The Phoenix
Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik, review published in Consequence
Remember the flight, for the bird is mortal.—Forugh Farrokhzad
The Shah did not understand that even if you can destroy a man, destroying him doesn’t mean he ceases to exist. The scythe swings, and at once the grass starts to grow back. —Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shah
In February 1967, the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad died in a car crash in Tehran at the age of thirty-two. A tremendous outpouring of grief followed both overseas and in Iran, where hundreds of people lined the streets on the day of her funeral. Every year since, thousands more make the pilgrimage to the Zahirodo’allah Cemetery on the anniversary of her death.
Due to a combination of linguistic brilliance and physical beauty (not to mention that prerequisite for myth—the early death), Farrokhzad is often carelessly labeled the Persian Sylvia Plath, but this grossly underestimates her status. Unlike Plath, the impact of Farrokhzad’s work transcended notions of personal, familial, and gender politics, and was ultimately perceived as a direct threat to the body politic. Despite spending much of her short life being slandered and scorned by her family, her country’s political elite, and its press—and a not inconsiderable number of its citizens—her passing, and public reaction to it, illuminates something profound about the role of the poet in Persian culture.
In an interview with the Institute for Policy Studies the contemporary Iranian writer Farideh Hassanzadeh explained that, with the exception of the Quran, the books of the great poets like Hafez, Rumi, Sa’adi, Khayyam, and Ferdousi, enjoy the largest circulation in Iran. “After prophets,” she said, “Poets, rule the heart and mind of my people.” Mehdi Jami, the Iranian journalist and commentator, went further in an interview with The Guardian (February 12, 2017) suggesting Farrokhzad fulfilled both roles. “In every culture you have icons, like Shakespeare in Britain. Farrokhzad was like that for contemporary Iran,” he believed. “She was the last prophet of truth-telling that our country has seen.”
It takes guts to fictionalize the life of an icon, but Jasmin Darznik pulls it off. The accomplishments of Song of a Captive Bird (Ballantine Books, February 2018), are twofold: it not only beguiles with a gripping history of an extraordinary artist, but plants seeds, quickening the reader’s curiosity about its subject, directing us beyond the confines of its pages into the poetry and films of Farrokhzad herself. Born in Iran and raised in the United States, Darznik currently teaches at the California College of Arts. Song of a Captive Bird is her first novel, and her second book, following her best-selling memoir The Good Daughter: My Mother’s Hidden Life (2011).
Darznik dramatizes Forugh Farrokhzad’s life over three acts: “I Feel Sorry for the Garden,” “The Rebellion,” and “A New Birth,” and each follows quite faithfully—with the exception of a few fictionalized scenes or name changes here and there—her brief but blazing flight. It opens with a disturbing event when Forugh is a teenager, but it is another character that soon grabs the reader’s attention: the country itself. “Vast deserts of salt and sand extend from east to west, and on any day of the year all four seasons take place within Iran’s borders,” she writes. “Here under a continuing shifting surface of wildflowers, sand, rock, and snow, black veins of oil plunge to the heart of the earth.” Iran is personified as a diseased paradise; a Garden of Eden infested with a cancer that, time and again, spouts symptoms of power and greed. At the time of Forugh’s birth, Tehran “was still an old-fashioned city of dirt roads, narrow passageways, and flat-roofed family compounds,” but by her death it had been erased, westernized by the Shah’s attempt to drag his reluctant country into the twentieth century. Yet in her memory, and in her poetry, Forugh’s beloved Tehran remained perfumed with “black tea steeped with rose petals and cardamom pods, coriander and cumin,” where, “even in summer the air carried the scent of snow.”
Forugh was born in 1935. Her mother, Turan, had married her father, Colonel Farrokhzad, when she was fifteen and he was thirty-two. “Unveiled, corseted, and lipsticked though she was, my mother’s life would always be a prayer rug spread at the altar of fear,” within “a house whose women believed the very walls listened for signs of sin.” To Turan marriage is “an act of faith” but her selfless devotion proves to be an altar built on sand. In both his professional and domestic realms Forugh’s father applies the king Reza Shah’s dictate of “strike first, show no mercy, trust no one.” Under this tyrannical, but not atypical, rule, the Colonel kicks Forugh and her six siblings awake every morning to perform exercises accompanied by a phonograph. When Reza Shah is deposed following the Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941 in favor of his son Mohammed Reza, the Colonel, despite some misgivings, transfers his loyalty wholesale. “Bound in service until his death,” he expects his family to do the same.
