 Good evening. I feel honored to be here. The inaugural talks of a man I dearly love, Esany Orshater, who really has done more for Iranian studies in this country and in my country of birth, Iran, that can be enumerated here. So happy that Soaz is doing that and the Middle East Institute together, they're doing that. I want to thank Professor Spell for a very kind and generous introduction. And of course I want to thank you all for gracing and honoring me with your presence. Thank you for being here. I have been fascinated by Foulou Farousal for a number of decades. I will later on talk to you about my original introduction to her, which was actually not through her poetry, it was through her film. But originally I wanted to write my dissertation on her biography. That was in 1977, that's when I became ABD at UCLA and the subject of my dissertation was going to be the biography of Foulou Farousal. Well, I went to Iran a couple of times, tried to interview different people, family members, writers, lovers, sons. She has a biological son and an adoptive son. And it wasn't a very successful enterprise. So I switched from biography of Foulou Farousal to literary criticism, which in a way was really a form of autobiography in disguise. I loved her poetry and as an immigrant I was in the US at the time. I really identified with her poetry as an outsider. As someone who didn't feel she belonged. So that was my dissertation. It was called Foulou Farousal, A Feminist Perspective. But over the years, my perspective on her life, on her poetry has changed substantially. That's the beauty of someone who is a fantastic poet. She changes and she grows with you. But I want to start with a word of caution. In my country of birth, for thousands of years, millions of storytellers have started their tales with this enigmatic, short, but profound sentence. Yekiboud, Yekinapoud. There was one and there wasn't one. It is so and it is not so. Now you see it, now you don't. Enigmatic sentence, at the threshold of every story, when the created becomes the creator, has several functions. If it has lasted for thousands of years, it must have several important messages included in it. The way I see it, one among many, is that life is full of inconsistencies, that there are always ambiguities in life, that there is always another story, that there is always another side to the story. And also, for me, makes it very clear that life simply refuses to be told. I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who said, you either live a life or you write about it. And I think there is great wisdom in that. So I am studying my account of this biography of Furore Farroussot that I have just completed with Yekiboud, Yekinapoud, as a word of caution. This is my Furore Farroussot. This is the way I understand her life, which has been full of adventures and misadventures. And this is my reading of her multifaceted, complex, beautiful poetry. Furthermore, Furore Farroussot was a difficult woman to be boxed in. She was growing by leaps and bounds. You know that she passed away at the tender age of 32 in a car accident. And prior to that, she had attempted suicide a few times. So still, in such a short period of time, she has managed to become, I think, an icon in spite of the fact that soon after the revolution, she was banned in Iran. And she was banned for a while. And even today, none of her collections of poetry are published in their totality. There are some poems that are excised. There are some lines that are deleted. There are some words that do not appear. So what we get inside the country is not the collection that we did prior to the revolution. It's a mutilated form of her work. For this biography, I have learned a great deal from the work of previous scholars in the field, both inside and outside the country. I think it's fair to say that Furuk Faroqzad is one of the most talked about Iranian women. If you Google scholar her, which I haven't done recently, but I did it about a year ago, there are more references to Furuk Faroqzad than Mohamed Reza Shah-e-Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who ruled Iran for 37 years. So this lack of information about her is also a question that hopefully we will be able to engage each other and see why. Why do we have such dirt of information still on the life of this woman? Now for the interview, I really have done my absolute best to be as objective as I can, to not be voyeuristic. I did not want to steal a glance. And I don't know if some of you have been involved with the hoopla now in the social media about one of the unpublished letters that I have published now online. And there is a lot of commotion on both sides of the argument. Why publish a private letter of a person like Furuk Faroqzad to one of the men she loved for the last eight