—from “Reborn”
The gravediggers set out with the morning’s first call to prayer. In spring, when the ground turned wet and loamy, or in summer, when it crumbled to dust, the job could be finished in as little as three hours, but it was now the middle of February, and with a hard snow falling and the earth so unyielding, the gravediggers would have to begin at sunrise and work long into the day.
It was the women—my mother, sisters, cousins, and aunts—who cleansed my body of sin. Starting with the right side of my body, they purified me limb by limb, from head to foot, three separate times. Though they spoke in whispers and glances, their hands were steady as they performed the ablutions.
Next they wound the white myrrh-scented shroud around my body, swathing me once, then a second and a third time. The ritual was repeated with a second kafan, and because it was winter and the snow was falling heavily, I was cloaked in a silk carpet.
At noon the men arrived and hoisted me onto their shoulders. A wintry haze had settled over the city. It would be dark by four. Trudging along icy pavements, their backs against the wind, they carried me into a white hearse and then drove me through the streets of northern Tehran. Hundreds upon hundreds of mourners followed in our wake. In the narrow alleyways surrounding Zahirodo’allah Cemetery, the cortege inched past teahouses and street vendors hawking roasted chestnuts, pomegranates, and sheets of flatbread, past the turquoise domes and minarets of Imamzadeh Saleh shrine, and through the tall gates of the cemetery.
All along the way, people on the sidewalks stopped to stare. The shah’s police stood in their dark-blue uniforms and gold-edged caps, with their rifles and long swords. Watching—they were always watching.
The newspapers were full of pictures of me that day, February 15, 1967. Forugh, the Colonel’s daughter, sitting on the stone steps of my childhood house with a white satin ribbon wilting at my crown and a blond doll posed on my lap. In the photograph, the Colonel stands over me in full military regalia and black boots half the size of my body. Forugh, the sixteen-year-old bride with arched eyebrows and a lipsticked pout that reads black in the picture. Forugh at nineteen, holding the son who would love, then fear, then despise me. Forugh, the divorcée, at twenty-two, my arms and ankles bare and a rope of pearls knotted between my breasts. Forugh, the notorious twenty-eight-year-old poetess, standing beside Darius Golshiri with bobbed hair and shy but smiling eyes.
Rumors drifted through the crowd. The roads had frozen up the night before, winter streaking the asphalt with black ice. I’d been driving too fast, at least twenty miles faster than was safe on that stretch of road, but for no known reason I hadn’t pushed the brakes as I headed toward the embankment—there wasn’t a trace of skid marks. Maybe I’d lost my head—hadn’t it happened before? Didn’t I have a history of madness? There was talk, too, of a school bus filled with children. Of a sudden swerve. Sacrifice and martyrdom.
There were other mysteries apart from the circumstances surrounding my death. “Golshiri,” someone whispered, nodding toward a man who stood slightly apart from the other members of the funeral party. He was quiet, his hands folded before him. “Her lover.”
“He bought this grave for her, you know. I’ve heard it’s in his family plot, next to what will be his own grave.”
At this, there was a perceptible intake of breath and a turning of heads.
Without a husband to claim it, my body belonged now to my father, the Colonel, so how had Darius Golshiri managed to bury me, and within his own family plot? And where would he bury his wife when she died? Next to me, his mistress? It was unthinkable. But no matter how carefully they studied him, no one could make out Golshiri’s emotions, much less his intentions. Throughout the burial rites, his expression remained hard and impassive. He betrayed nothing that day—and he’d betray nothing for the next fifty years.
Except for what I’d written in my poems, in the end no one knew the truth about my death and no one knew the truth about our lives.
* * *
When I left my father and then my husband, I lost my name and I was no one. But there was freedom in this, to be a woman on my own. It made me strong, and it made me the poet I wanted to be.
I knew many poets whose lives had nothing to do with their poetry. They were only poets when they sat down to write. They’d finish a poem and then turn back into greedy, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I could never believe in their poems, because I couldn’t believe in them.
