A LONELY WOMAN:
Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry
Forugh Farrokhzad is the most famous female literary figure
in Iranian history and its most popular 20th-century poet. Some
critics think she may have been the best Persian poet since Hafez. In addition, in her brief life--which
ended in a fatal auto accident at age 32--she demonstrated unique
tenacity in striving for artistic freedom and individuality. In
an environment of social restraint and taboo, she dared to express
her innermost feelings about love, sex, society and self with
an openness and frankness unprecedented in the history of Persian
literature, publishing five volumes of poetry before her death.
A Lonely Woman is the first book-length study of Farrokhzad in
any language. The author spent four years researching the book,
utilizing heretofore undiscussed periodical pieces and interviewing
numerous colleagues, friends, and relatives of the poet. This
book shows Farrokhzad to be a determined, multifaceted artistic
genius who has altered for the better and for good the course
of Persian poetic expression.
Note: This volume was co-published with Three Continents Press,
which has since been incorporated into Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Abstracta Iranica: "After
about two decades of active involvement with modern Persian literature
in general, and with the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad in particular,
Michael Hillmann has written this biography of the poet many have
called the first feminine voice in Persian literature, a view
that Hillmann shares. Using a variety of sources-critical essays,
interviews, newspaper articles, literary gossip and rumors of
different sorts, as well as generally accepted personal allusions
in the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad--he offers an insightful portrait
of the Iranian poet from a feminist perspective. The task must
have been complicated because of the absence of sufficient reliable
biographical information on this seminal literary figure of modern
Iran. The author opt for presenting diverse views, conjectural,
speculative, often self-serving "facts" communicated
to him by various friends and acquaintances of the poet, to the
reader before commenting upon them. He places all this in the
context of the literary climate in Iran in the decades of the
1950s and 60s. At times, the book provides as much information
about, and critical assessment of, other contemporary literary
figures as that of its subject. It concludes that Forrokhzad's
unparalleled sincerity and willingness to open herself up to the
world around her make her a unique voice in many ways. A Lonely
Woman contains some interesting pictures of the poet with the
men around her, and the reader can enjoy some of her poems in
the original Persian as well as in the author's English translation.."
Bloomsbury Review: "In
Iran, where few women are recognized for their own achievements,
Forugh Farrokhzad has earned unprecedented literary recognition.
Her poetry not only significantly altered the view of Iranian
women as subservient, it casts new light on Persian poetry itself.
Farrokhzad's work reflects an individual, independent artist deeply
connected to her culture. Although the book is more a study of
the poet than a literary criticism, many of her poems (translated
by Hillmann) are included."
Iranian history is of men and their exploits. In the lengthy
list of royal figures throughout over 2,500 years of formal monarchy
in the Iranian region, no more than a handful of women's names
appear. The bas-reliefs at the great Achaemenid shrine at Persepolis
depict no women. In the much revered classical period of Persian
literature from Rudaki (d. 940/1) to Jami (d. 1492), not a single,
significant woman poet or prose writer existed. Educated Iranians
today are hard put to cite a single woman by name from the Safavid
Era (1501--1722), Iran's last period of regional political glory.
During the Qajar Era (1796--1925), Iranian women were mostly anonymous
and restricted to the home. Under the Pahlavis (1926--1979), many
Iranian women may have found new opportunities to participate
in society beyond domestic courtyard walls. But even in the 1960s
and 1970s, when a woman achieved success or prominence in the
public arena, she did so, more often than not, as a result of
her relationship to an influential man, as his mother, wife, sister,
or daughter, or as a result of governmental tokenism.
In other words, an extremely small number of Iranian women have
achieved anything in Iran outside of the home without dependence
upon a relationship with a man or male patronage. The best known
among them is the poet Forugh Farrokhzad (19351967), the most
famous woman in the history of Persian literature.
In an age that pays at least lip service to the cause of women's
rights, such facts as the above are reason enough to examine Farrokhzad's
life and works. But she deserves attention for the following,
more important and potentially less patronizing reason, the demonstration
and elucidation of which is the purpose of this book. Forugh Farrokhzad's
life and artistic career reveal her as an Iranian personality
and character of historical significance. The eleventh-century
mathematician and astronomer 'Omar Khayyam and the fourteenth
century Hafez, Iran's premier lyric poet, have been mythologized
into such ideal individuals. In the case of Farrokhzad, a kindred
spirit to Khayyam and Hafez, there is no need to mythologize.
The facts of her life and poetry stand as an unequivocal statement
of a personality embodying values which non-establishment Iranian
intellectuals have long prized.
In literary terms, of course, Farrokhzad's poems deserve critical
appreciation both in Iran and abroad as potentially enduring modernist
verse. Although the primary purpose of this book is not literary
criticism, its many references to and quotations from Farrokhzad's
poems provide readers with bases for judging her poetry as of
special appeal.