years of her life, Mr. Ebrahim Megwal Esdan, and some who argue beautifully and vehemently that it's because it's a document. It's a historical document. And now Furuk belongs to Iran, belongs to the people who like her poetry inside and outside the country. And any piece of information that will shed light on her life, we should make it public. So the 70 people that I have interviewed, family members, adoptives, son, biological son, lovers, neighbors, and many of our foremost writers, cinematographers and artists, Furuk also painted. Some of her closest friends were painters. Has been very helpful to me. I have tried to present their perspective, even if it disagreed with mine. And I've tried to make both very clear that this person said that, but I don't believe that at least in my reading of this poem or of her life, this is what happened. Now Faroqzad was, as many of you know, a risky, she believed in risky ideals. She believed in bold dreams. I often think a dissertation needs to be written one of these days, comparing, in fact, one of her poems to that famous line by Martin Luther King, I had a dream. Because Faroqzad too could have a dream with her eyes wide open. In her 13 year literary career, because from the day she started publishing to the day she passed away in a car accident, was only 13 years. And in those 13 years, she has published five poetry collections. She has written seven short stories. She has written a travel narrative that in many ways, although not a literary masterpiece, but is pioneering, has written an anthology of Persian poetry and has translated with the help of her brother Masoud, collection of poetry from German into Persian. If there is one conclusion that I have reached after these years of being a student of Faroqzad, is that she has suffered a lot more than we know. She had a very complicated life and there is a lot of missing pieces of the puzzle of her life. So I'm hoping with the help of audiences like you, with the help of readers of the text of the biography, we will have a clearer image of Faroqzad's life. That definitive biography really needs to be written yet. So I said Faroqzad suffered a lot more than we know. So I want to read to you a section of the book in the translation. You would have to forgive me. It's not as polished as it should be because I've done it in haste, but it will give you the gist of what is in the book. It's actually in the beginning of the book. Okay, so this is a section from this book. The beautiful and young girl of Khadim Azad Street. She lived on Khiaban-e-Khadim Azad, that's where she lived, was brought to the house of Dr. Tajul-Muluk-e-Meshgat and Dr. Hassan-e-Khayyam, the street in the heart of Tehran, a street intoxicated with the scent of acacia and honey suckles, a long and narrow street on Molavi Avenue, Meydane Gombroke Square, a street that was to be memorialized in the poetry of a prominent woman. The most important memory of Masoud-e-Khayyam, the child of the physician couple living on Khadim Azad Street, belongs to the night that his house, the house of the little boy, suddenly fell into utter chaos. A patient was brought in. It was quite clear that the situation was especially dismal. There was complete havoc. The little boy craned his neck. He wanted to know what was going on, but no one was paying any attention to him. The little boy clunked to his mother's skirt. Mom, what's going on? Nothing, son. Just run along. Mom, what's going on, please? Furukh is not feeling well. She's sick. There was a lot of commotion, tells us, the young boy. Everyone was saying something. One person was swearing at her. One person was praying for her. Another was crying. The doctors were busy attending to her. They seemed to be in full control. The little boy had never seen his parents so serious and so important in his life. One of the neighbors whispered in the hallway, poor girl. She had attempted suicide before. The so-called poor girl who even at the threshold of death was cursed by some while others prayed and cried for her, which I should add, parenthetically, continues to be so 60, 70 years later. It's the most polarized response to a poet that I can think of in Iran. Indeed, she had attempted suicide on a previous occasion. And she had swallowed a bottle full of her mother's sleeping pills. So years later, when the young boy, Masouda Khayyam, begged her mother to learn about the reason why that little girl had attempted suicide. That young girl had attempted suicide. The mother, who had been very loyal and had not betrayed the secret of her patient, finally said after the death of Farooq for many years. She said, the day that she slit her wrist, I stitched and bandaged her and talked to her for a long while. She listened to everything I said. At the end, she sighed and she said, but you don't