by Brian Griffith.
As a daughter of two fairly prominent politicians from north Tehran in the 1950s and ‘60s, Azar Nafisi reported “we took our education and our books and parties and movies for granted. We witnessed women becoming active in all walks of life, governing in parliament … and becoming ministers” (2008, xx). It could be an exciting time to be a teenager. But Nahid Rachlin, growing up in the oil town of Abadan, recalled mostly frustration. Her family seemed modern, and didn’t fast at Ramadan or wear hijab. Still, her parents believed that boys and girls must stay separate. Unmarried girls must not attract attention in the street. Marriages had to be prudently arranged by the parents: “Tension from unexpressed desire permeated the house” (2006, 40).
In this age of frustrated aspiration, a traditionally unthinkable form of literature grew popular: women who published their real feelings about themselves and about men. Increasingly, the taboo on making public what was private was shattered. Simin Daneshvar, for example, published truths that every thinking woman knew:
Heterosexual relationships are altogether sort of sick in Iran. They are patriarchal and androcentric. Most marriages in our country are unsuccessful. Two individuals with two different backgrounds, education, and customs have to endure one another for a lifetime. Well, this very tolerance creates hatred. (Milani, 1992, 194)
Then around 1960, the wildly popular female poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935–1967) began exposing her whole world of inner conflict, desire, infidelity, and rapture, writing with a novel sort of free-flow verse:
Why should I stop, why?
The birds have gone off to find waterways
The horizon is vertical, and moving is rocketing
Shining planets spin
at the edge of night
Why should I stop, why? (1974, 76)
Farrokhzad had married at 16, largely to escape an unhappy home. She soon bore a son, but found her marriage deeply constricting. All this would have been extremely normal, but in 1954 Farrokhzad burst from anonymity by publishing a 12-line poem, in which she frankly described her own extramarital love affair. Here was a woman speaking in the first-person singular, using her real name, reporting her real feelings about an affair to the whole nation. And although large numbers of readers found this breathtakingly honest, the blowback was immediate and personal. The unnamed lover came forward to publish a series of character assassinations against her, and her husband joined in this publication contest to defend male honor. Before she was even 20 years old, Farrokhzad was divorced, lost custody of her son, and was stripped of the right to even visit her child.
Seeking to vent her pain, she published more disturbingly honest poetry, and was met with such hostility that she suffered a nervous breakdown, was hospitalized, and treated with electric shock therapy.
To escape all that, she boarded a cargo plane for Italy, and wandered around that foreign land as an unaccompanied woman for months. She explored what it was like to just follow her own curiosity, without regard for any social walls. Her published series of articles from Italy described simple joys or self-discoveries. She learned to hardly care that many readers in Iran said these accounts represented nothing but a quest for sinful depravity. She spoke of a commitment to making “naked truth” her spiritual practice.
Back in Iran, Farrokhzad found a job as a receptionist at the Golistan Film Studio and began avidly soaking up everything she could about film making. In helping to make a documentary about leprosy patients, she grew so mesmerized by these social outcasts that within months she got herself appointed director of a five-man crew, to make her own movie inside a leper colony near Tabriz. Her film, The House Is Black (1962) was disturbingly unblinking but deeply respectful, capturing the dignity and humanity of people dealing with the most fearsome forms of physical and social deprivation.
Then she published more poetry, which was always partly based on real adventures. Searching for a better way of relating, Farrokhzad sought and found men who were ready to risk being vulnerable. The men she described were no longer tyrannized by other people’s expectations. Probably at her adventurous prodding, they showed a capacity for honest intimacy. As Farzaneh Milani describes the men in these poems,
They are no longer determined or confined by roles traditionally assigned to their gender. They are not so tightly wrapped in their masculinity as to be forced to hide their own needs and desires. No other Persian woman has offered a more detailed, individualized portrait of men (1992, 137–138).
Azar Nafisi explains that Farrokhzad had “the audacity to acknowledge her love affairs without shame … She turned the idea of personal ‘sin’ … into a defiance of authority, especially of God” (2008, 169). For Farrokhzad, the veiling of personal life was no longer the basis of decency—it was the main obstacle that every real artist must overcome. When reviled as a harlot pushing sin, she answered “Don’t call me a woman poet. I am a poet, and if a male poet can talk about love, so can I” (en.iranwire, 2015, Forugh Farrokhzad). Her honesty would open gates for a steam of other poets, film makers, or memoir writers, who would turn the candid, public expression of women’s experience into a “soft weapon” for empathy.
With her 1964 book of poems Another Birth, the nation’s literary community belatedly began to celebrate her genius. The reading public started to proclaim her their artistic hero. Her poems ridiculed the prevailing social agenda and demanded better:
O, how comfortable I am
in the loving arms of the motherland!
The pacifier of the glorious historical past,
the lullaby of civilization and culture,
and the rattling noise of the ratchet of law.
O, how comfortable I am! (Keshavarz, 2007, 40)
Then in 1967 she died in a car wreck, leaving a resounding echo of clashing dreams. Those who denounced Farrokhzad as a corrupter of popular culture had their own iconic heroes, such as the increasingly famous firebrand cleric Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been expelled from the country in 1964 for inciting violent protest against the shah’s decadent regime. And what if we compare these two dreamers? It seems obvious at first glance that Farrokhzad and Khomeini were diametric opposites in the field of human potential. But there were also certain similarities. Both of them made the personal political. Both of them saw the role of women as fundamental for making a better world, despite having radically different visions of what was “better.” Both of them saw personal integrity as the key to transforming an unjust society. Maybe it was their definitions of personal integrity that differed most greatly.
Sources:
en.iranwire (2015) Forugh Farrokhzad, at en.iranwire.com/features/6682.
Farrokhzad, Forugh (1974) Let Us Believe in the Dawning of a Cold Season. Moravid, Tehran.
Keshavarz, Fatemeh (2007) Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
Milani, Farzaneh (1992) Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY.
Nafisi, Azar (2008) Things I’ve Been Silent About. Random House, New York.
Rachlin, Nahid (2006) Persian Girls: A Memoir. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.