 So, once again, I want to thank you for being here. The honest truth is that you really honor me. Thank you. I know it's Friday night. I know there are lots of other options in London and lots of other talks about Iran on this very night, so I can't express my gratitude enough. Thank you for being here. With your permission, what I'll do, I'll just take a couple of minutes for those who were not here last night to wrap up what we talked about last night. And then I stopped like my great-grandmother, Shahir Zad, at a very important moment, and I will then pick up at that very moment and go on, although I have to say I wish I had the talent of Shahir Zad. So we talked about the life of Fouroh Farrokh Zad a little bit. I think perhaps the new revelation, at least for me, as someone who has worked on Fouroh Farrokh Zad, I submitted my dissertation at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1979, and it was on Fouroh Farrokh Zad. In 1977, I was ABD, which meant I was done with my coursework, and I started going to Iran to interview. So this has been a long process for me. It is not the only project I have worked on, of course, so it has been often on working on Fouroh Farrokh Zad. But she has been my companion. I have often said that after I left Iran, Persian poetry, but in particular, Fouroh Farrokh Zad's poetry, became my evergreen garden. Its doors were always open to me, and I always found shelter and refuge in that exquisite garden of hers. I believe Fouroh Farrokh Zad has desegregated the pantheon of Persian poetry. It's hard to talk about Iran, the glorious tradition of Iranian poetry, and to only name Hafiz, Firdossi, Saadi, and a few others, and not to mention Fouroh Farrokh Zad. Khanume Zandian, a fantastic writer in her own right, called me just a day before I left for London, and she was talking about the book and something she told me that I didn't know. She said, you know, there are bookstores, lots of bookstores in Tehran Jelez in Los Angeles, and the owner of the biggest bookstore had told her that to this day, there are two categories of books we sell the most, Hafiz's poetry, the poetry of Hafiz, and the poetry of Fouroh Farrokh Zad. Now, this is not a scientific sample, obviously, but we know from the reprints of her books inside the country that Fouroh Farrokh Zad has become an industry, meaning the number of books, articles, films, voice recording, meat on her has turned her into definitely one of the most talked about Iranian women, not only in literature, but in our culture, in our history, I may dare say. So the other major thing I think that I said is that by the end of finishing my biography, I thought a lot about what is the most important revelation, and to put it simply, which is always a dangerous thing to do, is that I believe this poet suffered a lot more than we have been led to believe, that I believe she had a traumatic youth which had an impact on her for the rest of her life. We talked a little bit, and I read the whole poem, Daryoft, that I have translated as epiphany. A few of my colleagues have translated it as Inside, which is also a great poem. In case you have not read that poem, may I suggest that you please read it and read it carefully. It's in her collection, Tavalludi Digar, the fourth poetry collection. So we talked about her introduction to the Iranian literary scene, which was through her poem Sin. We talked a little bit about Sin. Again, we know everything that is amazing about that poem, but I said what I find fascinating in that poem is that Farouq, who was a warrior for freedom, never wanted freedom without responsibility. And that in our country is a very important thing, our experience with modernity, with the role of the individual, with the responsibility that comes with the right granted to an individual has not been quite recognized yet. And today I will go back and talk a little bit about this topic. So the three themes that will be the center of my conversation today with you will be the continuation of the fact that Farouq Farouq Sa'ad told the truth. She thought that was an obligation. And remember, for thousands of years, starting with Zar Dost, we've been told Gufdarenik. So telling the truth has been a problem, has been a concern in our culture. And Farouq, from early youth, from one of the first poems she wrote, she said, I will tell the truth, but she went further and I love that. She said, if telling the truth is my obligation, hearing the truth is my right. And imagine the significance of that, that you expect to hear the truth. And what will happen if you don't hear the truth? That's one. The second one is what we just discussed, that freedom is the right of a modern citizen, freedom of expression, freedom of all these various, to own her body, to own her sexuality, to choose her lover, to choose her husband, to choose to divorce all of these. But more importantly, that with that freedom comes a lot of responsibility. And the third one, which will be the focus of my talk mainly today, is the freedom of movement. And I will get to that after I finish the leftover from last night and only focus on freedom of movement, which will help us place Farouq Farouq Zad in a global context. Farouq is no longer only an Iranian poet. She has made it. She has been translated more than any other Iranian poet of the modern