Forough Farrokhzad
Forough Farrokhzad (Teheran, 1935-1967) is the greatest Iranian
poetess of the XX century. Among the multiple voices peopling
contemporary iranian cultural landascape, she is the one capable
of better rendering the unsolved contradictions that run through
Iran nowadays and the complex richness of his cultural production
where several mutable artistic forms have been worked out
to produce a magnificent pastiche
Her unrestrainable success goes very far beyond the attention
that literary critics pay to her production. She died prematurely
in a car accident and her grave is today the destination of
young deeply affected admirers. Her work, obscured in Iran
by the Islamic Revolution, was readmitted in the official
literary circuit around 1996
Farrokhzad started writing poetry, in the classical form of
ghazal, when she was only fourteen years old, but her first
real collection of poems, entitled Asir (The Prisoner), was
published in 1955. The following year, a second collection
was published, entitled Divar (The Wall) and dedicated to
her ex husband, Parviz Shapur, married at the age of sixteen.
This marriage, deeply desired by Farrokhzad, collapsed only
two years after. The union gave birth to Kamiar whose custody
was granted to the father after the divorce. The estrangement
of the child, who became more and more distant in the years,
constituted an unbearable tragedy for the poetess that eventually
found a form of sublimation through her own poetry. But her
real consecration as a rising poetess arrived in 1958 when
she published her third collection entitled Esiyan (Rebellion)
In order to get rid of family and social pressures, between
1956 and 1957, Forough started a journey through Europe that
brought her to Italy – to Brindisi and Rome in particular.
To bear witness of those moments she wrote a journal crowded
with intimate remarks more than accurate references and precise
dating.
Proud and passionate natured, Forough – as she’s
familiarly called by Iranian people – lived her brief
but intense life in a complete mind freedom and she often
had to face the adversity of the most conservative political
and cultural circles. During the 50s and the first half of
the 60s – Farrokhzad’s artistical production period
– Iran was shaken by meaningful social and political
transformations (such as the overthrowing of Mosaddeq’s
nationalist government operated by the CIA together with Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi and the forced modernization policy conducted
by the shah that culminated in the so called “White
Revolution”) that contributed to determine a climate
of instability
Forough Farrokhzad, as an Iranian intellectual, was a “sensitive
aerial” of the spirit of her age and her poetry echoes
worries that are not only personal to the artist but also
social. Farrokhzad’s poems, that for a long time have
been labelled by short-sighted literary critics as intimist,
are on the contrary characterised by a powerful “literary
ambiguity”, the stylistic figure of all Persian literature.
Some of Forough’s lines in fact, having a double layer
of signification, can be the object of multiple semantic interpretations:
in a poem as “I Suffer for the Garden” –
that could simply look like a personal ode born by memories
and references to the intimate world of the author –
we are eventually obliged to find out continual references
to the historical and political Iranian events and to the
spreading disenchantment typical of her age.
Farrokhzad passionately took part to the post-Mosaddeq Iran
debate on the role of the intellectual. In her opinion, Iranian
intellectuals of her age needed to accept the challenge of
the inevitable confrontation with western standards and modernization
without for this reason relinquishing their cultural heritage
and identity
In order to give a form to her personal urgency to write («My
Love and My Company is the Poetry and I Set Out to Discover
This Love», “The Desert Home”, from the
collection The Prisoner), Forough chose the blank verse as
her stylistic form; thus she followed the great master Nima
Yushij, pioneer of so called “new poetry”
Forough’s poetry is a gash in the literary conventions
curtain which, till that moment, had dried up Iranian millenary
literary production. By deploring the superficiality of contents
and the artfulness of poetry language, in its traditional
meaning, Farrokhzad voices her aspirations of woman, her interior
conflicts and her frustration caused by an hostile political
and social environment. Being the first Iranian woman who
wrote about desire and passions she became, against her will,
the voice of feminine dissent, not for an intellectual choice
but for vocation, for instinct: her work reflects the individual
entirety of a woman, an artist and a poetess, which devotes
herself to art without simulation
Driven by an eagerness of experimentation which muddles without
boundaries art and life, from 1958 Forough devotes herself
with passion to cinema through a collaboration with the movie
production company owned by Ebrahim Golestan, an authoritative
writer, director and producer, who will be an intimate friend
of the poetess till the end of her life. In 1960 Forough played
in the movie The Ritual of Marriage in Iran, and she also
collaborated to its production. The following year, she created
the soundtrack for Mawj o marjan o khara (Wave, Coral and
Rock), a documentary film by Ebrahim Golestan, and she also
realized the editing for Yek atash (A Fire), an other documentary
film shot near Ahvaz during the fire of an oil well which
has been burning for two years before the arrival of American
firemen. In 1962 this film won a prize at the Film Festival
in Venice. Forough’s commitment for cinema brought her
to England, in 1959 and 1961, where she studied movie production.
