April 21, 2002

At night on the damp road/How often have I said to myself/ Does life within our shadows assume colours, or/Are we ourselves the shadows of our shadows?

Is darkness pain or pleasure?/Is a body a prison or a field of freedom?/What is the darkness of the night?/Night is the shadow of whose black spirit? (The wall)



FAROGH Farrokhzad’s corpus of poems, fewer than two hundred, mostly short lyrics, are personal, and intimate and have established her as a first-rate modern Iranian poet. As a free spirit in the middle of the last century, when a new tradition of women intensely involved in self-reflection and self-revelation emerged in Iran, Farrokhzad’s literary life epitomized the dichotomy faced by men and women alike. Women were not restrained by the opacity of a veil and not only revealed themselves but also unveiled men in their writings. There was a discontinuity in society at that time and a period of rapid change. Safeguarding many traditional ideas, yet fascinated by change, women shuttled back and forth between the old and the new.

Love themes consistently form the core of her poetry, but its treatment is not strictly sensuous. It acknowledges the limitation and failure of conventional love to satisfy the poet, and appropriates new communicative and personal terrain denied women previously.

Farrokhzad was born in 1935. She never finished high school and at sixteen married a man she had fallen in love with. One year after their marriage a son was born. Farrokhzad’s first collection, titled Asir (Captive), appeared in 1955. It contains forty-four poems. Throughout these poems is a serious, searching, loving, young woman. The poems contain no philosophizing themes, or full-blown descriptions of nature. Images drawn from nature appear in these poems as part of a world in which love and the giving it implies are all that matter or seem, to exist. The speaker reveals a spectrum of moods: anticipation, regret, joy, remorse, loneliness, abandon, repentance, doubt, and reverie. But the immediate issue is love, a woman’s love for a man that makes the heart ache and that can satisfy all needs.



I want you, yet I know that never/ can I embrace you to my heart’s content./you are that clear and bright sky./I, in this corner of the cage, am a captive bird.



The poetic protagonist of Captive is a confused young woman who has a hard time forging an identity for herself. She is caught between the seemingly irreconcilable demands of a woman-wife-mother and an autonomous poet.

Her second collection, Divar (Wall), was dedicated to her now former husband.



How will your memory die in my heart?/The memory of you is the memory of first love



In less than a year her third book, Esian (Rebellion), appeared and securely established her as a promising yet notorious poet. Throughout the poems of these two collections one notices a much stronger and more sustained sense of the poet’s autonomy. She bitterly criticizes her society, specially its injustices against women. A sense of outrage and anger pervades the impetus for the writing of many poems of this period. The collection as a whole embodies a mood and anger reminiscent of Khayyam’s in Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubayat of Omar Khayyam. For example, in “Divine rebellion”, the protagonist declares what she would do if she were God. She would let the sun loose in darkness, throw mountains into the sea, set forests on fire, join souls to bodies brought from the grave

In Rebellion, she reveals that she has moved to that state from her sense of being a captive and facing walls.

Barely twenty years old with three poetry collections to her credit, she developed a new interest in cinematography, acting, and producing. In 1962, she made a documentary movie about a lepers’ colony, titled “The house is black”. The movie was acclaimed internationally and won several prizes. Meanwhile her fourth poetry collection, Tavallodi digat (Another Birth), was published in 1964. When Another birth exploded on the literary scene, modernist critics immediately hailed it as a milestone in the short history of modernist Persian poetry. Another birth, celebrates the birth of a female character who rejoices in her new options. She becomes her own model and gives birth to a self in the image of her likings and aspirations. For Farrokhzad herself, the contents of the volume represented ‘a new birth’ as a poet. She felt that the volume revealed first signs of poetic maturity. Another birth embodied a broadening of poetic concerns, vision, imagery, and diction.



One can cover cracks in the wall with masks/One can merge with even more useless designs and pictures/Exactly like a wind-up doll,/One can see one’s own world with two glass eyes/One can sleep for years in a felt-lined box/On lace and tinsel.