era. And there is a reason for it. She talks to people globally. She has an audience that is interested in what she has to say. So let me go back to where we stopped last night. We said that after the poem, Sin was published. There was, like always, anything associated with Farouq Farouq Zad has a lot of controversy attached to it. And we know why. There are always those who vehemently oppose her and those who passionately love her and support her. And it really represents the two Iran's, the paradox of Iran. Farouq Farouq Zad is a perfect metaphor for what has happened to our country in the last 100, 150 years. She is the distilled manifestation of that bipolar divided country. So there were lots of people who loved the poem. There were lots who were really angry. We talked about how just about a year later, Farouq published Asir, her first poetry collection. And the book was very successful. But very soon after that short lived success, Asir began to be published in that exact same magazine that had published Asir, the magazine Roshan Fikr. The editor in chief was Mr. Nasir Khudayar, a writer, a translator, a major figure in the 50s and 60s in Iran. As you see, if you might remember the pictures I showed you about the poem Sin, there is great resemblance between this woman and the picture that was right next to Farouq's poem. And this is a serial fiction. It's a, you know, pavaraqi that was very popular in the 60s and 50s in Iran. And it was about the love affair of a man with a woman who was a painter, not a poet, but who shared many of the characteristic features of Farouq Farouq. So some of the lines from the poem Sin are in fact in this short story, this serialized story. This is Farouq signing her book at an early age. This is before she had her nose surgery. Farouq did do a nose surgery. And here's another one, young Farouq. And then here's just a few months later. You see how emaciated she is. This is because Farouq was very upset about, at the time she was married woman with a child and she lived in a household that, Iranian to be fair at the time, who really concerned about the honor of their women. And here was a serialized fiction. But talking about the details of her extramarital relationship, Farouq had a nervous breakdown. She sent Faridun Farouq who told me himself that he went to Nasir-e-Khodayar and a close friend of hers, Parvina Moazed, a lovely woman who has also helped me a great deal with this biography. Mr. Nasir-e-Khodayar sent him a message and he told me, I have also interviewed him, he told me, I sent Farouq a message. I said, I'm the one who took you up with the publication of sin and now I'm going to make sure to bring you down. So Farouq had a nervous breakdown. The father was very upset. She was kicked out of her parental house. The husband, as you can understand, was also upset. And Farouq was hospitalized in Reza'i mental hospital. We know she was given electric shock therapy. And at the time, electric shock therapy were given without the administration of anesthesia. Sylvia Plath, my dear friend, referred to Sylvia Plath in Beljar, has one of the most amazing descriptions of electric shock therapy in that early phase of it that was, as I said, was administered without anesthesia. And recently, more than a decade ago, maybe, Shiba Arastui, in a wonderful book called Afyun, has another reference to the shock, the agony, the pain of electric shock therapy. So Farouq was there when she came out. The rumor around her was unbearable. She divorced her husband and we know that eventually she would lose the custody of her one and only biological child. And I will talk about the details of that in the last talk when I talk about how Farouq revived the very definition of family in Iran. To help herself and to get away from it all, to regain her health, physical and mental, she decided to leave the country. And soon I will talk about the details of that trip with you. She was away for 14 months. At the beginning, she went to Italy. She had a very close friend, a wonderful painter, Behcete Sadr, who was also her teacher, a painting teacher in Europe. Behcete Sadr was a close friend of Farouq Zad and had an impact on her life. After about seven months, she went to Germany to be with her brother. The story of the days in Germany will talk about it later. But finally, 14 months, she decided that she just needed to be back in her own country. She went back to Iran. She drove back with a car from Germany to Iran. Well, she needed to be self-sufficient. She needed to earn a living. And you know that Farouq didn't even have her high school diploma. She had finished ninth grade of higher education, high school education. It wasn't that easy. And she started writing. That's the period when she started writing under a pseudonym. Her first pseudonym, which is fascinating, was the iconoclast. And we'll talk about that too. How ironic it is that the woman who, to the best of my knowledge, had only chosen two pseudonyms, the first one was iconoclast, and has herself turned into an icon. I mean, the most difficult task of a biographer of Farouq Zad, like me, since I'm talking today, was the right to demystify this myth. How do you talk about a myth? How do you humanize an icon? Anyway, so she started talking. She published her short stories. Farouq has published seven short