While I was alive, poetry was the answer I gave to my life. I didn’t search for anything in my poems. I wrote to discover myself and to become myself. And I believed in being a poet in all moments, because to me being a poet meant being fully human. I tried to write and live with courage and also to die that way. Bravely. Honestly.
“There’s nothing for you in Iran anymore,” Darius had told me once. For days afterward I turned his words over in my mind. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place where a woman’s life was less governed by shame and prohibition, a place where I could walk with my eyes straight on the horizon, a place where I could be free. I thought hard about leaving Iran, but if Darius couldn’t fully choose a life with me, if he stayed married to his wife, what did it matter if we left Iran or went abroad?
But there was more to my decision not to leave the country. For so many years I wished I had been born somewhere else. I felt my life had been wasted in Iran. But the truth was I loved it. I loved Tehran’s relentless sun and heavy dusks and dusty side streets. I loved sleeping on the rooftop on summer nights and waking to morning’s call to prayer. When I walked in the streets, there was a memory at every turn, a rootedness I felt in my limbs and my heart. Whatever Iran wanted to be, I loved it. I’d found my life’s purpose here. Every poem I’d ever written was entangled with my country’s story. I loved its downtrodden, small-minded, generous people. I loved them; I belonged to them. They were my people, and I was theirs.
* * *
—
Many years after I died, a million books of my poems could be found throughout my country, hidden under beds and behind bureaus, crammed behind bookshelves and in the deepest reaches of drawers. A million books of poetry—it was a staggering number and unequal even to the ambition I’d had when I was alive. By then, the 1979 Revolution and war with Iraq had left very few families untouched by loss, and hundreds of thousands of Iranians had left the country and were now scattered all over the world. People read my work and claimed I’d foretold our country’s destiny in it—the chaos, the ruin, the tortures, the silences. The sons who died, the daughters who disappeared. In Iran they read my poems as auguries, and they called my death a blessing because it spared me from watching my prophecies come true, one after another, for so many years.
Once, when my poems were banned by the new regime and a publisher wouldn’t stop printing them, his press was burned to the ground. As if poetry could be destroyed like a building or a body. But art wasn’t like that. Art could survive; even when suppressed, even when outlawed, it could survive far worse fates than fire.
There was a day in the new millennium when hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the streets of Tehran. People called it the Green Path—green for the Prophet Mohammad as they knew him: humane, gentle, generous. The faith in the streets was one reborn from our own roots. People chanted my verses as they marched peacefully toward Azadi Tower that spring—“I Feel Sorry for the Garden” and “Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season”—but I wouldn’t be there to see it, nor would I witness the loss of so many young men and women along the path of my country’s bloody and aborted push toward freedom.
* * *
“La elah ella Allah!”—God is the only God!—came the cries as I was lowered into the ground.
The sun was a pale white circle above the Alborz Mountains; the wind blew faintly, stirring the sweet, smoky perfume of wild rue.
A ring of mourners encircled the grave. It was snow-lined and banked with masses of
white flowers. Tiny alongside the men in their forbidding black suits, three women stood together, their arms interlocked. They wore Western-style dresses with straight skirts and collarless jackets under their coats, but each covered her hair with a heavy black veil. Two of them were my sisters and the third one my mother.
At last the funeral prayers began. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Forgive those of us who are living and those of us who are dead, those who are present and those who are absent. Forgive us and forgive her. I was turned to the right side, toward Mecca, toward the One who is the only One. Salutations on the Prophet, a supplication for the deceased.
A pause, a silence, and then the first fistfuls of soil fell upon my body.
I felt the earth calling me back to itself. I was ready now. Swallows would one day lay eggs in my ink-stained palms. Tender green shoots would force their way out of my grave and up toward the air. All this would happen later, in the spring, when the sun warmed the earth and the sky, but already I had reached a place where censure and suffering are meaningless, where courage has no boundaries, where hope lasts forever and does not fade.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1978 my family left Iran with two maroon leather suitcases. There’d been trouble in Tehran for a while, but that year the trouble suddenly got worse. We weren’t sure how long it would last, but for now it seemed we should leave the country. There wasn’t much time to pack, much less to plan. We flew to America, thinking we’d wait out the violence and chaos back home. The next year there was a revolution in Iran. The two maroon suitcases were unpacked and then cast off.