One can, in response to every obscene squeeze of a hand,/Exclaim without reason:/”Oh, I’m so fortunate!”

(Another birth)



At the height of her creativity and barely 32, Farrokhzad died of head injuries in a car accident on February 14 1967. Trying to avoid an oncoming vehicle, she struck a wall and was thrown out of her car. Ironically she died at a time when she claimed to have finally found herself. She never saw the publication of her fifth collection, Iman biavrim be aghaz-i-fasl-i-sard (Let us believe in the dawning of a cold season)



And this is I/

a woman alone/

at the threshold of a cold season/

at the beginning of understanding/

the polluted existence of the earth/

and the simple and sad pessimism of the sky/

and the incapacity of these concrete hands.



But this verse from it reverberates through to her end as she was buried in the snow.



Perhaps the truth was those young pair of hands/Those young pair of hands buried beneath the falling snow/And next year, when Spring/

Mates with the sky beyond the window/And stems thrust from her body/

Fountains of fragile green stems/Will blossom, my love, O my dearest love.



Farrokhzad’s death shocked the Iranian literary world and even had the effect of changing the minds of some people who previously disapproved of her personal lifestyle and based on that were critical of her poetic output. It surely must have hurt that the attention given to her poetry during her life focused on its morality, and the sex of the author rather than on its own terms as poetic statement. Farrokhzad’s tragic and untimely death gave her poetry a special poignant popularity. It must, however, be recognized that prior to her no woman poet in Persian had ever composed love poems with men as the object, and after her none could escape her influence. Since then all of her poems have gone through numerous printings.

Farrokhzad’s poetry is the chronicle of an evolving consciousness, the testament of a growing awareness. It explores the vulnerability of a woman who rejects unreflective conformity with the past yet suffers from the uncertainties about the future. Flawed relationships, failed love affairs, and disintegrating unions fill page after page of Farrokhzad’s poetry.

The vitality of Farrokhzad’s poetry lies in more than her ability to candidly portray her unspeakable desires. Indeed what is so imposing and admirable is the emergence of a significant poetic female character whose complexities defy easy categorization. What sets her apart is her rendering of quotidian experience without any intention to guide, to educate or to lead. There is candour in her poems and the continuously rewoven webs of passion and love. Her simultaneous portrayal of the thrill of being free and fetterless and the anxiety and uncertainties attached to it eloquently speak of a confusion that in many remains unarticulated. Apart from being a personal history, this poetry is an accurate portrayal of the pain and pleasure of a whole generation undergoing radical change in the middle of the twentieth century.

Farrokhzad’s poetry resembles the story of a single individual’s growth and development within the context of a defined social order. The growth process, at its roots a quest story, is both an apprenticeship to life and a search for meaningful existence within society. It spurs the characters on to their journey. The process of maturity is long, arduous, and gradual, consisting of repeated clashes between the protagonist’s needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order. Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order manifest themselves in the protagonist, who is then accommodated into society. The protagonist assesses herself and her new place in that society.



They carried the whole innocence of a heart/To the castle of fairy tales/And now/How could one ever dance again?/And toss her childish tresses/Upon flowing waters?/How could one crush/ The plucked and smelled apple?

O Darling, O my dearest Darling/What black clouds await/ The sun’s festive day. (Dawning of a cold season)



Life, death, happiness, sorrow, the beauty of nature, the ugliness of social injustice, hope in love’s triumph, despair caused by the force of ignorance and hypocrisy, and other notions and emotions, filled her poems with the spirit of reality. However the powerful metaphor and the subtlest virtue of her poetic vision remained the sacredness of womanhood and the mystical beauty of love.



It is not a matter of fearful whispers in the dark/it is a matter of daylight, open windows, and fresh air/and an oven where useless things are burnt/and an earth pregnant with new crop/it is a matter of birth, and completion, and pride/it is a matter of our amorous hands/ connecting the nights/with perfume’s messages of breeze and light./ (Another birth)



The Urdu translation of selected poems of Farrokhzad by Fehmida Riaz has been published under the title Khule dareeche.

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