In 1962 she writes, directs and edits Khane siyah ast (The
House is Black), shot in the leper hospital of Tabriz. The
script of this movie, commissioned by the Association for
the Leprous and winner in 1963 of the best documentary film
prize at the Oberhausen Festival, is based on an adaptation
of the Torah and the Coran. During spring 1962, Forough had
visited the institute in order to prepare the production of
the film that will consecrate her major cineaste of the new
Iranian auteur cinema. She plunged with deep emotional involvement
in leprous’ everyday life at the institute, trying to
establish a relationship based on trust and respect. During
the autumn of that same year she will go back to Tabriz with
cameraman and two sound engineers in order to begin the shooting
of the film that went on for twelve days. According to the
numerous testimonies of the poetess concerning this strong
experience, which was human more than professional, some of
the relationships born at the institute lasted long after
the end of the shooting (Forough adopted a child and she brought
him to Teheran with the agreement of his parents)
In The House Is Black the camera steps into a secluded world
where, hidden from the rest of the world, men, women and children
live; their racked faces, bodies and smiles are depicted by
the director with human pietas. She doesn’t spare appalling
details but at the same time she never trespasses the limits
of voyeurism. Thus the leper hospital becomes a microcosm
showing the dark sides of a society and the darkness of human
existence without misérabilisme. «My film begins
with the image of a woman looking to herself in a mirror.
This woman symbolizes, as a matter of fact, the human being
observing his life in to a mirror, no matter the mirror»
. The House Is Black is a movie about a community of leprous
secluded into an institute, but not only: it is also a movie
about those who are imprisoned in a life that they cannot
escape. «I believe that one of the reasons why so many
people devote themselves to art is the unconscious need to
face and withstand decadence»
Jonathan Rosenbaum, authoritative American critic, traces
back in Forough’s artistic route the origins of what
will be called the Iranian Nouvelle Vague, of Abbas Kiarostami’s
production in particular who pays homage to the poetess by
giving to one of his films the title of a Forough’s
poems (Wind Will Take Us Away) and also by making his characters
play some of the poetess’ odes.
It is nowadays sure that the only film directed by Farrokhzad,
winner of several international prizes, constitute a milestone
in the history of Iranian cinema and a sort of precept because
of its artistic quality and social relevance. An other very
well known Iranian director confirms this by saying: «The
House Is Black is the best Iranian film which has been able
to influence Iranian cinema» .
Among her multiple cinematographic experiences Forough also
played in a movie that was never finished and that was based
on the novel Darya chera tufani bud? (Why Is The Sea Very
Rough?) by the famous writer Sadeq Chubaq, a friend and the
literary consultant of the poetess. Forough’s professional
life is also enriched by a theatre experience. Thus, shocking
the public opinion, Forough played the role of the stepdaughter
in Pirandello’s Six Characters Looking For an Author,
when it was represented for the first time in Teheran (1964),
in an unpublished French translation de Pari Saberi who also
directed it. Later on the poetess translated to farsi St.
Joan by Bernard Shaw with the intention of playing the role
of the protagonist mentioned in the title. This translation,
as the one of Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller, has never
been published. Meanwhile, her cinematographic carrier with
Golestan went on: she realised, in fact, some commercial documentary
films (the one for the publishing house Keyhan for exemple)
and she also co-directed Khest-o ayeneh (The Brick and the
Mirror, 1965), a movie characterised by a strong allegorical
realism which will play a leading role in the history of Iranian
cinema. In 1966 Farrokhzad took part to the Pesaro Auteur
Film Festival where – as it is related by her Iranian
biographers – she probably met Bernardo Bertolucci
For Forough poetry kept on being the companion of her life
till the end of her days. In 1964 a new sylloge was published,
Tavallodi Digar (An Other Birth) which was considered by critics
as the sign of her poetical maturity. But the poetess wasn’t
satisfied by the results obtained with this collection and
in her urge to write poems – “it is like breathing”
– she composed Iman biyavarim be aghaz-e fasl-e sard
(We Believe in the Arrival of the Cold Season), that was her
fifth and last collection published after her death in 1974
Nowadays the artistic production of Forough is a lighthouse
for generations of artists who search for new scopes of freedom.
Amongst the great names of international contemporary art,
we remind the famous visual artist Shirin Neshat, who have
immortalized women on whose skin lines by Farrokhzad are written
To conclude this brief portrait of Forough Farrokhzad, we
quote a few words pronounced by the famous cineaste Chris
Marker who met Forough in Teheran: «Brave, she didn’t
look for alibis or defences. As the professional of pain,
she knew their desires and their repugnance for the world.
As the experts of justice, she felt the need to fight without
ever betraying her own profound inspiration» .
Bianca Maria Filippini
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