Controlled Burn

Lit cigarettes, embers, fragrant smoke, flames—those are some images the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad uses to portray the intensity of falling in and out of love. Her poetry smolders. A lover’s kiss is likened to “burnt poppies”; the arms of a man with whom a married woman commits adultery are hot and heavy as iron. “Maybe life,” she muses, “is lighting a cigarette in the languid pause between making love and making love again.” Like ash, her narrators disintegrate; desire—for life, for love, for the attentions of fallible and inconsistent men—curls through her stanzas like the upturned edges of paper freshly set ablaze.

For Farrokhzad, one of Iran’s most famous and beloved 20th-century poets, this fire has a purifying quality, a sense of self-possession that lingers in the air like smoke. Dead too young at 32 and forthright in her dissatisfactions with Iranian politics and gender hierarchies, Farrokhzad wrote poetry as a kind of arson; it annihilates. But afterward, something happens: the most essential structures remain, the most essential self. Everything superfluous burns away.

Farrokhzad was the third of seven children, born near Tehran in 1934 to the career military officer Colonel Mohammad Baqer Farrokhzad and his wife, Tūrān. Theirs was an upper-middle-class family with artistic and intellectual leanings. Farrokhzad's sister Pooran also became a writer, and her brother Fereydoun was a musician and television host who fled to Germany following the 1979 revolution. As a child, Farrokhzad was tempestuous. Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., the translator of Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (New Directions, 2022), a new selection of Farrokhzad’s work that includes translations from each of her five collections, describes the young poet as “bold and rebellious,” with an “independent streak [that] presented a challenge to every kind of parental control.”

At 16, Farrokhzad got engaged to a distant cousin 11 years her senior; both sets of parents disapproved. Soon after the marriage, she gave birth to her son, Kāmyār. She was expected to settle down and embrace the familiar role of the supportive provincial wife. Instead, she wrote poetry. With her husband’s encouragement, she visited Tehran to meet with editors and eventually submitted to literary journals. “A girl with disheveled hair, ink-stained hands, and a piece of paper that had been folded and squeezed between her fingers” is how one editor later remembered her. Rumors of affairs quickly followed. She divorced her husband and was forced to relinquish custody of her son. At 21, this ink-stained girl published her first collection, pointedly entitled Captive (1955).

The poems in this debut run on carbon monoxide, not oxygen; they portray the airlessness of a poorly matched couple and the throttled sound of an unhappy woman’s cries. “I am the candle whose burning heart / lights up a ruin,” the last few lines of Gray’s translation of the title poem read. An earlier translator, the Iranian American Sholeh Wolpé, renders these lines as “I brighten this darkened ruin / with the flames of my burning heart.” Another poem, the scandalous “Sin,” also sets off sparks: “I sinned a sin full of pleasure,” it begins, a bold embrace of female sexual desire, “in an embrace that was warm and fiery.”

“We grew up in a patronizing family. We grew up in a male chauvinist country,” Farrokhzad’s brother Fereydoun observes in The Green Cold (2002), a documentary directed by Nasser Saffarian, the first in his trilogy dedicated to Farrokhzad’s life and work. Shortly before Farrokhzad’s rebellious marriage, her father left her mother for another woman; though society at large tolerated his affairs, and those of the married men with whom Farrokhzad had her own relationships, Farrokhzad’s were not acceptable. For centuries, Persian poetry, as Gray writes in her translator’s note, “explored the nuances of love … [but] the poetic speaker had rarely been a woman and certainly not a flesh-and-blood passionate woman speaking from her heart.” By contrast, Farrokhzad made men “her poetic subjects, her objects of love and reverie, of passion and sexual desire … [her poems] are ‘modern’ as opposed to ‘traditional,’ a form rejected by the academic community and not considered poetry at all,” Wolpé observes.

“Love Poem,” from Another Birth (1964), Farrokhzad’s fourth collection, is an arresting example of how intensely she could capture a modern woman’s sexual desire. “O you who color my night with dreams of you,” begins the poem’s sighing lament, “my breast fills with your scent […] O you, hidden under my skin / like blood burning through my veins / whose caresses have burned my hair / and burned my cheeks with the scorch of desire.” There is no coquettishness here, nothing tittering or coy. Rarely has a poet so totally depicted the erotic force of longing and the ways in which obsession can alternate between destruction and fecundity.

