gave a speech denouncing the lack of women’s education as a “chronic disease of the East.” Perhaps with that concern in mind, she became a school teacher for several years, and then a university librarian. In 1926 she was invited to serve as a tutor to the nation’s queen, but rejected the job offer. She married a police chief, but divorced him after ten weeks, finding that he had no comprehension of her mind.
E’tesami revived a long-neglected genre of classical Persian literature, namely the “debate poetry” that had been staged in the courts of medieval rulers. In the court of E’tesami’s mind, ordinary, powerless people (or other lowly creatures) spoke face-to-face with their supposed superiors, as they challenged each other over who or what had status, value, and spirituality. In her provocatively named poem “God’s Weaver,” E’tesami cast a female spider in debate with an arrogant man, who condemns her weaving work as less than worthless. Here is part of the spider’s reply:
There exists another market, my Dear Sir,
where my fabric is well appreciated.
No matter how great the customer, the gold treasure—
neither can compare with the eye of an expert.
You are blind to the curtains of my walls.
How do you expect to see the veil of secrets?
You keep caviling me, the spider,
when you’ve nothing to your name but arrogance.
I’ve been a weaver from the beginning,
and this I’ll be as long as I live. (Milani, 1992, 117)
In such poems, E’tesami ridiculed the powers ruling her world, combining social, political, and mystical arguments within the same lines. In this particular poem, she created a pro-feminist elaboration on Walt Whitman’s character in “A Noiseless Patient Spider” (Fomeshi, 272).
The first edition of E’tesami’s Divan (book of collected poems) included 158 compositions, and was published in 1935. After it drew widespread acclaim, Reza Shah’s Ministry of Culture was moved to award her a medal of honor. She rejected it and sent it back, claiming that others deserved such honors more (Moayyad and Madelung, p. xii). Her second edition included 209 poems, but just before its publication she died at the early age of 34. Her work was cut short, but remained so popular that it went through a dozen editions over the following eight decades.
As probably could be expected, the people whose status E’tesami challenged moved to invalidate her, and their main line of attack was to question her identity as a woman. They said that the intellect shown in these poems was utterly unlike the mind of a female. Such intellect was “manly,” “asexual,” or “cold and distant,” whereas a woman would be sentimental. Some accused that it must have been her father who wrote the poems, and Parvin had lied to claim herself the author. She replied with a poem including the line “Parvin is not a man.”
Even decades later, a critic named Fazlollah Garakani wrote a whole book trying to prove that the poetic masterpieces attributed to E’tesami could not possibly have been written by such a “timid,” “cross-eyed” female. Seeming to sympathize with this poor woman, he claimed that she had been wrongly “accused” of being a poet (Milani, 1992, xv). Fereshteh Davaran argued that E’tesami clearly “lacked femininity,” because women express their sexuality through “coquetry, flirting and loving” (Davaran, 84–85). The critics claimed such things despite E’tesami’s words in her poem “Iranian Women,” which begins as follows:
Formerly a woman in Iran was almost non-Iranian.
All she did was struggle through dark and distressing days.
Her life she spent in isolation; she died in isolation.
What was she then if not a prisoner?
None ever lived centuries in darkness like her.
None was sacrificed in the altar of hypocrisy like her. (Moayyad and Madelung, pp. 107–108)
Clearly, vast numbers of E’tesami’s female readers felt it obvious that like E’tesami herself, they were intellectual, creative, hard-headed, and emotional, all at the same time.
During the 1970s, Fatemeh Keshavarz (now the Director of the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland) was hosting an evening radio show in Shiraz, and someone suggested she invite a local man who had memorized every poem ever written by Parvin E’tesami. When he came to be interviewed, Keshavarz was surprised to see an old man in tattered peasant clothes. When asked when he began reading E’tesami’s works, he admitted that he had never learned to read: “I had a small piece of land to take care of and a family to feed, Ma’am” (Keshavarz, 43–45). This supposedly ignorant, traditional Muslim man illustrated the depth of popular admiration for a woman of poetic genius.
During the rule of the Pahlavi shahs, several of E’tesami’s most famous poems were included in the public school textbooks. Even after the Islamic Revolution, esteem for E’tesami’s work remained undiminished, even among the clerical leaders. When the school textbooks were “Islamicized” in the early 1980s, selected portions of her poems were included in the books for grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, and 12. Even the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, quoted lines from E’tesami’s poems on at least four public occasions, although both he and the school textbook editors selected lines that seemed to endorse their own ideology.
From the upcoming book Mother Persia: Praise for Great Iranian Women, by Brian Griffith and Zhinia Noorian
Sources
Davaran, Fereshteh (1994) “Impersonality in Parvin E’tessami’s Poetry.” In Heshmat Moayyad (ed.), Once a Dewdrop: Essays on the Poetry of Parvin E’tessami, Mazda Publishers.
Fomeshi, Behnam (2018) “‘Till the Gossamer Thread You Fling Catch Somewhere’: Parvin E’tesami’s Creative Reception of Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 35, 267–275.
Keshavarz, Fatemeh (2007) Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. University of North Carolina Press.
Milani, Farzaneh (1992) Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers. Syracuse University Press.
Moayyad, Hershmat and Madelung, Margaret Arent (1985) A Nightingale’s Lament: Selections from the Poems and Fables of Parvin E’tesami, Mazda Publishers.