M
i c h a e l H I L L M A N N
Farrokhzad's poetic
growth and development has significant formal and aesthetic dimensions.
For one thing, the feminist manifesto poems may seem less effective
as poems than either some of the earlier poems of feminine subjectivity
or later poems of female humanism because they deal with stereotypes,
abstractions, and a world that was not the poet's personal experiential
world in the terms which she employs in these poems. In other words,
she does not create them out of the raw materials of her own life
mirrored, as she once defined poetry for herself. Interestingly, Farrokhzad
never included "To My Sister" and "Battle Cry"
in collections of her own verse.
According to Milani's already cited feminist analysis, in 1958 Farrokhzad's
"perspectives change and the poet rejects 'feminine' and 'feminist'
writing in favor of a 'female' vision, a move toward human rather
than strictly female concerns and preoccupations." The broader horizons
and arenas of experience that opened up for the poet from 1958 onward
surly played a part in the broader thematic spectrum in her verse.
Of greater importance in the feminist perspective of the three stages
of Farrokhzad' s development as a woman was her personal resolution
of conflicts in her life between societal expectations and her own
predilections. The die was cast, and she was set on living as a poet
answerable as an individual to her own personal ethics. Her long-standing
senses of confusion, guilt, frustration, anger, and rebellion thus
put into perspective, she had the emotional and psychological space
now to turn "from the personal to the collective, from the female
to the human, and from the private to the public."
A Lonely Woman
Michael Hillmann page 95
Although Farrokhzad's
importance as a poet derives from remarkable artistic achievements
in her poetry qua poetry, nevertheless the fact that she was a woman
composing poetry in the man's world of Persian literature has great
cultural significance. In other word, if one accepts Reza Baraheni's
reading of the Iranian past and traditions as basically a "masculine
history," one can call Farrokhzad the founder of "feminine culture"
in Persian poetry and the originator of a new literary gender with
which subsequent Iranian poets and readers will always have to deal.
The most obviously
different theme in Farrokhzad's verse is her female and feminist sensitivity
to the plight of Iranian woman and her encouragement to her female
readers to understand their state of oppression and then to do something
about it. In the poem "The Wedding Band" Farrokhzad present a female
character who learn through experience that marriage is not necessarily
a partnership or a relationship based on trust. The first poem does
not reflect Farrokhzad's own experience with marriage. Which ended
in divorce for every different reasons, but rather her sense of typical
situations in which married Iranian women find themselves. The next
two poems, also products of the mid-1950s, are self-explanatory feminist
appeals called respectively "Call to Arms" and "To My Sister". The
final poem in this group is a longer and more famous poem composed
around 1960. Called "The
Windup Doll ", it is a comprehensive indictment of the lives which
Farrokhzad sensed the majority of Iranian women live.
The poems, "The
Captive" (1954), "The Sin" (1954), and "A Poem for You" (1957), exhibit
some of the qualities that brought Farrokhzad immediate fame when
she began publishing her poems in the mid-1950s. The poems are frank,
intense, and straightforward representations of very personal experiences,
conflicts, and dilemmas couched in everyday images and vocabulary.
Such poems were almost unprecedented in Persian in their autobiographical
candor, that is, in their poet's refusal to don a mask or to veil
real concerns in the grab of conventional literary decorum.
The poems "Green
Delusion", "Conquest of the Garden", "Another
Birth" and "It Is
Only Sound That Remains," constitute a fourth sort of Farrokhzadian
poetic statement, and perhaps the key to her preeminence as a contemporary
Iranian poet. These are four poems in which the female poetic speaker
deals with what poetic art means to her.
The poem, called "Green Delusion", is described by the feminist critic
Farzaneh Milani as "Forugh's eloquent statement of all the sacrifices
she has had to make for her art." In this poem, which Milani entitles
in translation "Green Terror," the ever honest poet reveals that her
decision to live as an individualistic female and artist is not without
its price.
Iranian Culture
"A Persianist View"
Michael Hillmann page 161
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