That sense of fecundity appears in the language with which she praises her lover: “Like rain that washes the earth’s body […] you who are more abundant than wheat fields / more laden with fruit than golden branches” read lines from the first stanza. Then, later, “The water of you filled the dry stream of my heart.” The metaphors are ripe, wet, yearning, but though there is a real sense of pleasure and regeneration in these allusions to the natural world, the poem’s last stanza flirts with something darker:

O you who have blended me with the ardor of poetry
who have poured all this fire into my poetry
because you ignited in me the fever of love
of course you have set my verse on fire

In English, at least, there’s something uneasy about that last line. How possible is it for the serious female artist to find companionship and love? Western press and marketing copy about Farrokhzad often draw parallels between her work and that of her American contemporary, Sylvia Plath. As a comparison, it’s far from facile. In both poets’ work, a sensual invocation of nature abruptly veers into a more brutal register. For Plath, bees are never innocent; in Farrokhzad, there is an inevitable and self-destructive linkage between love, fire, and art—a relationship that Plath shares. “I am a lantern,” Plath writes in “Fever 103°,” bringing to mind a similar line from Farrokhzad’s “Captive,” whose speaker declares herself to be “the candle.” Plath’s “Poppies in July” begins “Little poppies, little hell flames, / Do you do no harm?” The image recalls the “burnt poppies” of a lover’s kiss in Farrokhzad.

The color green is also important for Farrokhzad. She cites it frequently: “O you, green from head to toe” goes a caressing line from “The Wind Will Carry Us.” Another poem begins with “Lonelier than a leaf / with my weight of vanished joys / in the green waters of summer.” In “Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season,” she writes, “The soil of his grave is still fresh / I mean the grave of those two young green hands …” “I Pity the Garden” ends with another reference to the color as a garden is emptied “of green memories,” and in “Someone Who Is Like No One,” a neon sign blaring the word Allah is “green as the dawn.” In one account of her early teenage meetings with editors, even the ink staining her hands was green.

Green may be traditionally associated with spring, plants, vitality, and health, but Farrokhzad also uses it to conjure a sense of melancholy. Gray’s translation of “Vahm Sabz” is titled “Green Illusion”; others have opted for “Green Delusion” or “Green Terror.” The feminist critic and scholar Farzaneh Milani has cited it as “[Farrokhzad’s] elegant statement of all the sacrifices she has had to make for her art,” as the poem’s first stanza makes clear:

All day I cried in the mirror
Spring has entrusted my window
to the green illusion of the trees
My body no longer fit the cocoon of my loneliness
and the stink of my paper crown
had contaminated the air of that sunless realm

Farrokhzad’s iconoclasm came at a price. She had lost custody of her son, and a male editor with whom she had had a brief affair published a thinly veiled, unflattering series of short stories based on their relationship in the summer of 1955. That fall, Farrokhzad experienced a nervous breakdown and spent a month in a psychiatric clinic, where she was treated with electroshock therapy. Her embrace of autobiography in her art, though, transcends countries, languages, and time periods. It disturbs—the phrase “the stink of my paper crown” is unusual, arresting—but it also lends a certain beauty, even dignity, to a particular kind of unhappiness often coded as feminine.

In forestry, the process of a controlled burn, used to maintain the health of the woods, involves setting planned fires to the undergrowth, dead trees, and rotting branches that make up the normal composition of a forest floor. The opposing elements that Farrokhzad frequently references—the greenery of nature, not always friendly in its fertility, and the purifying, destructive force of flames—function as their own controlled burn, one that destroys cliches, conservatisms, and the stagnating influence of tradition. That process was not always kind to the poet. But afterward, there’s the possibility of germination.

“An intellectual,” Farrokhzad told the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci in a 1965 interview, two years before her death, “is one who, besides trying for the external development of life, tries for the spiritual advancement, for the improvement of moral issues. And he looks at these issues, thinks about them, and solves them for himself.”

