NYT's 'Overlooked No More' Features Forough Farrokhzad

Through its "Overlooked No More" series the New York Times pays homage to historical figures whose deaths went unreported. "Since 1851, obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men," its introduction explains. This week, the series features Forough Farrokhzad, "one of Iran’s pre-eminent mid-20th-century writers, both reviled and revered for her poems, which often dealt with female desire," writes the obituary's author, Amir-Hussein Radjy. From there: 

Throughout her life she struggled with how her gender affected the reception of her work in a culture where women were often confined to traditional roles, but where there are few higher callings than the life of a poet.

In the afterword to “Captive” (1955), her first poetry collection, Farrokhzad wrote, “Perhaps because no woman before me took steps toward breaking the shackles binding women’s hands and feet, and because I am the first to do so, they have made such a controversy out of me.”

Her death in 1967 at 32, in a car crash, was regarded as a national tragedy, making the front pages of Tehran’s newspapers.

Iran’s leading literary journal, Sokhan, wrote after her funeral, “Forough is perhaps the first female writer in Persian literature to express the emotions and romantic feelings of the feminine gender in her verse with distinctive frankness and elegance, for which reason she has inaugurated a new chapter in Persian poetry.”

After the overthrow of Iran’s secular monarchy in 1979, the Islamic Republic banned her poetry for almost a decade. But that censorship only elevated her appeal to new generations of Iranians, who saw in Farrokhzad — often referred to simply as Forough — an icon of artistic, personal and sexual freedom.

“I can only compare her in America to a movie star or a music celebrity, because no poet here would reach that kind of status,” said Farzaneh Milani, author of “Forough Farrokhzad: A Literary Biography” (2016) and a professor of Middle Eastern culture at the University of Virginia.

Learn more at the New York Times.