My family never returned to Iran. I never returned to Iran. But some things survived our exodus. Among the few cherished possessions my mother managed to bring to America was a slender book of poems by Forugh Farrokhzad. Growing up, I’d happen across the book every so often. I can still picture the bobbed-haired woman with kohl-lined eyes on the cover. Who was she and why had she followed us to America?
That image—its glamour, mystery, and modernity—rooted itself in my imagination, but it wasn’t until I was in college that I began to read Forugh’s poetry and that my fascination with her truly began. At UCLA I had the great fortune to study with the late Dr. Amin Banani, a scholar of Iranian literature who’d been acquainted with the poet in the 1950s. No sooner had I read “The Sin” than I was possessed by Forugh’s voice, its naturalness and immediacy. I was also bowled over by Forugh’s audacity. This was a poem about desire written from a woman’s point of view. Had Iranian women really once sounded like that?
Brought up in Tehran during the 1940s and 1950s, Forugh Farrokhzad, or “Forugh” as she became known, was the first woman to transcend the label of “poetess” without the support or patronage of a man, becoming a poet of tremendous accomplishment. She was not yet twenty when she wrote “The Sin,” a poem so candid and daring that its publication in 1955 made her the most notorious woman in Iran. Her five books of poetry cemented her reputation as a rebel. An exile in her own country, as a filmmaker, she turned her lens on those banished to the fringes of society. Again and again she flung herself fearlessly into life, voicing passion and protest at a time when many still believed women shouldn’t be heard from at all. She was simply too creative, too gutsy, and too ambitious to be silenced by the constraints others sought to place on her.
The risks she took cost her a great deal, but they also made her the artist she became. Her poems still offer an extraordinary reading experience more than half a century after they were first composed: The subject matter is daring, the language unfettered, and the point of view direct and unapologetic. More than perhaps any other writer, Forugh Farrokhzad gave Iranian women permission to be bold, furious, lustful, and rapturous. She ripped the decorous conventions off women’s writing, holding up a mirror for women’s hopes and pain. She cut a path through Iranian literature with her courage and her honesty, and my mother had been just one of a great number of women affected by her life and work.
For me, a young Iranian American woman coming of age in 1990s’ California, reading Forugh’s poems felt like crossing into a different country, into a different idea of what it meant to be a woman, into different possibilities for whom I myself could become.
Her poems changed me. They stoked my curiosity about Iranian women’s lives, a curiosity I chased first as a literary scholar and then as a writer myself. To write my first book, a family memoir titled The Good Daughter, I spent several years researching Iran before the 1979 Revolution. Even after completing the project, so much about this time period still vexed and riveted me. Iran is a paradoxical country, and those paradoxes were profoundly amplified in the fifties and sixties. Women’s lives underwent radical changes in these years, yet many old prejudices and prohibitions endured. The ensuing tensions fascinated me. In addition, since Forugh’s day, women have become a vital presence in Iranian literature, yet whether on account of cultural taboos or outright censorship, it seemed that so much remained unwritten, particularly about the decades leading up to the revolution. What did it mean to be a woman in Iran at that time? What were the rules? What were the possibilities and encumbrances? I wanted to read—and write—a story that answered these questions.
Eventually, my thoughts turned to Forugh. For many years I’d continued to read all I could about her, not knowing it would lead me to write a novel. Then at one point I discovered she’d assisted some student activists during the turmoil that roiled through Iran in the early sixties. I set about learning all I could. I returned to her poems, then to scholarly sources. Discovery piled onto discovery. What I found astonished me, and eventually I thought, I have to tell her story.
