A Passage through Sin: Life and Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad

Abstract

Only sound remains is a novel informed by the life and poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad—the most controversial poet of modern Iran. Saeed, the narrator of the story, who has been living in Adelaide for five years, has not returned to Iran after publishing his novel The imaginary narrative of a real murder, for fear of political persecution. When his father, Ismael, decides to travel to Adelaide to visit him, Saeed finds it peculiar since his father has never left Iran except for the Mecca pilgrimage. During his short stay, Ismael tells the story of his obsessive and unrequited love for Forugh. Ismael’s love for Utopian ideas, his inability to make peace between his desires and spiritual aspirations, and his naive involvement in politics as the Shah and the Ayatollah are struggling for power, is used to depict the ethos of the society of Farrokhzad’s time. It is against this socio-political background that the story of her endeavour to be her own individual rejecting the accepted norms of her society, is narrated. Ismael’s duplicity and at times his nonchalant cruelty, is an index of how the patriarchal society tried to punish and discipline Forugh for her unconventional choices both as a poet and as a woman. Through this narrative, Saeed sees the country he has left behind and his relationship with his father in a new light. The exegetical component of this thesis examines the aspects of Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry that agitated the core social and political tenets of Iranian society and provides a deeper understanding of the tense interaction between the poet and her surroundings. Farrokhzad’s poetry started an unprecedented poetic discourse on women’s sexuality in Iran. Through close reading of her poems, the exegesis suggests that ambivalence and fluctuations between self-doubt and self-confidence are central to her life and poetry; and she was pushed to the verge of nervous breakdown repeatedly, mainly because she approached love against the ethos of her time. Further, this exegesis argues that the confessional nature of Farrokhzad’s poetry—in a society where confession is neither part of its Islamic tradition nor culturally praised—played a central role in the extreme reactions her poetry evoked.