The Mirror of My Heart Read online

  But as a poet she looked back as much as she looked forward. For all the daring of her intellectual and public life, she is an almost wholly traditional poet, writing within the tropes and conventions of medieval and subsequent poetry, in which the speaker is supplicatory (and/or celebratory) vis-à-vis the poem’s addressee or subject. She differs from most of her female predecessors in the emphatic no-holds-barred religious ardor that she brings to some of her poems, but the rhetoric of these poems, the driving rhythms and the metaphors of drunkenness and erotic obsession, derives virtually unchanged from medieval religious poetry, especially perhaps that of Rumi (1207–73). It was in the two or three generations that came after Tahereh that the substance and rhetoric of women’s poetry began to change, and to reflect more clearly women’s evolving consciousness of their status, a psychological and social shift of which Tahereh can be said to have been the main harbinger.

  A number of social factors facilitated this change. Literacy was becoming more widespread among the daughters of the wealthy and the as yet relatively small middle class. Various newspapers began publication (almost all of them agitating for political reform, and many of them published outside of Iran, in India or Turkey, and then smuggled into the country); some of these papers welcomed contributions, including poetry, by women. Poetry was quite quickly becoming a more democratic medium, often in the form of political or social satire, with a life of its own outside of both court and Sufi circles. Educated women were beginning to form their own social and intellectual groups, some of which joined in the growing agitation for reform. In the period leading up to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11,* politically oriented poetry by women began to appear in various publications, many of them more or less clandestine. The main demand of such poems was usually that foreign governments cease their interference in the political and economic life of Iran, as the Iranian government was widely seen, with a great deal of justification, as being incapable of warding off foreign influence, particularly that of the Russians and the British, who had spent much of the nineteenth century jockeying with one another for control of the country.* This was often coupled with two other demands, for representative government, and for the emancipation of women. A number of women’s poems at this time take up an admonitory and even mocking attitude toward Iranian men, implying that they are too pusillanimous to do anything about the dire political situation; the implicit question these poems pose is: What use is your vaunted machismo if women have to rouse you to defend your country? Sometimes there almost seems to be a sexual subtext in the verses, as if they are a nineteenth- or twentieth-century equivalent to the relatively frequent poems by medieval women that mocked old men’s sexual deficiencies, implicitly comparing their inadequacy with the angry vitality of their dissatisfied partners.

  Some of these political poems openly state that if women were socially equal to men, the country would not be in such dire straits. The demand for female emancipation is often made in comparison with the perceived social position of European women, the implication being that if Iranian women could have the same status as their European counterparts, the country would be much better off all round. How far the women voicing these ideas were familiar with the actual status of women in Europe at this time is perhaps open to doubt. Some of their “information” about Europe may well have come from European novels, particularly those written in French, which were beginning to be translated into Persian* (and some women from richer families were able to read French novels in the original), so there was probably an element of fantasy in the literate Iranian women’s view of the status of European women in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Nevertheless, many were quite sure that, even if they hadn’t got all the details exactly right, most European women had a better chance of leading a personally satisfying and relatively free life than most Iranian women, and their poems say this. And here we come upon a paradox inherent in a number of socially conscious poems by women from this period: while insisting that European countries absent themselves from Iranian economic and political affairs, and be forcibly ejected if necessary, a demand is also being made that Iranian women have a similar social status to that of European women. Europe was seen as both the rapacious foreign exploiter of the country, and as a beckoning symbol of what enlightened gender relations could be in a better world. Of course, Iranian opinion was not alone in simultaneously holding these two views of Europe as being both an exploitative adversary and, in some senses at least, a model for desired reforms.

  Two of the most important Persian-language women poets of the past five hundred years dominate the first half of the twentieth century, or at least they do so in retrospect, as the poetry of one of them was almost completely unknown until after her death. The poets in question are Alam Taj (1883–1946), whose pen-name was “Zhaleh” (“Dew”), and Parvin Etesami (1907–41). Alam Taj, who has been called the first feminist poet to have written in Persian, came from a prominent aristocratic family, and her first poems were published when she was still a teenager at the suggestion of the then poet laureate (Malek al-Shoara Bahar), who was a family friend. But she was married off at the age of fifteen to a military man, Ali Morad Khan, who was much older than she was and who had no interest in literature or indeed in any of the arts; if Alam Taj is to be believed, he was also incapable of showing her affection or approval. He forbade her to write,* and though she continued to do so, she wrote secretly and hid her poems in books and drawers and various other places around the house, where they remained until they were discovered, after her death, by her son. She outlived her husband, and it’s not wholly clear why she continued to hide her poems after his death; perhaps she had by then despaired of ever having an audience, and the habit of secrecy, developed over so many years, had become too internalized and ingrained to break.

