Jasmin Darznik Discusses the Importance of Forugh Farrokhzad

At Literary Hub, learn about Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, who Jasmin Darznik explains was once known as, "the country’s most notorious woman." "Her poems were revolutionary: a radical bid for self-expression and democracy written in a time and place," Darznik writes, "which showed little tolerance for either, particularly when women voiced the desire for them." From there: 

Like the thousands of other Iranians who left Iran in the late 1970s, my family escaped the country in a hurry. It was 1978, a year on the edge of political upheaval. Soon there would be gunfire and tanks and dead bodies heaped in the streets. In 1978 no one could know that, but many people—especially the poets and artists—sensed it.

That was almost 40 years ago. I was five, and yet the details are strangely vivid: my grandmother sitting me on her lap to watch the pop diva Googoosh on television while my mother packed our suitcases. It was winter, and the snow was falling fast that night in Tehran. “We’ll be back soon,” my mother kept saying, but something in her made her walk over to the bookshelf and pick up her favorite book—a book of poems by Forugh. Something in her must have known she would need it.

Growing up in America, I was made to think poetry is useless, that it’s dead or elitist or merely decorative. In Iran, meanwhile, there is no higher art form. Poets aren’t just venerated—they are loved. Everyone seems to have a favorite poet and can recite whole poems by heart. Iranians know that when you memorize a poem it becomes part of you. You carry it with you, even if in fragments, even in another country.

I don’t remember my mother reading Forugh’s book or any other book when I was growing up. The exigencies of immigration, of remaking a life, didn’t allow it. My most enduring memories from those first years in America are of her working at the motel she and my father bought: shuffling from motel room to motel room with an olive gray trolley stocked with cleaning supplies, her voice reduced to a broken English. She worked long hours and when she came home she’d stretch out on the couch with the television on until she fell asleep, but maybe it wasn’t that she was just too tired to read. Poetry was bound up with a self she had shed, and it might have been too painful to be reminded of that self. Still, she never gave her books away.

Read on at Literary Hub.