This timely anthology, which casts a critical eye on the “biographical imperative” that has dominated so much of Farrokhzadian criticism, assures readers that its essays will instead “explore new avenues of research”. The book successfully offers significant contributions to the field in many directions, from careful literary and cinematic exegesis, to comprehensive socio-political contextualization, to analysis of Farrokhzad's impact in translation and diaspora.
In their introduction, Brookshaw and Rahimieh's identification of Farrokhzad's “split subjectivity” and “writing the body” with the cultural climate of her times, including a second-wave feminist gesture towards jouissance, is a refreshing and important new critical framework. Gender was a sprawling, amorphous and complex theme for Farrokhzad, intimately intertwined with other social, cultural and political issues. In the first essay, Homa Katouzian's “psychological-cum-literary” connection between Farrokhzad's desire for a harmonious reunion with her father and her search for a “paradise lost” in poetry seems tenuous at best, although his reading of the formal weaknesses and strengths of “Sin” and “In the Cold Streets of Night” as linked to the varying consistency of the poems' emotional content is an intriguing hypothesis. The chapter by Marta Simidchieva, by contrast, rejects the biographical imperative at the outset and instead argues for the persistence of a dramatis personae throughout Farrokzhad's first collection Captive. Simidchieva thoroughly assesses female agency, classical influences, and themes of love and sex, extending previous feminist analyses of the “unpoetic bluntness” in Captive boldly to suggest that even contemporary critics downplay its importance because public acknowledgement of female sexuality “still feels like a trespass”.
Brookshaw's exegesis of the prophetic “I Feel Sorry for the Garden” offers a careful reading of the decaying baghcheh (traditional Iranian courtyard) as a metaphor for the demise of the modern Iranian family, but his survey approach often turns his enumeration of the home and garden tropes somewhat repetitive, leading to generalizations such as: “Before her death … Farrokhzad was concerned more with social issues than those of gender”.
Rivanne Sandler provides historical context for Farrokhzad's strikingly conversational tone and her embrace of free verse, while tracing the presence of an internal “muse” throughout the collections. Leila Bahmany's piece offers a novel psychoanalytic interpretation of Farrokhzad's developing poetic persona, using previous critics' delineation of the poet's three stages – feminine, feminist, female – in a gender-sensitive examination of mirror symbolism that draws on Lacan and Cixous.
The brief meditation, by Michael Beard, on subject-formation through poetic and cinematic perspective confesses to a “polemic intent” and critiques what he deems “obvious” transitions and “commonplace” themes in the poet's work. Although his tone is far more elliptical than the surrounding essays, Beard presents an intriguing analysis of the role of spaces, line breaks, and perspectival shifts in the nuanced, dystopian, “I Feel Sorry for the Garden”, whose ending he calls “the most startling moment in Farrokhzad's startling career”.
Kamran Talatoff's revisionist biographical methodology aims to dispel dominant “myths” that portray Farrokhzad as a “victim” of frustrated love, restrained sexuality and patriarchal oppression. He identifies her letters, travelogue and short stories as harbingers of the radical turning point in her career that came with the publication of Rebellion, establishes her as a respected mentor of other poets, and links her personal rebellion to political reform in pre-Revolutionary Iran in broader strokes than many feminist readings of her work.
The chapter by Sirous Shamisa reinforces this notion of the politico-poetic “pioneer”, and traces her prophetic and apocalyptic visions to the growing pre-Revolutionary tensions throughout Farrokhzad's lifetime. Shamisa's allegorical analysis of “I Feel Sorry for the Garden” also provides a political counterpoint to readings by Brookshaw and Beard. Taken together, these three arguments significantly advance the breadth of scholarship on this poem alone.
As the volume moves beyond literary exegesis in the second half, two new interpretations of The House is Black, Farrokhzad's controversial and genre-bending documentary set in a leper colony, challenge readings of the film as a reflection of the poet's own transgression and alienation. Rahimieh's brilliant essay draws on gaze theory and Kristevan notions of abjection, and the fact of “disability” as a negative construction in Iranian culture, ultimately to suggest that the film's ending shot of a closing gate “disrupts the assumption of the wholeness and wholesomeness of the nation”. According to Maryam Ghorbankarimi's formalist analysis, Farrokhzad's use of voiceover, juxtaposition, black-and-white composition, and other techniques indicates a coherent and intuitive transition from verbal to “cinematic poetry”.
The final three essays address the impact of Farrokhzad's verse in the international literary arena. Nima Mina and M. R. Ghanoonparvar delve into new questions regarding translation. The former argues that the work of German poet Ossip Kalenter, translated into Persian by Farrokhzad and her brother, was instrumental in the composition of “Aftertimes” and other poems; the latter examines various interpretations and mistranslations of the complex imagery found in “Another Birth” and offers a new, vivid, amalgamated translation of his own.
Persis Karim's perceptive concluding chapter maps out the variegated “emotive topography” of Farrokhzad's role as a “cultural touchstone” for various Iranian intellectuals in diaspora. Within the US academy, Karim draws incisive parallels between Hamid Dabashi, Fatemeh Keshavarz, and Azar Nafisi's nostalgic and over-personalized attachments to Farrokhzad as a “representation of their own literary awakening”. She concludes the volume by pointing out how artistic diasporic renderings of Farrokhzad's voice – including the poetry, photography and plays of Roger Sedarat, Shirin Neshat, Maryam Habibian and others – memorialize and reinvent Farrokhzad's themes for a contemporary global audience.
This landmark volume covers much ground as it amasses a refreshing juxtaposition of biographical, psychoanalytic, socio-political, strictly textual and transnational readings of the poet's work. Ultimately, it is the chapters that rely the least on biographical claims that present the strongest, most innovative arguments, especially in a book that so comprehensively maps out the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural reverberations of Farrokhzad's oeuvre.