  Her poems are intensely personal and in the main intensely unhappy. One of her chief subjects is her loathing—the word doesn’t seem too strong—of her husband, but she extrapolates this sense of personal injury into vehement protests against the social norms and customs that had put her into her intolerable marriage in the first place; as she succinctly puts it in one poem, “Woman’s crime in our country is to be a woman.”* She inveighs against the marrying-off of young women to old men for familial reasons; she argues that women should be men’s equals socially, and that intellectually and spiritually they are men’s equals, if not their superiors; she protests at the subjugation of women by men, and she advises women to burn their veils. In one of her most poignant longer poems, she looks forward to a future, one in which she will not share, when the women of Iran will be equal citizens in their own country, and more than almost any other poet she sees this change as coming from the West:

  A breeze blows from the land of the living

  Towards this country, making my limbs revive;

  The song of women’s freedom comes from the west

  To the east, but my place there will be empty.

  The biography of her much better-known contemporary, Parvin, was in its early stages remarkably similar to that of Alam Taj. Both were extremely close to their fathers, who encouraged their writing when they were young; both were first published when they were still adolescents at the instigation of Bahar; both made unhappy marriages with military men who were uninterested in their poetic vocation and who provided them with little or no emotional support. The major difference is that Parvin’s poems were published in her own lifetime, and although appreciation of her poetry was grudging at first,* some was enthusiastic (and Iran’s foremost literary historian, Zabihollah Safa, was later to call her “the most accomplished of all Iran’s women poets”*), whereas Alam Taj’s poems remained unknown till after her death; another difference is that Alam Taj’s father, who also seems to have been her closest friend, died shortly after her marriage, whereas Parvin’s father lived for almost as long as she did. As an adult, Alam Taj was emotionally extremely isolated and sh
e lacked even the satisfaction of knowing that others could read her poems; if Parvin’s (very brief) married life was unhappy, at least she experienced the praise and respect of a number of the most important poets of her time, which must have given her some solace, and she didn’t lose the love and support of her father until a few years before her death.

  The subject matter Parvin constantly returns to is the sufferings of those in the lower reaches of society—ragamuffin children, the working poor and the unemployed poor, the aged who have no one to turn to for help or support—but despite the strong sense of economic and social injustice that permeates her poetry, she has no political agenda, no revolutionary call to arms, and there is no sense in her writings that the despised and rejected should rise up against their oppressors.* Given her social conservatism, it is perhaps not surprising that her technique is strictly traditional and owes a great deal to the widespread history of moralized “advice” poetry in Persian, especially to the didactic verse of the major thirteenth-century poet Sa’di (one foreign influence was that of the seventeenth-century French poet and fabulist Jean de La Fontaine; her affinity for his poetry probably sprang from the fact that La Fontaine’s fables were in some ways similar to the moralizing anecdotes to be found in traditional Persian poetry). Farzaneh Milani has pointed out that Parvin is one of the very few Persian-language poets who wrote no love lyrics or erotic verse of any kind,* and we can occasionally see in her poems something that is also discernible in some of Alam Taj’s poetry, which is a kind of revulsion at female sexuality and female vanity, and to any sort of display that is meant to attract erotic attention. She is not as extreme in her condemnation of what she sees as women’s failings as Alam Taj can be (see, for example, the section “Woman” in Alam Taj’s poem “Life’s Image” on this page), but she implies that if women don’t want to be considered solely in sexual terms, they should not dress or behave in ways that are likely to provoke unwanted male interest. Both of them emphasize that it is far better for women to be modest and chaste in their demeanor than to be showily attractive, or even particularly noticeable; that is, for all their innovative genius, and their demands for both education and social equality with men, they have internalized their culture’s standards of how the ideal woman should behave, and certainly how she should behave in public.

  Although their childhoods were spent in literate families that valued their daughters’ poetic talents and aspirations, when they became adults Alam Taj and Parvin were each quite isolated as a poet. It’s unlikely that Parvin even knew of Alam Taj’s existence, and neither of them belonged to a group of like-minded women poets who could provide one another with mutual support, act as a sounding-board for new ideas, or offer friendly but critical advice on their latest verse. For the generation of poets who followed, and who came to define modern Persian poetry by women as a self-consciously contemporary phenomenon that broke with many of the traditions of the past, the situation was very different. As young women, Simin Behbahani (1927–2014), Lobat Vala (b. 1930), and Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–67) met regularly to discuss poetry and to share their new poems with one another. As Simin Behbahani later wrote:

  We made up a group to which a number of women poets, as well as those interested in poetry, painters and other kinds of artist, were invited and every week we met together. We read our poetry to each other and we discussed poetry and other subjects. At that time we were three poet friends and Dr. Sadraddin Elahi called us “the three musketeers”. The three of us went to every literary gathering . . .*

  One of the subjects the three discussed was the break with the traditional metrical system that had been initiated by Nima Yushij (1897–1960), who became known as the father of modern Persian poetry. Among Yushij’s technical innovations was the popularization of a loosely metrical quatrain in relatively short lines that rhymed abcb, and a number of the early poems by the “three musketeers” were written in this form, which became a kind of halfway house to the fully fledged free verse that came increasingly to dominate Persian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Later in the same essay Simin Behbahani describes her two friends as they were when the three of them were young together:

  Lobat was kind, naïve, sweet in her conversation, and magnanimous. She never said anything harsh. She never complained about anyone. She overlooked anything negative and was a very loyal friend . . . Forugh on the other hand, because of being constantly highly-strung, and because of the difficulties in her life, was quarrelsome, reckless and full of expectations.*

  Forugh was to become easily the most famous of the modern women poets who wrote in Persian, and she is still perhaps the only one whose name is widely known outside of Iran.

