On the 15th of February 1967, an obituary notice for the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad ran in Tehran’s newspapers. She had died the day before, flung out of the window of her car while swerving to avoid an oncoming school bus. She was only 32 years old. Since then, her quasi-autobiographical, tragically prophetic, posthumously published elegy Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season has grieved her untimely death.
To review this poem is to review Farrokhzad’s life. Mercilessly criticised for the uncompromising subjectivity of her poems, she unflinchingly combines the exploration of her innermost identity and memories. In this poem, written shortly before her death, she explores the dissonance between subjective and objective perceptions of herself. ‘There is always a gap / between seeing and the window’, she writes, emphasising the discordance between the fragmented parts of the self. To condemn the subjectivity of the poem, therefore, is to demand an entirely fixed depiction of a whole, immutable identity. Instead, Farrokhzad delicately depicts her multiple past selves.
‘How kind you were, beloved, my truest friend, / how kind when you lied, / how kind when you closed the mirrors’ eyelids’. She addresses her first husband here: her family’s efforts to protect her virginity led her to be married to satirist Parviz Shapour at sixteen. She ironically thanks him for constructing an unreality where she could avoid confronting her multiplicity: there was no need for self-reflection when he could objectify her.
Farrokhzad vehemently rejects religious rapture, insisting that ‘The Messiah sleeps in a grave’. Instead, her saviour is a mirror. She mourns her irrevocable loss of youth and projects her sorrow into ‘the mirrors’ grieving virgil’. The mirror opens up a space for introspection, honesty, and memory, allowing her to converge her scattered past identities into a unified conception of the self. She asks, ‘Who is this, she walking eternity’s road / towards the moment of fusion?’. Through such examination, she can self-objectify in the mirror and thus autonomously ascribe the grounds of her identity. The inextricable link between Farrokhzad’s recurrent image of the mirror and commitment to subjectivity lies in Lacanian psychoanalysis: ‘the mirror stage’ is described as a developmental milestone in which an infant first apprehends themself and subsequently begins to develop a separate identity from their mother. The convergence of multiple selves can thus be regarded as a rebirth, protest, and emancipation from Iranian patriarchal standards under which Farrokhzad’s identity had previously been sketched.
It would be diminutive to define ‘Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season’ as a joyful liberation. In realising her identity, Farrokhzad isolates herself: ‘And here I am / a lonely woman / on the threshold of a cold season’. She is unapologetic in establishing her individuality here and yet acknowledges that to take this emancipatory step is to estrange herself from the Iranian standards of womanhood in the 1960s. The poem’s modernist departure from Iranian tradition was considered scandalous: after her separation from Shapour, Farrokhzad embarked on several love affairs with married men, lost custody of her child, and adopted another. Her radical nonconformity to Iranian patriarchal culture and intimate, poetic depictions of women’s inner worlds made her the victim of acute censorship and criticism. After the Iranian Revolution, her work was banned for a decade. Thus her self-realised maturity also brings disillusionment, alienation, and despair: ‘I am cold and I think I will never feel warm again’. The condemned female voice that pervades ‘Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season’ is undeniable. However, to define the poem under purely feminine terms would be to reduce Farrokhzad’s self-determined gender identity. On the contrary, her femininity can be seen as one fragment of her multiple selves that traverse the convex mirror to merge into a unified identity. Although still relevant for women’s independence, the poem is best read through a lens of female humanism rather than femininity.
As one of her final works, the poem is imbued with a sibylline honesty as Farrokhzad predicts her imminent death: ‘I told my mother: This is the end. / Before you know it, it shall happen. Let’s send my obituary to the papers.’ On these biting days following the 56th anniversary of her death, confront the bared soul of a woman freed from a fractured self only to find a glacial fate stretching before her.
Image Credit: “Women’s Mirror” by {✿D-Munkhuulei✿} is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.