Familiar and Foreign

Manijeh Mannani, Veronica Thompson, Manijeh Mannani, Veronica Thompson

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781927356883
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary

The current political climate of confrontation between Islamist regimes and Western governments has resulted in the proliferation of essentialist perceptions of Iran and Iranians in the West. Such perceptions do not reflect the complex evolution of Iranian identity that occurred in the years following the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and the anti-imperialist Islamic Revolution of 1979. Despite the Iranian government's determined pursuance of anti-Western policies and strict conformity to religious principles, the film and literature of Iran reflect the clash between a nostalgic pride in Persian tradition and an apparent infatuation with a more Eurocentric modernity. In Familiar and Foreign, Mannani and Thompson set out to explore the tensions surrounding the ongoing formulation of Iranian identity by bringing together essays on poetry, novels, memoir, and films. These include both canonical and less widely theorized texts, as well as works of literature written in English by authors living in diaspora.Challenging neocolonialist stereotypes, these critical excursions into Iranian literature and film reveal the limitations of collective identity as it has been configured within and outside of Iran. Through the examination of works by, among others, the iconic female poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the expatriate author Goli Taraqqi, the controversial memoirist Azar Nafisi, and the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, this volume engages with the complex and contested discourses of religion, patriarchy, and politics that are the contemporary product of Iran's long and revolutionary history.

CHAPTER ONE

The Development of the Artistic Female Self in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad

Safaneh Mohaghegh Neyshabouri

Between the views of those critics who value the literary merit of Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry and those who consider it mere erotic verse, there is a significant interface: they all agree that her poetry drastically changed the path of self-expression in Iranian women’s literature. Farrokhzad daringly expressed herself on taboo topics, and the rebellious quality of her work undermines the patriarchal rules of Iranian culture. She presented her intimate experiences, and by doing so created the image of a lonely genius in a patriarchal world too indifferent to a woman’s sufferings. To some readers, she has become an accessible idol whose personal experiences of nervous breakdowns and divorce, along with her tragic sudden death in 1967 at the age of only thirty-two, define the value of her poetry. As American critic Jasmin Darznik writes: “During her own lifetime, critics tended to conflate Farrokhzad’s poetry with the poetic persona of her verses, and when Forugh Farrokhzad is remembered today, it is still most often as a confessional poet, one who drew directly from her life to her art or, more pointedly, from her sex life to her erotic verses” (104).

The similarities between Farrokhzad and the persona she created have made her life story a point of reference in interpreting her work. The same can be said of the importance of Farrokhzad’s life story in the feminist movement of Iran. Her struggle both in life and in art to balance socially accepted roles for women with their personal aspirations and inner desires has made her the symbol of resistance to patriarchal power. While I concede that her life experiences made her the epitome of the progressive Iranian woman at the turn of the twenty-first century, I believe that she moved beyond this struggle into a realm of universal human experience. In trying to express her femininity, Farrokhzad found, defined, and constantly redefined her artistic self. The incorporation of personal experiences into art demonstrates this struggle in the lives of progressive women artists of her generation and places Farrokhzad among the poets of the confessional school.

The term “confessional poetry” was first used by critic M. L. Rosenthal, in a review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies published in 1959 (154). The broad acceptance of the term resulted in some critics giving more weight to the candour of the poems than to their artistic qualities. Robert Phillips insists that “a true confessional poet places few barriers, if any, between his self and direct expression of that self, however painful that expression may prove,” arguing that confessional poetry “dispenses with a symbol or formula for an emotion and gives the naked emotion direct, personally rather than impersonally” (8). He suggests that the more directly the poet exposes her inner feelings and desires, the greater the artistic value of her work. However, Bruce Bawer expresses a completely contrasting view, writing that “the best of confessional poetry is marked by balance, control, a sense of form and rhythm, and even a degree of detachment” (8). Bawer’s position is that confessional poetry should be more than simply an emotional outpouring that reflects the poet’s personal life and experiences. Nonetheless, as the poetry of the personal “I,” confessional poetry often reveals private experiences and feelings about a great range of issues, including death, depression, and love. The “I” of Farrokhzad’s poetry invites the reader to bear witness to the sufferings of the persona and to join her as she goes through distressing experiences. Through the use of personal material, she ventures into areas of female consciousness and feeling that had rarely been touched on by other forms of Persian poetry produced by women. To make her voice heard, Farrokhzad needed to break through the limitations and challenge societal expectations of her as a woman and as an artist.