stories. A couple of them with no name or only the editor-in-chiefs knew that they're theirs because they're very autobiographical and a few under her own name. But the money she made, and with the publication of her third poetry collection, Ribellion Ession, we know that in the land of the Rose and the Nightingale, in the country we love poetry. Our poets, at least in the modern period, cannot live with the income of their books and their pens. So she needed a job. She was introduced to Mr. Ebrahim Eghulistan with two of their mutual friends, and she was hired immediately to be a filing clerk and the receptionist. At the time, Farouq Zad had already published three poetry collections, Asir, Divar, Osya, Captive, Walls, and Ribellion. I repeat this to give you an idea of the struggles of a woman poet in the 50s, in the 60s, in Iran. She was delighted to get the job. She was hired with a salary of 852 months, which is a lot of money for the 1950s Iran. And that really changed her life. As you remember, Virginia Wolfe said, in order to become a writer, a woman needs a room of her own and economic independence, which will allow her the leisure, which will allow her the time to dedicate to writing, which is a full-time job. So Nadir Ebrahim Eghulistan, this is an older picture. At the time was 36. Farouq Farouq Zad was 24. The employer and the employee had many dissimilarities. One was a successful, well-to-do artist. He had, at the time, the most technically advanced film studio in the country. He was a short story writer. He had a political past. He was the editor-in-chief of one of the most important magazines of the Tude party, Organi Hezbet Tude, Der Mazan Deran. And he lived in a beautiful garden in Der Rus at the time. Farouq Farouq Zad was 24 years old, had already had a very difficult life, was living in a small apartment in Khiaban-e-Moezi. As I said, could barely support herself and really didn't have the support of her family. Turan Farouq Zad, her mother, always backed her up, always. And Turan Farouq Zad was a delightful woman. She suffered a lot. We talked about the suffering of Turan Farouq Zad, but she always supported Farouq. Her love was non-judgmental. Didn't matter what the daughter did. Didn't matter if it was right or wrong. She was the loving mother. So she was a divorced woman. At that point in her life, she was even denied sporadic visitation rights with her one and only biological son. And I will come back to that in my fourth talk and the unfairness of this. And I don't blame the husband, but I feel great sorrow and sadness for the son and for the mother and for a culture that allows such unfairness to mothers. Farouq in effect became an ex-mother. And I don't think any mother should ever become an ex-mother regardless. So the relationship, the love relationship started the bet later. And it became one of the, as far as I have read and I'm familiar, I think they are the most beautiful love poetry written by a woman for a man. I had quite a few examples, but I won't have time to read them. I'm hoping you will reread them. They're truly, they make you want to fall in love again. So let me just read one of them. It's a poor translation of mine, and that definitely the Persian translation, the Persian original is exquisite. You come from far away places. You is Gulistan here, Mr. Gulistan, from the land of fragrance and light. And you know Furuq loved fragrance and lights, jasmine flowers, and she was in love with the sun. You have set me on a bark built of ivory and clouds and crystals. Take me away, oh my dear love. Take me to the city of poetry and passion. Wash me in waves of wine. Wrap me in the velvet of your kisses. Call me to yourself in languorous nights. Leave me never. Part me not from the stars. Look how in my eyes sorrow melts away, drop by drop. Look. See me touched by the sun. See me enveloped, fevered. See me awash in the light. Lift it to the stars. Look. See me where I've reached. You call me and I go to the galaxies, to the infinite, to the eternal. So a lot has been said about this relationship. The poems are of course the most clearly taboo breaking. Furuq has entered a taboo territory in many of these poems. So the book also includes 15 of Faroq Zard's poems. I'm sorry, 15 of her unpublished letters to Mesterkollistan. They have never been published. We've had sections, little sections of random letters. And I don't know, I haven't found all of them in these letters, a few of them, but not all of them. But these 15 letters are very similar to the poetry. But what will be fascinating to you if you read those poems is not only the passionate, lustful love of a woman for a man. It is the intellectual relationship. It is the way these two talked about films. Before reading these poems, I had no idea Furuq knew so much about films. You know, most of the writing about the house is black, has been about, well, as in one of his talk back in Iran, in the 60s, Mesterkollistan said, did you just believe that Miss Faroq Zard woke up one night, and after putting some makeup on, decided that she's going to become the director of this masterpiece, the house is black? Those letters will prove to you the level of knowledge that this woman had for films and the conversation. We don't have, unfortunately, Mesterkollistan's letters, but at least we have the