Turan raises her daughters with a benign neglect till they are mature enough to enter the marriage market. The girls complete their education by ninth grade. Confined to the family compound, which they are forbidden to leave unaccompanied, they watch their brothers playing in the street, watch them leave for college overseas. From the start Forugh proves too feisty for her mother, who, believing her spirited daughter haunted by a wayward jinn, instructs a servant to drop sedatives in her food. Intelligent, curious, and bored, Forugh spends as much time as she can in her father’s well-stocked library, where he keeps, like all cultured Iranians, the great works of Persian literature. When her father’s friends gather to socialize, she spies on their poetry recitations, smitten by the music of Farsi, “a language that can sometimes sound like susurrations of a lover and sometimes like the reed’s plaintive song.” At age eleven, she scrawls her first poem down the margin of a scavenged newspaper. “The more I read, the more I longed to let loose the words inside me.”
Tentatively she begins to share her verses with her father—although she fears him she longs to please him—and her precociousness stokes the Colonel’s vanity. He listens “as if assessing not the poem’s value, but mine.” Thus begins a pattern of yearning for male approval and patronage that repeats over her lifetime, fueling her creativity, provoking her public undoing: she is incapable of keeping her heart off the page. Soon enough, her fledgling artistry receives a severe clipping, and she orchestrates an exit through the only door open to her, exchanging the imprisonment of being a daughter to that of being a wife.
By sixteen Forugh is married (unhappily) and living under the eye and control of her mother-in-law, in a rural outpost over five hundred miles from Tehran, “a scrubby land, without hills or meadows, a country of stones and stunted blooms.” The Shah’s modernization efforts, including outlawing the veil and ridding his land of “camels, donkeys, beggars, and dervishes,’” win patchy support within Iran’s cities, and almost none beyond their borders. In this predominantly rural nation, religious conservatism holds its ground. “Unveiled women would be showered with insults and, in some neighborhoods of the city, with fistfuls of stones. It wasn’t only the mullahs who’d protest the shah’s new law; thousands of women refused to set foot outside their homes once the veil was banned.” Forugh scandalizes her husband’s village with her uncovered head and modern clothes—and with each rebuke, the skirts get shorter and the heels get higher. She refuses to pray five times a day and fails to learn to cook. Her mother-in-law scolds her to “Shhhhhh” and submit to besooz o besaaz, the Iranian code of wifely conduct meaning to “turn inwardly and accommodate.” Listless and ravenous for intellectual life, Forugh devours the books in her husband’s library and begins to write again. She invents an excuse to take the twenty-four hour train journey to Tehran where she meets an editor who calls her “not a poet, but a mere poetess,” a derogatory term with almost onomatopoeic qualities—you can practically hear him patting her on the head—and tells her to go home to her husband. She does, but not before a much more consequential encounter.
“I’d expected motherhood to temper my desire to write, but the less time I had to devote to it, the more the idea of writing consumed me.” The birth of a son fails to distinguish her ambitions, and she resumes her scandalous trips, unaccompanied, to Tehran. When she is nineteen years old, an Iranian literary journal publishes her controversial poem “Sin” and she catapults overnight from obscurity becoming exhibit A against the emancipation of women and symbolic of Iran’s cultural decay. “Woe to the daughters of Eve who spurn God’s will and take up their pens to write,” screams the press, reflecting the cultural belief that a woman has no business creating art, let alone art of such sensuality. “I sinned a sin full of pleasure,” her poem runs, “next to a shaking, stupefied form, / o, God, who knows what I did / In that dark and quiet seclusion.”
“Who did my days belong to?” she asks herself, after a query from a lover. She concludes that not only should her days now belong to her, but furthermore, “it’s shame, not sin, that’s unholy.” After reaching these momentous personal (and politically reckless) conclusions about the ownership of her body and her intellect, Forugh spends the remainder of her life fighting to secure them. Her lover commits a despicable betrayal, compounding the scandal caused by her poetry. Later, she will reflect, dryly, over the innocence of that nineteen-year-old girl who had thrown herself, “headlong into the future. . . thinking I might escape without consequences or regrets,” because the consequences of her “taking what I wanted from life” are, predictably, swift and brutal, and orchestrated with the collusion of her family.
