Description

Forough Farrokhzad (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد‎; December 29, 1934 – February 13, 1967) was an influential Iranian poet and film director. She was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclast, writing from a female point of view.

Forough Farrokhzad was born in Tehran in 1935, to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad (originally from Tafresh city) and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar. The third of seven children (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydoun, Pooran, Gloria), she attended school until the ninth grade, then was taught painting and sewing at a girls’ school for the manual arts. At the age of 16 she was married to satirist Parviz Shapour. She continued her education with painting and sewing classes, and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. Her only child, a son named Kamyar Shapour (subject of The Return), was born a year later.

“After her separation, and later her divorce (1954), from Parviz, she loses custody of her son because she has had several affairs. Her son Kamyar, whom she affectionately calls Kami, is taken away from her and brought up by Parviz and his family. Forugh is given few visiting rights, and the child is brought up with the impression that his mother has abandoned him for poetry and the pursuit of her sexual pleasures. The thought of her son thinking that she willingly abandoned him, is a source of great sorrow and constant torment.”

Farrokhzad spent nine months in Europe during 1958. After returning to Iran, in search of a job she met filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan, who reinforced her own inclinations to express herself and live independently, and with whom she began a love affair. She published two more volumes, The Wall and The Rebellion, before traveling to Tabriz to make a film about Iranians affected by leprosy. This 1962 documentary film, titled The House is Black, is considered to be an essential part of the Iranian New Wave movement. During the 12 days of shooting, she became attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers. She adopted the boy and brought him to live at her mother’s house.

She published Reborn in 1964. Her poetry at that time varied significantly from previous Iranian poetic traditions.