After You
To age seven:
you, that stark decisive moment
after you what came to pass passed in a blind mad mess
after you the window that was a bright gasping link
between us and the birds
between us and the breeze
shattered
shattered
shattered
after you that terracotta figurine
that never spoke except to ask for water, water, water
drowned in the water
after you we killed the cicada’s song
and fell in love with the school bell’s blare over our abcs
and with the whistling of weapons factories
after you, when the space under the desk was ours to play in we
went from under the desk
to at the desk
and from at the desk
to around the desk
where we played a hand
and we lost, age seven, we lost all flush of you
after you we betrayed one another
after you we scrubbed all the memories clean from
the soft temples of the plaster walls lining the street
using scraps of lead and detonated drops of blood
after you we took to the streets
shouting
long live so-and-so
death to so-and-so
and in the chaos of the square we clapped when the buskers
who’d snuck into the city for a little sightseeing earned their small change
after you we who were killers, each of the other
made a case for love
and with our hearts
worryingin our pockets
argued for love’s share
after you we turned to face graveyards
and death, lay breathing under Grandmother’s chador
and death, was that muscular tree
on whose weary branches
the living on this side of the beginning
tied their prayer knots
and at whose fluorescent roots clawed
the dead on the other side of the end
and death sat resting on that holy shrine
when all of a sudden on all four sides four blue tulips
lit up
the wind is howling
age seven, the wind is howling
I rose and drank some water
and was reminded out of the blue — how scared
those freshly sown fields of yours were of the swarming locusts
what price must one pay
what price must
one pay to get this concrete box to grow bigger?
all that we had
to give up, we gave up
we set out without a lamp
and the moon, the moon, that kindly mare, was always there
in those childhood memories of a thatched roof
rising over freshly sown fields scared of the swarming locusts
what price must one pay?
— Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Mariam Rahmani
As war rages in Iran I’ve found myself entangled in the quiet task of translating Forugh Farrokhzad, one of the country’s best-known poets and filmmakers. Farrokhzad was active in the 1950s and ’60s, and died at 32 in a car crash, lost to the world at the height of her power. Her late work is considered her best.
Mid-century Iran was unstable. In 1953, a British and United States-backed coup d’état overthrew the new government led by prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, reversing Mosaddegh’s oil nationalization and reinstating the Pahlavi monarchy. In the next couple decades, grassroots feminist movements were increasingly co-opted by the state to shore up the reputation of the new regime, with the shah’s sister Ashraf Pahlavi becoming a spokesperson for women’s rights on the international stage. The last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, made dramatic reforms in the early 1960s; known as the White Revolution, these included women’s enfranchisement alongside land redistribution. The reforms were contentious to say the least, and in June 1963 mass protests broke out in Tehran and other cities. They were suppressed by a military crackdown and dissidents were tortured, imprisoned, or exiled.
Scholars and translators willfully ignored her critique of the state.
Written in the years just before her untimely death in 1967 and named after the long poem widely regarded as her magnum opus, Farrokhzad’s collection Let Us Believe in the Coming of the Cold Season was published seven years later, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was still in power. The posthumous collection is hard-hitting in tone, and its language is straightforward. It shows Farrokhzad working against the baroque conventions of Farsi poetry that were slow to crumble even decades into blank and free verse.
The poem I’ve been tinkering with, “After You,” contains stanzas that were originally censored in its 1974 publication, rendered here in my translation:
after you we betrayed one another
after you we scrubbed all the memories clean from
the soft temples of the plaster walls lining the street
using scraps of lead and detonated drops of bloodafter you we took to the streets
shouting
long live so-and-so
death to so-and-soand in the chaos of the square we clapped when the buskers
who’d snuck into the city for a little sightseeing earned their small change
Today this image of protest still holds a pulse, a picture of sanitizing history that was itself bound for sanitization. Then, the shah reigned over Iran. Now, there is a different regime to march against, and when it comes to spilling the people’s blood, foreign bombs are dealing death alongside the state.
