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modern Iranian Poetess Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967) virtually
"opened the windows" of Iranian poetry to real
realtionships and the real world. While Persian poetry had
already been somewhat liberated by the free verse of the 1920s,
her frank presentation of feelings about loving, sexual
relations ships was revolutionary. She did the
unthinkable, not only writing about initimacy in a presominantly
Shi'ite Mposlem society, but writing about it from an utterly
honest, utterly feminine point of view. Without fear, she
said waht had always been forbidden, inwords that had never
before appeared in a literary work. Incredibly, her
impressive ability caused initial shock to give way to the
overwhelming admiration of the educated and the young.
Secure in her voice, she broadened her concern to include
natural, honest relationships within the Iranian social order.
Finally, she began to emphasize a dialogue with the rest of the
earth, and an openness to the entire natural universe, as her
once specifically Persian images of fundamental relationship
(the wall, the window, the mirror, the streets, and the garden
and the sun, etc.) were suddenly galvanized with universal
force.
Perhaps she dared fate by
her extremely public living of a life that defied stultifying
restriction. The daughter of a military colonel, she
married at sixteen, published her first volume of poems at
seventeen, gave birth to a son at eighteen, and was divorced
before her twentieth birthday. Not long after the divorce
she was prevented from seeing her son ever again. Her
increasingly mature volumes of poetry included The Captive,
The Wall, Rebellion, the important Another Birth, and the
posthumously published Let Us Have Faith in the Beginning of the
Cold Season. She studied film production as result of her
liaison with the Iranian interllectual and film maker Ibrahim
Golestan, and won the prize for documentaries at the 1963
Uberhausen, Germany Film Festival, with her film about a leper
colony in Tabriz, Iran. In 1965, UNESCO produced a 30
minute film on her life, and Bernardo Bertolucci, a 15 minute
film. In 1967, she was planning to play the lead role in a
Tehran stage production of her Persian translation of Shaw's St.
Joan, when she met her untimely death in an automobile
crash.
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