Editor’s introduction:
The encounter with modernity is a major theme in Iran‘s story during the past hundred years. During this period, perhaps no other poet in modern Iran symbolizes the struggle with modernity more than Forugh Farrokhzad, who, along with her poetry, is the subject of the following essay.
Farrokhzad’s poetry depicts vividly what Immanuel Kant considered the hallmark of modernity and the enlightenment, that is, the maturity and courage to “dare to know.”
Living in a traditional society in transition, Farrokhzad had the audacity to tear away the veil of norms, mores, taboos, and boundaries of society to reveal her innermost personal desires, no matter how sexual and carnal.
Her poetry challenged the pretenses of a society that congratulated itself on having achieved a stage of enlightened tolerance. Especially boldly for a mid-century woman, Farrokhzad questioned the roles society assigned to women as daughters, lovers, wives, and mothers.
She paid for her audacity with the loss of her mental health, but she was above all, authentic. Her authenticity, which runs through her life and work, makes Farrokhzad both modern and post-modern.
She took up Kant’s challenge to “dare to know” and thus became a modern person, confident and self-reliant.
Yet at the same time, she was what Richard Rorty, the American post-modernist thinker, calls “the strong ironist” –someone who discards the need for solid foundations in her life but recreates herself authentically and anew each day.
On the cusp of a new century, Iran, like Farrokhzad, is faced with the same reckoning between the embrace of tradition and the allure of modernity. More than sixty years ago, Farrokhzad showed Iranians the way forward to liberty, and the price of liberation.
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