Protests are ongoing in the tragic wake of Mahsa Amini’s (مهسا امینی) death on September 16, 2022. Mahsa was a 22 year old woman arrested by Iran’s Guidance Patrol (گشت ارشاد) also sometimes referred to as the Morality Police, for not complying with Shari’a standards for hijabs. The Guidance Patrol’s duty, as enforcers of Shari’a law in the Islamic Republic of Iran, is almost exclusively policing women on acceptable attire and behavior in public. As it’s been reported, Ms. Amini was in violation of the standard for hijabs and was apprehended by the patrol to be escorted away to a “re-education center”. On paper, this process involves a form of arrest where women are taken to a DMV-like education center, tediously instructed on proper hijab etiquette, and then released. But, in practice and ideology, the Guidance Patrol is meant to make women feel unsafe, an ever-present reminder backed by the state that if a woman is caught naked (that is, without hijab) in the street, she leaves herself open to forms of unwanted attention. The slightest hint of a woman’s hair extending beyond the humbling wrap of the hijab, for example, could be cited by the patrol as an infraction.

Mahsa was detained by police on the 13th in Tehran and died on the 16th. She was reported to have experienced dizziness and loss of vision shortly after being detained and would (eventually) be transported to Kasra Hospital where she died. According to eye-witness accounts and leaked medical records, Mahsa’s death was likely the consequence of poor (or no) medical treatment for injuries sustained as a result of deliberate police brutality. CT Scans indicate skull fracture and internal hemorrhaging.

Word spread while she was detained (and unconscious) that something was amiss. This wasn’t the typical “re-education”. Concerned citizens gathered outside of Kasra Hospital to protest yet another flagrant misuse of power, this time resulting in the death of a young woman. Despite the state’s efforts to quell protests and deter the spread of information (by shutting down the internet), word has spread far and wide. Metropolitan areas of Iran have been vocal in their dissatisfaction with Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei and the state’s orthodoxy—one that has spent much of its time and resources keeping its citizens conformed to an autocratic standard. To be clear, these protests are not against what Islam itself represents (religiously, ethnically, culturally). Rather, these protests are against oppressive laws set by the state and enforced by military and paramilitary agents.

As protests for justice and (hopefully) women’s liberties continue, I am reminded of the poet Forough Farrokhzhad (فروغ فرخزاد). Born on a Saturday, December 29, 1934 in Tehran (per her birth certificate), Forough’s oeuvre in Farsi is remembered today as unapologetically bold in expression of desire, devotion, longing, and heartache. Her legacy combines the profound modernist voice of a Julia de Burgos, Frida Kahlo, or Sylvia Plath with the cinematic vanguardism of a Maya Deren.

Farrokhzhad married at 16 to Parviz Shapur (then 31), but the marriage wouldn’t last long. Some of her early poems from this period evince a young woman disenchanted with the domestic life she was expected to lead. That ennui would perhaps lead to an affair and divorce from her husband. Parviz would be granted custody of their son, Kamyar (b. June 19, 1952), and Forough would be severely limited in her contact with the child—a source of pain and angst for the rest of her life. Though raising a child conflicted somewhat with her ambitions as a writer and artist, she nevertheless pined for motherhood.

Farrokhzhad was especially beloved (and controversial) because, in her art, she had not been shy about expressing her lived experience. In some sense, she was a contemporary of post-war European and American confessional poets (Plath, Lowell, Berryman, Celan)—exemplary in that mode for the attention she’d receive after publication of her first works. One of her most widely anthologized poems, Sin, was published while she was still married, a mother barely twenty years old. The poem, framed as the longing and fulfillment of a lusty young housewife (whose accompanying photo no one would deny was beautiful, even seductive), titillated and scandalized readers. It wasn’t long before people, including her husband, would recognize the paramour of the poem as editor Nasser Khodayar.

Eventually liberated from her marriage, Farrokhzhad would go on to publish 4 collections, pursue painting and other forms of art, and even make film (with the help of filmmaker and lover Ebrahim Golestan). Her first (and last) directorial effort was a documentary, The House is Black (خانه سیاه است), chronicling the lives of people with Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) at the Behkadeh Raji colony. So inspired by the experience, she would adopt one of the children of the colony, Hossein Mansouri.

(Content Warning: graphic depiction of Hansen’s Disease)

In her life and work, Farrokhzhad was insistent that she not be categorized as a woman artist or woman poet. While femininity was as central to her work as identity is central to our lives, she was concerned that her work would be ghettoized and dismissed as writing for women, rather than writing for all of humanity.

Unfortunately her concern would prove somewhat prophetic. She died in 1966, well before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, but her work was banned for nearly a decade after the establishment of the Islamic Republic. As was the hope and wish of many a modernist, she wanted the status of universal appeal—but the dogmatic orthodoxy of the Republic and the Ayatollah would posthumously affirm Farrokhzhad’s greatest fear.

While I suppose she’d bristle at the notion that we are now discussing her as an icon of feminism, it is for that very reason that her poetic voice is needed now more than ever. Not simply because she was a woman, but because she was unafraid to insist that she not be limited in the free expression of her self. As women across Iran go naked and cut their hair in defiance of decades of oppressive government, I stand in solidarity and remember the infinitely complex life and artistry of Forough Farrokhzhad—a poet who reminds us all to live our truth.