During her darkest days, Forugh meets a woman in the surreal surroundings of a Tehran clinic lit by Parisian streetlamps, who had been forced to undergo a lobotomy while awake. The doctors had told the woman to keep singing during the procedure, and “when she stopped singing, they knew it was done.” This physical muting parallels Forugh’s cultural suppression. “Because I was a woman they wanted to silence the screams on my lips and stifle the breath in my lungs. But I couldn’t stay quiet. . . we too, have the right to breathe, to cry out, to sing.”
Divorced, ostracized, severed from her son, nevertheless she persists. “When I left my father and then my husband, I lost my name and I was no one. But there was freedom in this.” In 1955 she publishes The Captive, her first volume of verse, and over the following decade she publishes four more, “poems about the feeble threads of faith and justice, the law’s black kerchief, fountains of blood, my country’s youth cloaked in a funeral shroud.” She secures a powerful female ally, and in 1957 meets a documentary filmmaker, Darius Golshiri, who plays a consequential role in her development as a film editor. When news leaks out about their affair, once again she is seen as a whore. The press and the political elite, frustrated by her failure to stop writing while reluctantly awed by its quality, insinuate that it is Golshiri’s hand behind the pen.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s different strands of revolutionary forces, including communists, nationalists, and the Islamists—led by the fiery cleric Ayatollah Khomeini—threaten to destabilize the Shah, whose autocratic rule is propped up by the Americans and bankrolled by a conglomeration of foreign oil companies. SAVAK, the brutal secret police, begin a bloody crackdown. “Every death was telling some part of our story, which was Iran’s story.” The Shah’s oppression encompassed literary censorship and the rounding up and exile of clerics and mullahs. Golshiri warns Forugh to be careful of her allies, careful of her words—“If we say what we want, in the way we want, who do you think will be left to make art in this godforsaken country?” She fails to heed his advice. Although forewarned of a tragedy, I still found it appalling. Even though there were times I wished I could give its heroine a good shake and an earful—get a grip, woman, he’s a plonker!—I confess that by the end of Darznik’s lyrical novel I had fallen a little in love with Forugh.
No one wants to believe the garden is dying,
that the garden’s heart has swollen
under the sun,
that the garden’s mind is slowly
being drained of its memories of green.
(“I Feel Sorry for the Garden”)
Darznik’s allusions to nature, gardens, and corruption, rooted in those early pages of her personification of Iran, eventually spread and entwine Song of a Captive Bird, binding the life of Farrokhzad to that of her country, like a living allegory. Her mother’s joy had been her garden. The bearer would bring water to their house, with which Turan tended her “roses, nasturtium and honeysuckle,” and her “quince, pomegranate and pear,” and where, in the honeyed dusks, the Colonial entertained his guests over samovar and sweets on carpets spread under the loggia. But when Reza Shah was deposed in 1941, the rush to modernity was accelerated by his successor, Muhammad Reza Shah. “The whole country is diseased, contracted over decades of imperialism,” Forugh overhears one man say at a party, “And it’s called Westoxification.” The old values, as espoused in Omar Khayyam’s Rubiayat, of scorning wealth in favor of the simple pleasures of bread, grape, and discourses on love, are perceived as uncomfortably anti-capitalist:
I need a jug of a wine, and a book of poetry,
Half a loaf for a bite to eat,
Then you and I, seated in a desert spot,
Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm.
Colonel Farrokhzad’s first act after the new Shah’s ascendancy is to destroy Turan’s garden. After bulldozing, it’s replaced by a car park rimmed with plastic plants, both byproducts, ironically, of the cancerous oil. “We couldn’t yet imagine what we had lost would be lost again and again.” In 1958, Forugh accompanies Golshiri to the Iran border to make a documentary about a refinery fire. “Every conversation, no matter the subject, circles back to oil,” she says, of her country, and “BP built everything here. All those shanties, but also the country club and the tennis courts. The Iranians weren’t allowed over there, not even to use the drinking fountains.” It took over ninety days for the refinery fire to be contained after the intervention of a Texas engineer. The foreign companies had contrived to ensure that none of the local Iranians would gain either the expertise or the authority to exploit and manage their own resources. In the non-fiction classic, Shah of Shahs, Ryszard Kapuscinski coined the term “petro-bourgeoise,” to describe the new social strata created by Iran’s most valuable asset. “Oil is a resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts,” he wrote. It was “a fairy tale and like every fairy tail, a bit of a lie.” While making documentaries during the last years before her death, Forugh witnessed her country’s struggle to shake off the greedy shackles of stubborn colonialism. “The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafes. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plastic swans. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had traffic jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers [but] still our oil wasn’t our own, our country wasn’t our own.”