know everything. More than 70 years later, we, her avid readers, still don't know why the young Farooq slit her wrist. We still don't know why she swallowed a bottle full of sleeping pills prior to slitting her wrist. I want to assure you, I have no morbid curiosity for the attempted suicide of a poet I love, of a woman I admire. I just want to know what happened? Why did this young woman attempted suicide, at least twice, as a young person? There are other questions that are left unanswered to this day. A few years ago, a collection of Farooq's letters was published. It's called Avalin Tapeş Hoya Galbe Oşıgıman. The first, what, palpitation is for sick people. Pulsation, yes, the first pulsation of my heart that is in love. The son, the biological son, had published the letter with the help of one of his friends. That publication has shed a lot of light on some of the questions I've had. It's been very helpful. And I want to tell you, I agonized over publishing the 30-some letters that I'm publishing in these letters. And especially after this book was published, and I realized how helpful it has been in clarifying some of the issues that I've been struggling with all my adult life, I decided that in order to better know the life of this iconic woman, we need to publish anything we have on her. So I just want to read a couple of quotations from that book and ask a question. So in one letter she says, this is before their marriage. It's a paviz, that's the name of her husband, paviz-a-shapur. I will never forget your nobility and chivalry. I know I was damaged goods. I know I didn't have what other girls had, and you overlooked it. I know I owe you a lot, but I never consider myself a sinner. I have a clear conscience. I have fulfilled my moral duty and come to you pure and healthy. I have never stepped beyond the bounds of modesty and purity. Still, you had the right to reject me, and you did not do that. You continued to love me, and you never blamed me. We should ask ourselves, why did Farrokh Zod at such a tender age consider herself damaged goods? What was it that other girls had to offer Mr. Paviz, and she couldn't? The older sister, Puran Farrokh Zod, in an interview soon after her sisters passed away, told in an interview, and I'm quoting verbatim, there is something about Farrokh Zod's life that I cannot discuss with you. What was that untold truth that still remains untold? In many of her poems, Farrokh Zod mourns the early death of her youth. She talks about the swift transformation of her childhood and adolescence into young adulthood. How was her innocent childhood carried away as she tells us one night with the wind? In another letter, in those collection of 55 letters, deeply and unfortunately censored, I should say, Farrokh Zod again, young woman writes, In this house, that's her parents' house. I have seen things that every time I think about them, I tremble from anger and revenge. Paviz, when I think about my childhood, when I think about how no one protected me, and I was nothing more than a naive and innocent child, I want to claw, I want to strangle everyone, undoubtedly, if my mother had protected me, this veil of secrecy and ambiguity that has been woven around me would have disappeared. And I would have known everything and calmed down a little bit. What was this veil of ambiguity? What was this dark secret? Why don't we still know about it 70 years later? Why in so many of her poetry, Farrokh hates her body, their repeated lines, praying to God, oh, how can I tell you, oh, God, that I despise my body? Every night I beg you for another body. How can we explain this? For now, in spite of all the articles and movies and books written about Farrokh Zad, I still think it is her poetry that is the best clue to what she's talking about. She demands of us, her readers, to pay closer attention to what she's telling us. So with your permission, I want to read one of her poems that has been basically neglected. It is not one of her most anthologized poems. And it's a long poem and I might not have the time to read the whole poem, although I think it's one of her most important poems. It's called Daryoft epiphany, insight, an insight that will change you forever. Light was veering itself out and fading in the lamp globe. Suddenly the window was filled with night, a night dreaming with vacant noises, a night poisoned with venomous panting. I listened. In the dark and terror-struck street, someone was trampling his heart like a decayed mass under his feet. In the dark, terror-struck street, a star exploded. I listened. My pulse was swollen from a burst of blood and my body, my body was tempted towards disintegration. This is the word she uses, disintegration of the body. I saw my own eyes in the ceiling, crooked lines, like a fat tarantula, shriveling in spittle, in