letters she has written, constantly discussing techniques, contents, how wonderful this film is, how terrible the other one was. It is a revelation. It's going to help a lot of people who've been working on Furuq and cinema to understand her love of cinema better and to understand her techniques as well. So those letters, I'm going to read a couple of sections of a couple of them to you and then start going and discussing the theme of tonight. How much? So in the 15 letters, Furuq uses Khurbanat Beravam, which I wasn't able to translate it properly in English. It's a difficult translation in English. So, you know, I would give all my life for you, I will die for you. You know, I didn't want to use the word sacrifice. It's just Khurbanat Beravam. You know, I've seen it translated as may I sacrifice myself for you. It just doesn't relay the beauty and the elegance of the Persian. So I've decided to leave it as Khurbanat Beravam. She repeats it 54 times in 15 letters and she repeats, I love you, which is not very easy for Iranian men and women to say it on a regular basis. Even at our wedding, a woman is not allowed to say yes at the first asking because that would might be showing too much excitement for the wedding to come. So I love you. I love your whole being. I love the gray hair on the nape of your back, of your neck. Excuse me. I love the wondering of your lazy eyes. I love your joy and sorrow. What are you and why can't I find rest anywhere else other than in you? Even your footprints on the ground sustain me. They support me. They hold me up so that I can trust, so that I remain upright, so I can be. It's enough that you call me and say furuk and I'm born again. And the trees and the sun and the birds are reborn with me. Oh, I love you. I love you. My heart cannot endure all this love. My heart seems too big for my ribcage. It draws me to a state of restlessness. And in another letter, she writes, oh, I can't, I can't be without you. I don't want without you. I don't understand without you. I don't feel without you. I don't see without you. Without you, I lack the will to live. Oh, if you only knew, today I felt so miserable that I brought all your papers out and read them again. I love your letters. I love the way your pen swirls across the pages. I look at the words and I remember the movement of your hands. Where are your hands? The hands that stroke my skin like the advent of waking. When I hold those hands, listen to that. When I hold those hands, I am free from the terror of being strung up in the middle of the earth and the sky. I love you, Shahi John. Shahi is Mr. Gholistan's name. Everybody who knows him, it's his surname, calls him by that name. I love you, Shahi John. What's the use of writing this? How can I write this? When I think about you, it feels as if every beat is becoming a thousand times stronger and is being repeated a thousand times. My whole body is being torn apart. So I think these letters are as some of them, at least sections of them, are as beautiful as some of her love poems. I'm very grateful for the chance to have them and to put it out there for scholars like me who have been interested in the life and in the work of this woman. Those letters and the 15 other letters, there are more than four letters, more than 15 letters. So let me just give you a rundown of the letters I have been able to find so far. Fifty-five letters of Furuk have been published. They're all to her husband, the only husband she had, Mr. Parvis the Shakur, a lovely man. Thirteen are to Feridun Farrukhzad. And I have to say none of these letters, except for perhaps one or two, have been published in their full, their censored. There is a word deleted here, a paragraph deleted there, a sentence deleted there. I decided if and only when I can publish those letters uncensored, it's when I will publish them. And I have not touched a word. In fact, I will show you what we have done to be loyal to her. So these are the letters that have been published to this day. As you see, it's over 80, 83 total numbers. So in my book, you are going to see 30 books, 30 letters. On every page, we have put the original letter, her handwriting. And because sometimes her handwriting is not very easy to read, and because they sometimes needed major research, especially for all, I think in the 15 letters to Mr. Golestan, there are references to 68, I think about 68 films in 15 letters. We have all these letters. Now, if you count all of them, it's about 120 letters from Furukh Farrukhzad. We rarely have any poems from people to Furukh Farrukhzad. And I assure you, I've been looking for them. If anyone told me I have a letter of Furukh, I traveled anywhere in the world to go to at least get a photocopy of that letter. Mitra Rachia, one of her closest friends, told me she had a letter. I went to Italy to pick up that letter. I would have done it. And I have asked people I knew, can you please give me a letter that someone wrote to Furukh Farrukhzad? There are a few, very few postal cards that I could find. And you see, this is not me cutting the name. Whoever was the author has decided to cut the name. So we don't know who wrote this letter, but you see it's almost like a sunflower. It's really beautiful. And it says just a couple of things about his trip. It's by a man. And then he repeats, I love