As a poet, Forugh often drew inspiration from her life, and the outlines of that life—a troubled early marriage and divorce, the forced surrender of her son, her notorious union with a prominent filmmaker, and, of course, her death in 1967 at the age of thirty-two—form the novel’s framework. Moving between interpretation and imagination, I embedded the novel with the images, tropes, themes, and rhythms of Forugh’s poems and films. As I wrote, the ghost of her voice—its urgency and tenderness—was constantly in my ear. I wanted readers to hear it, too, so I steeped myself in her poetry, working from the Persian into English. By translating her poems for the novel, I gained a completely new intimacy with her writing, one of the most precious gifts that came from writing Forugh’s story.
What I couldn’t know I invented. In part this was of necessity. Unlike other novelists who’ve written about historical figures, I didn’t have access to a well-stocked archive. When Forugh died in 1967, many of her papers disappeared. Friends and relatives, no doubt traumatized by the death of one so young and gifted, as well as by the ongoing turmoil in Iran, chose not to speak about the more controversial parts of her life. Her work, too, was silenced. After the 1979 Revolution her poems were banned, then heavily censored. When one press refused to stop printing her work, it was scorched to the ground. For decades Michael C. Hillmann’s A Lonely Woman, published in 1987, offered the only in-depth look into her life. Forugh’s writing has been splendidly illuminated by Professor Farzaneh Milani, yet Milani’s full-length Persian-language study, Forugh Farrokhzad: A Literary Biography, was published in Iran shortly after I finished writing this book.
Yet the gaps and fissures I encountered in the historical record opened a space for invention. “The historian will tell you what happened,” E. L. Doctorow remarked. “The novelist will tell you what it felt like.” In writing about Forugh, I wanted to go beyond what was known outwardly about her—what could perhaps ever be known about her, given not just the reticence of those who’d been close to her but the fundamental inscrutability of the human personality. I wanted to imagine what it felt like to be the woman writing those astonishing poems. To be the woman who created herself by writing those poems. And to do this I embraced the unique power of fiction to illuminate the past.
In writing Song of a Captive Bird I drew from Forugh
’s own poetry, letters, films, and interviews as source material but enlarged upon these in ways only possible in fiction. For example, the character of Leila Farmayan is based on a woman who befriended Forugh in the years immediately after her divorce, yet the novel expands her role so that she stands, finally, as a symbol for the untold number of Iranian men and women who have died under mysterious and not-so-mysterious circumstances over the course of the last century. I was unable to cover every aspect of Forugh’s life in this novel, as some pieces of her story could be additional novels in themselves. For example, it is known that when she traveled to the Bababaghi Hospice in the early sixties to film The House Is Black, Forugh took a child from the colony under her wing, but I didn’t want to invent threads where the record seemed particularly thin, nor intrude upon the memories of those loved ones who have survived her.
As I worked on Song of a Captive Bird, I found myself continually moved by Forugh’s bravery, tenacity, and independence, pained by the slights, prejudices, and cruelties she faced, and awed by her talent, vision, and integrity. Through Forugh I found a way to enter the past and to return to the country I’d left as a child, but to my surprise I discovered that many of her dreams and frustrations echoed through the present. Song of a Captive Bird is the story of a woman who battled to create a life on her own terms, to balance conflicting roles and desires, and to survive in an often-hostile world. Her choices, when she had them, were hard; her independence and her career were achieved at significant cost, not least the surrender of her child and her own emotional well-being. Her love affairs both freed and entrapped her. She was a modern woman, and in her hopes and ambitions we can see our own.
Today Forugh’s work is as significant as ever, and for the same reasons it has been for more than five decades. Forugh Farrokhzad is an icon in Iran, a gifted and spirited woman whose work and commitment to individual liberty and social justice resonate deeply across generations. Her poems have been banned and censored, but readers still manage to get ahold of them. There is perhaps no more touching proof of her legacy than the thousands of people who trek to her grave in Zahirodo’allah Cemetery every year.
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