yellowness, in helpless joking. Despite my struggling, I was sinking slowly to the bottom, like sludge, like stagnant water in a ditch. I listened. I listened to my whole life. A lonesome mouse in its burrow was singing an ugly futile song, a stubborn ludicrous squeaking, going round and round a fleeting moment gushing into oblivion. Ah, I was full of lust, lust for death. Both my breasts felt stabs of staggering pain. Ah, I remembered the day of my menses, when my whole body opened in an innocent wonder to merge with that which is vague, voiceless, strange. Night yawned in a quivering line in the lamp globe. So something is happening in this poem, light turned off, and at the end, light turns on. And something is happening to the poetic persona, to the woman inside this poem. Something so traumatic that she has to leave her body and watch herself like a fat tarantula on the ceiling. This poem is very powerful because it transforms a trauma into a beautiful aesthetic experience. So who was this woman who transformed trauma into art? Who was this woman who took a slice of dire living and gave us such beautiful poems, such aestheticized poetry? So let me talk a little bit about Farrokhzad's poetry life. Farrokhzad's full name is Furukh Zaman Farrokhzade Araki. In some documents, it's Furukh Zaman Farrokhzade Araki. And in a minute, I will tell you what it means. She was born on Saturday, December 29, 1934. She was born in the city of Tehran. But the occasion of her birth was not, although jubilant like the birth of any child, was marred by the fact that the father was in prison. Mr. Farrokhzad, who at the time was Raisi Amloki Sultanatida Noshar, the head of the Pahlavi royal properties in the city of Noshar, was in prison. And he didn't get to see his daughter for a few months till he was released. And remarkably, after he was released, he went back to Noshar and he started in his old position again. They had a beautiful house in Noshar next to the Caspian Sea on one side and the forest on the other side. And from what everybody tells me, from early childhood, Farrokhzad loved nature, loved being in the open and did so. Farrokhzad was stunningly beautiful as a child. This is the father, Mr. Farrokhzad, Muhammad Farrokhzad, and I'll come back to the mother in one minute. From all accounts, she was as a child. She loved running around. She didn't like rules. She wasn't necessarily the most obedient child. When she was seven, and there are several references in her poetry, the family returned to Tehran. But in those five years that they were in Noshar, Mr. and Mrs. Farrokhzad had four children in five years. Two sons, Amir Masoud and Feridun, and two daughters, Puran and Furuk. And then when they came to Iran, there were three other children, a daughter, Gloria, and two sons, Mehdad and Mehran. Now, Puran, the mother, Turan, the mother, was a fascinating woman in her own right. She had unveiled herself prior to the 1936 unveiling act in Iran. She played the tar very well. She went to the American school in Tehran. She was a very hard-working woman, as you can imagine. In the first five years of her life, she had four children, and apparently very clean, a stickler for order. And she loved dolls. You see, the way she's holding the dolls is really fascinating. Gloria, the younger daughter, told me that she loved her dolls so much that she had actually asked to be buried with four of her favorite dolls. And because in Islam, this is not allowed, this last request of her was also not granted. Turan was kind-hearted. Everybody tells me she had a proclivity for outspoken simplicity and candor. And that is very much like Furuk Faruqzat, her daughter. And most of her children are like that. Turan had a very complicated and sad life. She lost four of her seven children before her death. As Furuk had predicted in a letter to Feridun, she was the first one to die in the family. She passed away in a car accident, and she had written to Feridun in a letter years before her death, obviously, that I'm going to be the first Faruqzat to die, and you're going to be the second one. And in fact, it's exactly what happened. Faruqzat with Feridun was the next one, and my colleague Nima is translating some of his poetry, and hopefully it will get published soon, a poetry of Feridun Faruqzat, who also was a poet and a prize-winning poet in Germany, in fact, more than his poetry was recognized inside Iran. She witnessed the death of one of her grandchildren and the suicide of one of her daughter-in-laws. Towards the end of her life, she suffered from painful arthritis, and she had tongue cancer. A couple of operations on her tongue had had an impact on her declarity of her talks. Turan fell in love with Mohammad Faruqzat. They met at a relative's house, and although Turan's mother was vehemently