Farrokhzad is hardly remembered for this kind of capital-P politics. Instead the feminist poet has largely been limited to her sexual and gender politics, with scholars and translators willfully ignoring her critique of the state in her late work. Farrokhzad expert Farzaneh Milani depicts the poet as apolitical, writing in a 2016 Farsi biography that I’ve translated for Liveright (forthcoming) that “while Farrokhzad never succumbed to the pressure of this or that political party or authority — unwilling to be put under the spell of any particular ideology or leanings, to be shackled by any faction or sect — she consistently fought to dismantle the very foundations of inequality” by pushing for gender and sexual equality (my translation throughout, unless otherwise noted). By this account, only the personal was political for Farrokhzad: The poet, Milani goes on, “did not view the ruling elite as the exclusive perpetrators of injustice and domination, but instead saw the mark of power on the domestic realm and in everyday life.” In introducing her buzzy translation of selected poems from Farrokhzad, published in 2022 by New Directions — Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, which I reviewed for this magazine — Elizabeth Gray outlines the political upheaval of the Iranian ’50s and ’60s yet slides over the the politics in Farrokhzad’s poetry, noting only that critics of Farrokhzad’s 1963 film The House Is Black “felt the film spoke, obliquely, to the political environment in the country.”
Writing frankly about sex was certainly among Farrokhzad’s contributions, starting with the splashy and controversial publication of her 1954 poem “Sin:” published in Rowshanfekr, “Sin” was an autobiographical poem about Farrokhzad’s affair with Nasser Khodayar, the magazine’s editor-in-chief. As the country polarized into pro- and anti-monarchists, Farrokhzad’s early work contextualized sexuality within a larger gender and class critique. Discussions of pleasure and the body arrive in the same breath as acid commentary on bourgeois femininity, domesticity, and consumerism, betraying an elegiac tone. Sexual politics are politics — but for Farrokhzad, they didn’t stop there. Tracing the development of her oeuvre shows that by the end of her life Farrokhzad was critical of the state and even explicitly anti-shah.
A garden stands for an ailing, polarized, and increasingly militarized nation.
Openly political imagery surfaces in Farrokhzad’s third collection, Another Birth (1964), widely considered the one in which her work realized its full potential. In “Rose,” for example, the narrator likens a pregnancy to a red rose, “red / like a flag / in an uprising,” per Gray’s translation. (According to Milani, Farrokhzad became pregnant around this time and had an abortion.) In the political climate of the time, any “uprising” or “resurrection” (rastakhiz) would be understood to be anti-shah. Between 1964 and her death in 1967, Farrokhzad wrote five poems characterized by translator Sholeh Wolpé as “more political than her previous poems, scrutinizing the social injustice under the Shah’s rule, the modern Tehran with its increasingly mechanized way of life, and the hopelessness of those struggling to make a living.” Wolpé does not specify which poems she means, but I assume that both “After You” and “My Heart Goes Out to the Garden” make the cut.
In the latter, a courtyard garden stands for an ailing, polarized, and increasingly militarized nation. In the poem’s final stanzas, sounds of “bombs exploding” reverberate through the walls “all day long,” while “instead of flowers our neighbors are all / planting mortars and machine guns.” Courtyard fountains are being used for “secret stockpiles of gunpowder / against their will,” and “the neighborhood kids have packed their schoolbags / full of / small bombs.” Milani reads the poem as spreading the responsibility for unrest across the many people, top and bottom, who form the family of the nation. Farrokhzad “presciently foresees the overthrow of the government in a bloody revolution,” Milani writes in my translation, “yet refrains from pointing fingers at the government or lawmakers.” But power is not distributed evenly in the world of the poem. Line order matters. Violence moves from the outside in — starting in the public space of the street then literally and figuratively echoed in the domestic space of the courtyard — and down the power gradient, from the most to least powerful, and militarizing the adults before the children. The image of schoolbags packed with bombs is devastating because children lack agency, while the fountains similarly have been weaponized without their consent, made to store deadly gunpowder rather than life-giving water.
The militarization of urban space that has accompanied this new war — including checkpoints put up around Tehran — will persist beyond any ceasefire. In the wake of the mass protests that shook the nation in January, the bombing of civilian infrastructure will only serve to keep the current regime in power and the people down. Restoring Farrokhzad to her proper place as a political actor and thinker on all levels — social, sexual, and governmental – is not a matter of literary quibbling. Late in life she bonded feminism to organized politics. Today more than ever, we must remember that bond.
Mariam Rahmani is the author of the novel Liquid and a translator from Farsi.
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