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 (1935-1967), the most famous woman
in the history of Persian literature.
Forugh Farrokhzad was born in Tehran into a middle class family of
seven children. She attended public schools through the ninth grade,
thereafter received some training in sewing and painting, and married
when she was seventeen. Her only child, the boy addressed in "A
Poem for you," was born a year later. Within less than two years
after that, her marriage failed, and Farrokhzad relinquished her son
to her ex-husband's family in order to pursue her calling in poetry
and independent life style. She clearly voices her feelings in the
mid-1950s about conventional marriage, the plight of women in Iran,
and her own situation as a wife and mother no longer able to live
a conventional life in such poems as "The
Captive," "The
Wedding Band," "Call
to Arms," and "To
My Sister."
As a divorcee poet in Tehran, Farrokhzad attracted much attention
and considerable disapproval. She had several short lived relationships
with men-"The
Sin" describes one of them,--, found some respite in a nine-month
trip to Europe, and in 1958 met Ebrahim Golestan (b. 1922), a controversial
film-maker and writer with whom she established a relationship that
lasted until her death in an automobile accident at thirty-two years
of age in February 1967.
Unlike her female predecessors, Farrokhzad had a poetic voice that
was and remains
(where as a voice not heard may be no voice at all.)
Sound, sound, sound,
Only sound remains. (Forugh Farrokhzad)
Iranian Culture (A Persianist View)
Michael C. Hillmann page 149
TOP