you, Gorbaneto, Gorbaneto, 37 times in that postal card. So I can stop this here. And you might need to help me with that. So I now want to move to the conversation about Farrukhzad's major themes. We know, of course, that one of the most important themes in Farrukhzad's work is love, undoubtedly. It's talking about love differently and from a woman's perspective. Jean-Lou, our major poet, said something really interesting. He said, when you read Farrukhzad's poetry, you don't need to see his, her signature. You know, these are poems written by a woman. The content of it, the form of it, everything about that poem will tell you this was written by a woman. So another theme, of course, is femininity. Farrukhzad, as she said it to Ebra, Iraj Gholistan, in one of the best interviews when Iraj Mr. Gorgin, God bless him, asks her, says, I think one of the most important characteristics of your poetry is that it is feminine. It's written by a female poet. And the answer was very simple and very Farrukh-like. She said, if my poetry is like that of a woman, it's because I am a woman. Khosh Bahtani, man yek zana. Fortunately, I am a woman. And so of course, I'm going to write like a woman. And she did. And we might think, what's so big about that? She was a woman. She was a writer. The pen was in her hand. She had publishers by now. What's so big about being a woman and writing as a woman? So my talk today hopefully will help clarify that. What was so unusual about writing as a woman and being a woman? So I have compared Farrukh-Farrukhzad to the Iranian, I've called her the Iranian Icarus. I don't know if you're familiar with Icarus. There are lots of paintings about him, lots of poems about him. Icarus was the son of Dedalus. They are actually, the father was the best engineer architect. He's the first one who built a prison, a labyrinth of sorts. That to me is like a prison because they wanted someone to get in there and never to be able to get out. But life is a game of boomerang. I say always, I love cooking. I say life is a bowl of ash, of Persian soup. What you put in your pot, you will eventually get it in your bowl. It's very simple and it happens. At least that's what I'm convinced of. So the first builder of a prison ended up a prisoner and he was put in a great island with his son Icarus. He was the best engineer. After a while he knew he has to get out of that island. So he built four wings, two for himself and two for his sons. And he called his young son a wonderful… Baudelaire has written beautiful poems about him. Many have an idealist, a risk taker, someone who could have bold dreams, someone who could dream with eyes wide open. And he glued them on to himself and he glued them on to Icarus. And he said, son, don't fly too high. When you get to the sun, the wax is going to melt and you're going to dive deep in the ocean and you'll be dead. And don't fly too low because the feathers on your wing will catch water. It will be heavy and it will draw you down. So take the middle course and you will be a free man. We'll get out of this island. Well, Daedalus was a wise man, but Icarus was a dreamer. He was a poet. He wanted to survive and in fact he has survived. His father who took the prudent course, the middle course, was physically alive for a while, but he survives in the arts, many museums, many poetry books. He always wanted to meet with the sun. And he said, I'm going to do it. So he did. He went to the sun. And of course we know what happened to him. So he was a risk taker. So was Farouk Farosaad. And Farouk knew the consequences of her actions and she still did it. The resemblance I see between the two is exactly that. The character, the willingness, the boldness, the audacity to take risks. And in many of her writings, in many of the interviews, in some of her letters and in many of her short stories, she says over and over again that I knew I shouldn't do that but I wanted to do it and I did it. And we know she paid an exorbitant price for it. So Farouk Farosaad, we talked yesterday about how the image of the sun is central to her poetry. Even in the first poetry collection in Captive, there are 10 references to the sun and her desire to fly. We can take flying metaphorically. We can take it physically. We can take it literally. We can take it literally. And I want to do that today, hopefully combining all of them together. I had a few poems about her love of the sun, of light. But I don't think I will have time. So with your permission, I'm not going to do those lines and I'm going to go to the theme that I want to focus more today than anything else. There are two major themes that is central to Farouk Farosaad's five poetry collections, her short stories, and even her film. And next session, we're going to first see the film. I don't know how many of you have seen The House is Black. So we're going to see it again and we're going to discuss it as an ideal life narrative, as a manifesto also of Farouk's art and life. So the two central themes other than the ones I've said, love, in Farouk Farosaad's poetry is the theme of captivity and flight. If we focus on either of these two, if we only focus on her desire to fly to the gateless sky, and she loved the sky because there are no walls up there. It's gateless. It's free. She could go anywhere she wanted. Flying for her had