Though her poems of sex and love are always acutely aware of the power differentials between women and men, Farrokhzad’s work from the early 1960s on manifested a new political consciousness, particularly as the political situation in Iran worsened under Mohammad Reza Shah following the 1953 US- and British-backed coup of Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh and as criticisms of the shah by activists, artists, and writers were increasingly suppressed. The riots and unrest that broke out across Iran, such as the massive public demonstrations and protests that occurred in June 1963 following the arrest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, found their way into her work. In her 1964 poem “Rose,” Farrokhzad writes, “A red rose is growing /red rose / red / like a flag in / an uprising.” In “After You,” published posthumously, she pairs the loss of girlish innocence with the loss of political innocence: “After you we went to the squares / and screamed / ‘Long live …’ / ‘Death to …’” And “O Jeweled Land” takes its title from the national anthem during the days of the shah and is sarcastic in its portrayal of daily life in Tehran:

Victory!
I registered myself
I adorned myself with a name, on an ID card
my existence distinguished with a number
So hail to #678, issued at Precinct 5, Resident of Tehran!
Now I don’t have to worry anymore
The kind bosom of the Motherland
the pacifier of the past full of the glory of history
the lullaby of civilization and culture
the squeaky-toy of the law …

What good, Farrokhzad seems to ask, does a love of culture do when it is mired in the past and the oppressive forms therein? Later in the poem, she is even more explicit about this apparent tie between conservative forms and conservative politics: “I have read every issue of Art & Science and Homage & Flattery / and I understand the skill of ‘Writing Correctly.’”

A similar concern with the ties between form and politics and the improvement of moral issues is evident in her only film, The House Is Black (1962). Shot in just over 12 days, the 20-minute experimental documentary is a poetic exploration of the Bababaghi Hospice leper colony in northeastern Iran. The Society for Aid to Lepers commissioned the project. Golestan Studios, run by Farrokhzad’s lover, Ebrahim Golestan, produced. Interweaving everyday scenes of villagers living with leprosy alongside voiceovers of poetry read by Farrokhzad and more factual medical narration read by Golestan, the result is a disquieting meditation on the relationship between the sickness of a state and the sickness of its people. It has been widely credited with launching the Iranian New Wave.

The opening shot, featuring the half-shown reflection of a woman gazing at her disfigured face in the mirror, is shocking; shocking, too, are the quiet facts that make up Golestan’s narration. Leprosy, it is pointed out, is a disease of poverty, entirely preventable and entirely treatable if detected early. Children play, most of their faces and bodies whole, but in a classroom scene, there are students who, like the adults around them, have lost a nose or an ear, their limbs stiffening into stumps. A celebration—perhaps a wedding—occurs. A man is shown praying. Then, toward the end, the classroom appears again, and a teacher asks a little boy with dark and shining eyes, “Why should we thank God for having a father and mother?”

“I don’t know,” the child responds. “I have neither.”

The film is unbearable, beautiful in its composition and righteous in its anger. Like the formally modern poems of Another Birth, which Farrokhzad was writing at approximately the same time, it’s a perfect marriage of avant-garde aesthetics and consciously left-leaning politics. It brings to mind what Farrokhzad’s brother Amir once recalled in an interview about his sister: “[She] was not in the century she was living in. She lived in the twenty first century. I think she used to think one hundred years in advance.”

On February 14, 1967, Farrokhzad drove to her mother’s home for lunch. Upon leaving, her mother later recalled, Farrokhzad's lips were cold— a sign of impending death, according to an old wives’ tale. Though her mother begged her to stay, Farrokhzad laughed and quipped, “Whatever God wishes, comes to pass.” During her drive home, she swerved to avoid an oncoming school bus, was thrown from her car, and hit her head against the curb. She died instantly.

Snow fell during her funeral. Iran’s intellectuals gathered alongside Farrokhzad’s family and hundreds of admirers. A decade later, after the 1979 revolution, the new Islamic government banned her books. But a book of poems is not a corpse. Poems possess their own pulses that beat between readers. Farrokhzad is gone, but her words still leave scorch marks across the page.