opposed to the wedding, they did get married, and soon after marriage, they went to Nochar. Now, Mr. Faruqzat, who was an army man, Kolnirv in the army, was also a very complicated man, a fascinating man. When he was 14, he was going to be married off to his sister-in-law, the wife of his brother, because the brother had passed away, and the day that he was going to get married with very little cash, he left Tafresh, that's where he comes from, and walked to Tehran. For a while, he worked in a grocery store, and then he joined Reza Shah Pahladi at the time Reza Khan, and when Reza Khan became Reza Shah, he sent him off to Nochar to be in charge of his properties in Nochar. Mr. Faruqzat loved poetry, occasionally wrote poetry, but by all accounts, he was also a womanizer, and when Turan was pregnant with their seven child, he fell in love with another woman and actually married her, and brought her to Tehran to live in the house next to the house of Turan and her seven children. We have never heard about this second wife. Her name is Bahindur de Darahi. It took me years to find her, and I have interviewed her, and it is part of the book. It is in the book. She too has a fascinating story to tell. She came from Zanjan. Mr. Faruqzat was appointed to go to Zanjan, and that's where he met Bahindur de Darahi, who is a beauty, even when I met her as an older woman, and a highly educated woman. She had a PhD in literature and has written also one of the first books written by a woman about custodial rights in Iran. Before knowing this woman, I wasn't aware, and I've been studying Iranian women writers for 40 years, that actually prior to Faruqzat, someone else had written about motherhood and the unfairness of custodial rights in Iran. Puran Faruqzat, the eldest daughter, told me something that I will never forget. So the last sentence her dying mother told her was Puran. Your dad is here again. He's bothering me. Don't remember as yet. And apparently this was her last sentence, and we don't know much about her after that. We have been told that Faruq, I don't know if you have seen this wonderful picture of Faruq Faruqzat on her wedding day. She is the one who did almost everything. The couple were not very rich, and the wedding was only for a couple of hours, unlike the older sister who had married a few weeks a few months earlier. It was a big fanfare. This wedding was very short and just sweets and tea were served. There were no photographer. For years we didn't have this picture. We didn't have any picture of the wedding of the couple, although there is this other picture that was taken soon afterward. Faruq did fall in love with Parviz-e-Shapur. She loved him. And I think what we have heard about Parviz-e-Shapur, at least some of it, has not been very fair to him. Parviz-e-Shapur was a good man. They were different, but they had a genuine love. But Faruq was early 16, and I think one reason she married him, the love, I'm not saying anything, was because that's about the time that Mr. Faruqzad had brought the second wife to Tehran in the neighborhood. In many of the letters, some published in my book, some published in the book published by Kamyar-e-Shapur, she basically says, the house I'm living in is like hell, so there was this desire to leave it. And I think it's also interesting that the older sister did exactly the same thing. She too fell in love with the son of a neighbor and married very early. And her marriage also ended in a quick divorce. So Kamyar, their son, biological son, was born just about two years after the couple got married, and they moved to Ahvaz after their marriage. We have several letters and some, the letters to Faruqzad's father in the book that shows she was madly in love with her son, as most mothers are. She really wanted to be a very good mother to the biological son. But, and this is a wonderful picture, and this is Mr. Parviz-e-Shapur on the corner, and Pari Motazed, one of Faruqzad's close friends, who kindly gave me this picture. But soon something happened to the couple. Faruqzad started writing poetry, and we have often heard that the first poetry collection, Asir, captive, was published when Faruqzad was 17. Most of the poems in that collection are dated when she was 19 and 20. How could she have written a book, published in 17, when the dates on the poems are themselves from 19 and 20 when she was 19 and 20. So I really doubt there is a collection of Asir. I have the first print, and it was published in 1955 when Faruqzad was older, not 17 years old. But to tell you how she published her first poetry collection, which is this, in Majal-e-Roshan, in Roshan Fekir magazine. Feridun Moshiri, a lovely Iranian poet, a very kind-hearted man, was the editor-in-chief of the literary page. And some of you remember that old Iranian magazines had