also a metaphoric meaning. But flight is only part of the story. There is also another story. It's the story of Farouk Farosaad's captivity. And that happens from the few first poems she wrote to the very end. So basically saying, don't lock my lips. I have an untold story. She's been telling us about that story from the early poems and opened from my feet the chain that is restraining me, that is holding me in place. So the first poetry collection is called Asir, captive, a prisoner. The second wall is called walls, restriction, obstacles, not being able to have a gateless, free space, rebellion. And then of course, after that you have Taval-e-Di-Di-Gar, born again. So there is a lot of poetry, a lot of poem in Farouk Farosaad about these two. Imagine how important that is in our Persian culture. Can you imagine Rostam, the hero of our national epic, The Book of Kings, without Rakhsh? Can you think of the life of Sadi without all his travels? Can you think about Shams and Rumi without their dances, whirling their wishes? My examples can go on and on. A synonym for Mard in Persian is Mard-e-Maidan. Men belong to the public square, and where was the place of a woman? Traditionally, Zaneh Khanin house was the place of a woman. For centuries, sex segregation divided the world of men and women in Iran and in many other Islamic countries. Our focus tonight is on Iran. The idea of women, and I'm not saying all women could or would do it, but the idea of women in Iran is Zaneh of Mahdab Nadideh, a woman not glimpsed by the sun or the moon. So covered, so restricted in her movement that she had not to be even seen by the sun and the moon. Zaneh sanginu saumet. Have you ever thought about the meaning of these terms? Saumet, lal, not saying a word, and sangin, so heavy, not able to move around, to to run around, to go places. Gender apartheid has been a part of our culture for years, for centuries. I would argue one of the central theme of the Islamic Republic was to return women inside the house, to bedrooms and kitchens where they belonged. But I want to take just a few minutes to to tell you that this five minutes, 12, okay, thank you, thank you, sure, I will be, I'll finish, I'll try. First, I want to tell you the importance of freedom of movement. If you're not free to move about, to leave your indicated domain and to come back to it without penalty, without chaperones, you won't have access to higher education. You won't have access to power. You don't have access to political presentation, and we know how important that is. You don't have the right to exercise your economic rights. In the arts, we should ask ourselves, why is it that in a thousand years of Persian literature, we have so few women writers, and all of them, the overwhelming majority of them, up to a few decades ago, all poets. In a book about Iranian women writers, there are 294 writers. All 294 are poets. We know why. The answer is simple. Poetry is at the threshold of public and private art. All you need is a pen and a piece of paper to write it, and it doesn't demand long stretches of time. Anyway, the labor force, even exercising your religion, those who decide the rules of the religion will be those who have freedom of movement, and of course, leisure. So that's how important it is, and I want to give you one example of how women have been deprived of this freedom of movement, which is at the core of freedom of expression, freedom to have money, freedom to be politically involved. I'm going to focus on one example, on the issue of feminine beauty, you know, mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all? And look at that, symbol of femininity and masculinity. Look at the woman. She's held in place, can't move, and it's a handheld mirror. And look at the man, the weapons of Mars. The sky is the limit. It's not attached. Look at this one, attached here, stuck to the ground. Who is the counter-ideal woman? Not only in our country, in most of the world, a witch. She has many qualities that, you know, old and wrinkled and asymmetrical with big feet, but also she's flying around. And she's flying around on a broomstick, taking the very sign and symbol of domesticity and turning it into a vehicle able to carry them to anywhere she wants. This is the counter-ideal woman. What about foot-pinding? Practiced for thousands of years in China. What did foot-pinding do? Look at what it does to the foot of a woman. And then the idealization of these tiny little foot, it literally breaks the bones of these young girls and it makes high heels out of the bones and the muscles of a woman. This mutilated feet is then considered the ideal of beauty for a thousand years. I teach a course called From Cinderella to Barbie and we work a lot on few weeks on foot-binding. There are so many books written about fabulous books. You know, beauty contexts in China were based on these feet. Women will sit behind curtains and they will put their small, tiny feet, not like that, but with their beautiful slippers. And based on those, the most beautiful girl will be chosen in China. Would it surprise you then, if I tell you? The oldest written version of Cinderella, Cinderella, whose characteristic feature, her tiny little feet, comes from China, congruent with the beginning of foot-pinding. Barbie, the icon of Western beauty. Her feet, I did