The novel’s gender politics and social theory converge in the black gold: “Mine was a country where they said a woman’s nature is riddled with sin, where they claimed that women’s voices had the power to drive men to lust and distract them from matters of heaven and earth.” Women, like oil, it was presumed, have the power to corrupt. But in the end, as Kapuscinski argued, it was the Shah’s staggering corruption, bolstered and milked by the petro-bourgeoisie, which forced the Iranian people in 1979 to choose between SAVAK and the mullahs.
For many women life, regardless if whether they lived in the cities or the countryside, was a choice between a rock and a hard place, between one form of patriarchy or another. The Shah’s modernity was cosmetic; it didn’t look beyond loose hair and lipstick to gender equality or democracy, and this was exactly the approach preferred by the British and American empires. Growing up, Forugh never addressed her father by anything other than Colonel or ghorban, “you to whom I sacrifice myself,” and after she died, ownership of her body returned to him.
Courted, invaded, oppressed, silenced, and plundered—I could be describing either Forugh or Iran—nevertheless during Forugh’s short flight between cradle and grave she refused to play the victim, she took what she wanted and transformed gender relations through her poetry by swapping the pronoun ‘she’ with ‘I’. Under the traditional mores of Persian literature the woman’s role was always that of the object, never the subject; a woman could incite desire, but never before had she been portrayed as expressing it.
While on the subject of pronouns, Darznik’s decision to narrate Song of a Captive Bird in first person rather than third raised particular craft challenges. Although the first person narration provided intimacy, Darznik couldn’t resist the siren’s call of the epilogue therefore Forugh ‘tells’ her story from beyond the grave. (Prologues and epilogues—like impulse buys—are often a mistake.) When a writer decides her protagonist will narrate an ambitious political novel, she must find a way to impart enough information about the setting. Some readers in the United States may be unfamiliar with the questionable roles Germany, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have played in Iran’s turbulent history—which is unfortunate given its continuing importance in our present foreign policy and its influence on the wider Middle East—but, overall, Darznik navigates this precarious path with considerable skill. Only now and then do Forugh’s deviations into wider events seem out of character or expository.
Darznik’s Forugh is sensual and deeply engaging, yet sometimes the writing feels more tentative than in her earlier memoir, the pacing a little too careful, as though Darznik’s admiration for her subject made her wary of trusting her instincts and allowing herself full fictive reign. We learn what the character Forugh thought about the oppression of women, about desire, about love, but she gives little away about her wider geopolitical or spiritual beliefs, though it can be found in Farrokhzad’s poetry. With sensitivity toward Farrokhzad’s surviving family, Darznik chose not to include certain events within the novel, and changed the name of a key player. Earlier this year, the filmmaker Ebrahim Golsetan, who is the inspiration behind Darius Golshiri, gave an interview to The Guardian (February 12, 2017), in which he admitted to his relationship with Farrokhzad after decades of silence out of respect for his late wife. Golestan denied he had any impact on Farrokhzad’s art. “She was influenced by her own efforts,” he said. “I never saw her in a state of not being productive . . . I rue all the years she isn’t here.”
Let me, at this late stage, confess—sheepishly—that I’d never heard of Farrokhzad prior to reading Song of a Captive Bird, and I’m so grateful that Darznik introduced me to this enigmatic artist. Several clips from Farrokhzad’s documentaries are available on the Internet, including The House is Black, her celebrated short film about an Iranian leprosy colony. Narrations on these clips allow us to hear her beautiful speaking voice.
I plant my hand in the garden soil—
I will sprout,
I know, I know, I know.
And in the hollows of my ink-stained palms
Swallows will make their nest.
(“Reborn”)
Autocracies and theocracies the world over never seem to learn that the most effective way of turning a dead literary irritant into a martyr is to ban her books. Art can survive, as Forugh contends, “far worse fates than fire.” In the decade following the 1979 Islamic revolution, Farrokhzad’s poetry was prohibited in Iran, the Ayatollah failing to heed wisdom attributed to Omar Khayyam:
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on
nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
One might be tempted to feel sorry for all those men—all those daft, deluded, frightened sods—for their failure to make this woman shush, turn inwardly and accommodate. But I don’t. It seems so timely that in our present overdue reckoning with the patriarchy, Forugh Farrokhzad—through Darznik’s remarkable first novel—rises again like an exquisite phoenix weeping healing tears.