In the course of discussing the poetry of another female confessional poet, Sylvia Plath, with whom Farrokhzad has been compared many times, Sandra Gilbert also explores the work of Charlotte Brontë, referring to her novel Jane Eyre as a Bildungsroman. She states that Brontë “couldn’t write the serious, straightforward, neo-Miltonic account of the ‘growth of the poet’s mind’ that Wordsworth produced.” Primarily for psychosocial reasons, “[w]omen as a rule, even sophisticated women writers, haven’t until quite recently been brought to think of themselves as conscious subjects in the world. Deprived of education, votes, jobs, and property rights, they have also, even more significantly, been deprived of their own selfhood” (“A Fine, White Flying Myth” 249). In an earlier study of confessional poets, Gilbert aptly observes the difference between male and female confessional poetry:

The male confessional poet—Lowell, Berryman, Yeats—writes in the certainty that he is the inheritor of major traditions, the grandson of history, whose very anxieties, as Harold Bloom has noted, are defined by the ambiguities of the past that has shaped him as it shaped his fathers. The female poet, however, even when she is not consciously confessional like Plath or Saxton, writes in the hope of discovering or defining a self, a certainty, a tradition. (“My Name Is Darkness” 448)

Gilbert does not use the term Bildungsroman for the work of the female confessional poets but states that “[c]onsidering and discarding different metaphors, different propositions of identity,” the female confessional poet “seem[s] to be straining to formulate an ontology of selfhood, some irreducible and essential truth about her own nature” (448). However, Farzaneh Milani considers “[t]he whole canon of Farrokhzad’s poetry . . . as a kind of Bildungsroman.” Milani believes that the term “best embodies Farrokhzad’s emergence from cultural conditioning and her struggle to come to self-realization, warranting its adaptation to her journey and to her awakening” (136). Although Bildungsroman is a genre of novel and has most often been associated with the development of a male protagonist’s mind and character, the concept—or rather its subtype, Künstlerroman—can be used to study the development of the persona in the poetry of Farrokhzad. In what follows, I trace the formation of the female self in samples of Farrokhzad’s poetry. I begin by introducing the forces that shape the selfhood of the artistic female self; this is followed by a discussion of whether and how the persona goes through rebirth and recreation of her artistic self.

Autocratic political systems and cultural obstacles have prevented the freedom of expression in different periods of Iranian history and have resulted in the formation of a complex system of metaphors and layers of meaning in Persian poetry. A cursory look at the history of Persian literature reveals how poetry has helped many in expressing their most radical criticism of cultural, social, religious, and political matters without facing any serious consequences. However, this situation has been the privilege of male poets, and the female experience has been glaringly absent from Persian poetry. In the mid-twentieth century, with certain cultural developments and the creation of more opportunities for women to participate in society, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Familiar and Foreign: An Introduction / Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson
• 1. The Development of the Artistic Female Self in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad / Safaneh Mohaghegh Neyshabouri
• 2. Overcoming Gender: The Impact of the Persian Language on Iranian Women’s Confessional Literature / Farideh Dayanim Goldin
• 3. Autobiomythography and Self-Aggrandizement in Iranian Diasporic Life-Writing: Fatemeh Keshavarz and Azar Nafisi / Manijeh Mannani
• 4. Graphic Memories: Dialogues with Self and Other in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Persepolis 2 / Mostafa Abedinifard
• 5. Mr. and Mrs. F and the Woman: Personal Identities in Zoya Pirzad’s Like All the Afternoons / Madeleine Voegeli
• 6. Anxious Men: Sexuality and Systems of Disavowal in Contemporary Iranian Literature / Blake Atwood
• 7. Reading the Exile’s Body: Deafness and Diaspora in Kader Abdolah’s My Father’s Notebook / Babak Elahi
• 8. Persian Literature of Exile in France: Goli Taraqqi’s Short Stories / Laetitia Nanquette
• 9. Farang Represented: The Construction of Self-Space in Goli Taraqqi’s Fiction / Goulia Ghardashkhani
• 10. Film as Alternative History: The Aesthetics of Bahram Beizai / Khatereh Sheibani
• 11. Technologies of Memory, Identity, and Oblivion in Persepolis (2007) and Waltz with Bashir (2008) / William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson
• Contributors