the calculation. Her feet are the size of a woman of a young girl of between four and five. And to go back to literature, the erotics of immobility, world literature is filled with examples of women who are sleep, short of death. It's the best thing you can get, right? They're sleep, they're not moving, they're not talking. Sangino summit, perfect. With modernity, something happened. You know, the oldest novel, according to many critics, is, of course, Don Quixote. And what did Don Quixote do, among many things? Don Quixote acknowledged his desire to be free. You know, with his sidekick, Sancho Panza, and his little Don Quix, he decided to go. He left the village not for war, not for money, not for in search of women. It was for no basic other reason other than his freedom of movement. And I think one of the most powerful arguments made for prison is by, of course, Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. I would just, to me, I love this book. I think women have had that experience. He argues that prison started with modernity on a large scale because freedom of movement was so central to the modern citizen, which that part is definitely true. Then, of course, and these days, as I was preparing my PowerPoint for the talk, I couldn't help but reminded of what the Supreme Leader has said recently about bicycling of women. When, you know, he said that it was causing promiscuity and therefore it's forbidden. When, when bicycles started, women loved it because they knew it's means of transportation. It's giving them physical mobility. Susan B. Antony, one of the leaders of women's movement in the US, look at what she said. Bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world. And I couldn't resist showing that at Oxford when women were admitted for the first time. They protested, men protested, and what did they do? They burned the effigy of a woman on a bicycle. You know, that tells you how important freedom of movement is. We've talked about money. We've talked about all sorts of restriction placed on women. Personally, I think the core basis of all of this is denying women the freedom of movement. And Furuq al-Rusad, like no other poet, because men never experience that, so you don't expect them to write about it. I don't think anyone in Iran has focused more on the issue of freedom of movement than Furuq al-Rusad. Noshi is one of the first women who we talked about the trip. I'll be done in a couple of minutes. We talked about Bejjati Sad. This is Bejjati Sad. And I have another lovely picture of Furuq. This is when she was out of the hospital, out of one of her suicide attempts in Italy with her friend Bejjati Sad. They were in Rome. And I went there to, anyway, so Furuq, this is Furuq, I think on snow. I was going to end today's talk because we might not be able to talk about it anymore in the next two talks about her death. You know that she did predict with uncanny precision her death. And she's buried in Zahira Dole cemetery. And she was buried under falling snow. So this poem published while she was alive, not after she was dead, says, perhaps the truth was those two hands, those two hands, those two young hands buried beneath the falling snow. And next year, when spring meets with the sky beyond the window and cascades of saplings will erupt from her body, she will blossom. Oh my love, she will blossom. And indeed, even after her death, Furuq continues to run. My dear friend from whom I have learned a lot about everything in particular about Furuq Faroqzad, Simin Berbani, who was a friend of Furuq Faroqzad for a while, told me something that I will never forget. She said, one reason our friendship came to an end was a variety of reasons. But one major reason was jealousy between us. We were both competing with each other. And she said after Furuq passed away, I couldn't write for a while. And then one day I said to myself, look, Furuq is running even after her death. You need to run too. So Furuq continues to run after her death. I think every new reading of her poetry is a new revival of her legacy, is a new understanding to this multifaceted, complex work. And that if we believe in certain things that when Gloria Faroqzad, Furuq's sister, showed me this identity card, Sejel de Furuq Faroqzad, I really had goosebumps all over me. So you see, so the first one is her identity. When she was born, the father, the mother, the rest of it. At the second page, every time a woman or a man, anyone is buried, they cancel it. They have to allow the burial. Look at it. It has not been canceled. I don't think Furuq Faroqzad will die. She will be with us. And here's one indication of it. And last but not least, we talked yesterday a little bit about the bipolar nature of her poetry, the high and the low, the joy and the despair. But if you take the whole world, work of Furuq Faroqzad as a whole, I think it's exactly like the sky, like a rainbow in the sky. We only see the rainbow when there is sun and the rain. Two opposite things that are considered to be an either or dichotomy. It's either the rain or it's either the sun. Come together and in a moment of magic and mystery, create this caravan of colors. I think the poetry of Furuq Faroqzad does that for us, creates this nuanced caravan of feelings and candor and decency and sheer aesthetic beauty. Thank you for listening.