As an inspirational contemporary Iranian and modernist poet, Farrokhzad
speaks through her actions and art in extremely cultural terms.
In her poetry, she rarely speaks in the philosophical terms of
all times and places. For her, issues of love, death, and the
rest are intimately tied to specific, Iranian moments. She speaks
from and to a very specific era of Iranian life, the post-Mosaddeq,
pre-Khomeini period from the fall of 1953 to the end of 1977.
In historical, social, and political terms, these later Pahlavi
years were a discrete age whose intrinsic significance as a fast-moving
era of absorption, synthesis, and artistic achievements remains
inadequately appreciated because of the drama of the period from
the World War II years through the days of Mohammad Mosaddeq's
premiership (1951-1953) that preceded it and the drama of the
Khomeini era that succeeded it.
Although the primary focus throughout this study is on Farrokhzad,
the period itself receives attention by means of its characterization
through her eyes, as an individual who reacted in and to it in
special ways that highlight its essential features. Finally, Farrokhzad's
life and poetry will be seen to be equally relevant to an understanding
and appreciation of essential currents and conflicts in post-Pahlavi
Iran.
The first two chapters are a biographical sketch. Chapter 1 reviews
Farrokhzad's life and career from her birth to what seemed a turning
point in her own mind, i.e., her abandonment in poetry of a relatively
moderate approach to innovation in verse. Chapter 2 reviews her
life from that point in 1958 when she began composing wholly modernist
poems to her death at thirty-two years of age in an automobile
accident in February 1967.
Although both chapters incorporate numerous quotations from and
other references to Farrokhzad's poems in a basically chronological
review of her life, that does not imply a simplistic merging of
her poetic personae and real personality. Obviously, one can rarely
assume that the speaker in a lyric poem is identical or coterminos
with the character of the poet outside of the poem. Yet, many
of the fewer than 150, mostly shorter, mostly lyric poems Farrokhzad
composed in a career that unfortunately lasted only fifteen years
are patently autobiographical and depict and comment upon a palpably
real and observed social context, identifiable as the secular
intellectuals' Tehran of the 1950s and 1960s. One reason why Farrokhzad's
poems are so autobiographical and close to the world about her
and another aspect of their reliability as documentation in a
study of her life has to do with her conception of poetry as a
companion, mirror, and means to self-knowledge. She thought, in
addition, that she should live and compose poetry as frankly and
unhypocritically as possible. This, of course, caused her verse
to be uniquely feminine in perspectives and content, something
that had hitherto not existed in Persian literature.
Chapter 3 scrutinizes Farrokhzad's verse as this first significant
expression of feminine perspectives in Iranian culture. It begins
with a review of her use of sexual imagery in verse, with special
attention to a 1955 poem called "The Sin," perhaps the
most scandalous poem of the post-World War II period. Then comes
an examination of a number of her poems in the context of feminism,
including her much anthologized "The Windup Doll." The
chapter concludes with a consideration of Farrokhzad's 'female
humanism.'
Chapter 4, in effect, assesses some of Farrokhzad's later poems
as potentially enduring, with nearly half of it devoted to an
analysis of "Another Birth," perhaps her most important
poem. However the underlying purpose is not literary criticism,
but rather the elucidation of dimensions of Farrokhzad's special
ability to bring to life in her verse everyday happenstances and
concerns and the characterization of her personae and special
role as a spokesperson for her culture.
In the fifth chapter, after having presented Farrokhzad speaking
for herself in earlier chapters with minimal authorial commentary,
I offer a personal assessment of her life and career as the remarkable
expression of a remarkable Iranian individual, female humanist,
spokesperson for her day, and near free spirit for all days. In
this unabashedly partisan assessment, I interpret her life and
art as one woman's poetic struggle within a pervasively patriarchal
society and culture to become the individual of her own definition.
In so doing, she becomes a model for Iranians and for the future
of their culture.
The study concludes with a comprehensive bibliography which reveals
that this is the first biographical or critical volume on the
poet. A guide to the transliteration system of Persian terms employed
in this study appears at the beginning of the bibliography.
Farrokhzad's works are reportedly now banned in the Islamic Republic
of Iran, which means that serious study of the subject has there
ceased. In the West, I hope that my work may stimulate further
inquiry, especially into the critical appreciation of her remarkable
poetry and into the significance of parallels between her career
and those of women artists around the world.
Michael Hillmann is a Professor of Persian at the University of Texas at Austin. He is one of the leading American authorities on Persian literature and the author and editor of more than a dozen books as well as numerous scholarly articles. Send email to Michael Hillmann.