  Forugh Farrokhzad was born into a military family in 1934, and married at the age of sixteen. She had a son, and after three years of marriage she and her husband were divorced; one of the great sorrows of her life was that her husband’s family received custody of the child (as was usual in Iran at this time after a divorce) and she saw him only occasionally for the rest of her life. In 1958 she met the writer and film-maker Ebrahim Golestan and began a relationship with him that lasted until 1967 when she was killed in a car crash. Forugh’s eager hypersensitivity to experience, which often seems to find itself rebuffed by the world, is everywhere evident in her poetry, which can be read as a kind of psychological collodion plate responsive to every shade of light and dark that flits before it. Her “highly-strung” psychological state, as Simin Behbahani characterized it, together with her extreme sensitivity to the difficult vicissitudes of her life, had its cost in serious bouts of depression, and at least one almost-successful suicide attempt.

  Taken together, the titles of the four books of poems she published in her lifetime spell out the trajectory of her life as she herself saw it: The Captive, The Wall, Rebellion, and Another Birth.* The most famous, and at the time of publication scandalous, aspect of her poetry was its acknowledgment and celebration of female desire and sexual pleasure, whether or not—and it seems from her poems preferably not—this occurs within the confines of marriage. That she should discuss female sexuality at all in her poetry in Iran at that time was remarkable, and it is perhaps not surprising that hers is, at least in her early poems, a relatively fraught celebration of the subject. If we compare her poems that deal with sexuality with poems on the same subject by medieval women writing in Persian, we see a major difference. The insouciant bawdiness of a fourteenth-/fifteenth-century poet such as Mehri is predicated on finding sex available, normal, and funny; much of the sensuality of Forugh Farrozkhzad’s poetry is predicated on notions of sin, the flouting of socially acceptable gender roles, and transgression. The subject is charged with tension, anxiety, and defiance, and there are few purely lighthearted moments. Sexual pleasure is equated with—or at least inextricably linked with—sin, even as the notion of sex as sin is denied, and it is no coincidence that what is perhaps her best-known poem about sex is called, exactly, “Sin” (see this page). The title can be read as ironic (the poet is saying that sexual pleasure outside of marriage is not a sin, whatever society may think) but “sin” still provides the context and ethos within which the subject is seen, and the possibility of sexual pleasure is linked to notions of transgression.

  Forugh Farrokhzad has often been compared to Sylvia Plath,* a comparison that is valid, both in reference to their poetry and to the ways in which their work and more especially their lives have been mythologized since their deaths. Both poets can adopt a rather apocalyptic tone, especially when dealing with notions of patriarchy and masculinity; both write from deep within their own psyches and their own psychological preoccupations, so that their poems can sometimes seem to sweat with irresolvable anxiety or nausea. The lives of both poets, their unhappy marriages, their violent deaths, their often expressed wish somehow to transcend or escape from the circumstances in which they found themselves, have become iconic for a number of later wome
n poets in their respective cultures, almost as though they constitute a kind of irresistible archetype of what it means to be a woman poet in the contemporary world.

  The poet whom Simin Behbahani described as “kind, naïve, sweet in her conversation, and magnanimous,” Lobat Vala, is perhaps the most conservative of the three, both technically and in her choice of subjects and her expressed attitudes toward them. Much of her poetry had, and continues to have, a direct appeal that reached a much wider audience than was usual for contemporary verse, and a number of her poems were used as the lyrics of popular songs. About sexuality she is usually very modest (see, for example, her poem “Footprint” on this page), and Behbahani’s description of her personality is also applicable to many of her poems. She lived far longer than Farrokhzad (at the time of writing, she is still alive), long enough to experience both political and personal disillusion, and her later poems can sometimes have a bitter tang to them that is largely absent from her earlier work.

  Simin Behbahani herself died in 2014 at the age of eighty-seven. Her range is very wide, and includes personal love poems, poems of social anger and political commentary, poems of self-questioning introspection, and a number of moving vignettes of suffering (particularly the suffering of exploited and disadvantaged women). A reader of her work has a sense of someone whose whole life has been given to poetry and to the fight for social and political justice. To compare her to a non-Iranian writer, we have to reach for the names of similarly inclusive and compassionate authors who can rise to any technical challenge as if it were no challenge at all; perhaps the non-Iranian poet she most resembles, in the breadth of her sympathies, her steadfast personal and political integrity, and her mastery of formal possibilities, is Pablo Neruda.