the literary page for poetry. And he said he was sitting in his office when a young woman came to the door. She was shaking. She was very shy. And she had three poems in her hands. She gave them to Mr. Moshiri, and she said, I would like to publish these poems. Moshiri read them and was shocked by the candor, by the iconoclasm, by the transgressive nature of these poems. She said I need to consult with the editor-in-chief and with my other colleagues. And he did. And Mr. Nasir-e-Khodayar, the editor-in-chief of the magazine of Roshan Fekir, and a few other people said, yes, let's go ahead and publish it. So Faruq had already published a short poem in another magazine. But her entrance in Iranian literary field was with the poem, Guna, Sin. So I'm going to read a few lines of this poem. And how much more time do I have? Five minutes to wrap up. Okay, sure. It's so fascinating. We don't want you to stop. The only good thing is you have three more evenings. Thank you. I will finish in five minutes. So I'm going to just read a few lines of the poem. Many people know the poem, Gunah Kerdam Gunohi Porzelizad. I won't have time to read all of it. It's simple, but it's a very courageous poem. And to me, it's not only courageous because of what she does with the issue of sexuality. It's fascinating because a woman in her 20s, in the 1950s, 52, this poem was published 52, 53, when everybody was pointing a finger at someone else and accusing someone else that you are the sinner. I didn't do it. Americans did it. This general did it. That general did it. This woman got up and said, I sinned. I voluptuously sinned. And throughout her life, and to me, this is one of the reasons I love Roura Farroza. She never accepted freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. And to me, that poem is a perfect example of that. Yes, it's the first time that a woman is talking about her sexuality. Yes, it's the first time that a woman is saying, I did something that I wanted, and I also enjoyed it. Yes, she doesn't get punished. But still, what makes this poem unique for me, at least, is the courage of this woman to say, I'm the sinner and no one. The man in that poem is not held responsible. He's not the partner in crime. She's the one who is saying words of love in his ears. She is the one in a way who is almost inviting her to that love relationship. As you saw, the 12-line poem was accompanied by a description, a biographical sketch of Roura Farroza. The focus was on the fact that this is a married woman with a child. And obviously, this is an adulterous relationship that she's talking about, except that Persian literature is full of adulterous women. So what is so different about this poem is that one is written by a woman with her name, with two photographs instead of two, instead of one. And she's accepting, and she's not repenting. She's not repenting. She's saying, I did it. And at the end of the poem, she doesn't get punished. You know, like Anna Cararine, she's not thrown under the truck and under the train. She doesn't conveniently die of one thing or another. She doesn't attempt suicide. She survived, and she writes the poem to be published. So I have a few minutes left, and let me see what... So I'm going to say just this one end here, and if it's okay with you, tomorrow I will start with the rest and continue with the conversation about some of the themes in her poetry and Furukh in a global context. So the relationship, just two minutes, please. The relationship went sour for a variety of reasons. A year after the publication of Sin, The Poem, Furukh Farah Saad published Captive as Seer, the first poetry collection. It had an introduction by Shojo Eddine Shafa. And significantly, the poem for which she had become famous, and to this day, some people still call her Furukh Shah-Eregunah, the poet of Sin, was excised, didn't appear in the collection. I've interviewed Mr. Shojo Eddine Shafa, and I was always curious. I said, how come you wrote the introduction to that book? So, very interesting. I would tell you something about the intellectual atmosphere of the time in Iran for women. Mr. Shafa told me that the publisher had said, we will publish this collection if a known man, a respected man, writes an introduction to the collection. So one day Furukh took her poetry, her notebook with all the poems, and in the early youth, she always wrote with green ink. She took it, she went to Mr. Shafa's door, knocked on the door, and introduced herself and said, here's another poetry collection, my poetry collection, would you write an introduction to it? And of course, Mr. Shafa did, and I have to say it's a good introduction. It tells a lot about the intellectual milieu of Furukh Farozat at the time. So with your permission, I will stop here and I will continue with the rest tomorrow.