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sunday, evening. Farzaneh Milani brings the wall and death together when she writes about the Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad: At the height of her creativity and barely thirty-two, Farrokhzad died of head injuries in a car accident on February 14, 1967. Trying to avoid an oncoming vehicle, she struck a wall and was thrown from her car. Ironically, this woman who escaped and avoided walls for a lifetime was eventually killed by one, killed at a time when she claimed to have finally found herself...Like a dream cut short by wakefulness, her life and her art, characterized by a breathtaking dynamism and mobility, are stamped with the finality of a premature death.11 But this so-called finality, with its touch of fatalism, should not be interpreted as the end. The wall failed in its victory. Farrokhzad's poems - intimate and personal - have continuously been and remain in print and in demand (in spite of the severe censorship in Iran), right at the heart of the modern Iranian poetry. Indisputable arrows that have irreparably ruptured the wall. Thirty years after her death, Farrokhzad's is amongst the most discussed and analyzed modern Iranian poetry in and outside the country.12 There is a journey in Forough Farrokhzad's poetry. It is not only the "maturity of the poetic language" but the spiritual landmarks of finding one's own image, the process of "[giving] birth to a self in the image of her own likings and aspirations"13, that signal the course of this journey. The language, the writing, is merely a reflection of the spiritual, "with the intimate and the personal as an everpresent background."14 The titles of the five published collections of her poetry - four published in her lifetime and one posthumously - illustrate the point. Imagine a woman, imagine a woman breaking free: Captive, The Wall, Rebellion, Another Birth. These are the first four titles. We don't know if she indeed chose the title, Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season15, for the entire collection that was printed posthumously. But even if she did, and even if we accept the apparent sadness and finality of the Dawn of the Cold Season - feelings which admittedly overwhelm the reader in much of the poem that lends its title to the collection - in the collection as a whole, as in this poem itself, there is a hint to a secret spiritual landmark: And in the martyrdom of a candle The landmark - and the secret to Farrokhzad's immortal presence in Iranian poetry - may indeed be this, in her own words in It Is Only the Voice that Remains, another poem from the same collection: Remember the flight The flight is what we all remember. All the Iranian women who have experienced, in body and in soul, the dawn of the cold season, living through the unforgettable period of Iranian history when rising fundamentalism, involving the most undemocratic, brutal and misogynist practices, was sweeping away the democratic achievements of the 1979 revolution.18 Thus, Haideh Moghissi, begins her book, Populism and Feminism in Iran; Women's Struggle in a Male-Defined Revolutionary Movement, from which the above passage comes, with different lines from It Is Only the Voice that Remains: I am a descendant of the house of trees. Moghissi chronicles the development of the women's movement in Iran, from its emergence as a "separate political involvement [in] the national struggle for constitutional government during 1905-11"20 to its polarization during the despotic Pahlavi reign "into two antagonistic spheres - the one, open and pro-establishment; the other, clandestine and anti-establishment"21, through to its emergence in the post-revolutionary period as "the first, and to a certain extent, the most effective challenge to the Islamic regime...courageously questioning the clerical authority to define the conditions of their lives"22. Turning her gaze to the right and the left, she analyzes the political forces, from the secular/nationalist to the capitalist to the socialist to the Islamist (there's the body I drew) which, patriarchy prevailing at the core of their understanding of women and in their leadership, submerged "women's cause in male-focused political struggle and political activities"23, ultimately leading to the loss of many "personal and social freedoms"24 women had gained. But this is not the end of the story. Moghissi's story ends with a new beginning. Giving illustrations of "women's determination and their enormous efforts to escape the prisons of the femininity and sex-roles defined and guarded by the guardians of Sharia"25 - the wall - she talks about women "jumping over the fence" - a kind of wall. At the beginning of her concluding chapter, Moghissi quotes these lines from Forough Farrokhzad: Dreams always fall from the height and, talking of autonomy as subversion, echoes Farrokhzad in the final lines of the book: We revolt to survive, and our defiance and insubordination will shake up the entire society to eventually come face to face with reality and recognize the need to reconsider and transform the hierarchical, undemocratic and patriarchal values, presuppositions and relations that so fully inform this society.27 No loss is final so long as the voice remain. The voice that tells the story. Remembering the flight, I dream the wall away with these lines from Forough Farrokhzad: I have dreamed that someone is coming The window defies the wall and the roof ends it. I dream and the wall separating us disappears. Another story begins. It is the same story, but the voice is different. |