“Remember Flight”: Forugh Farrokhzad, the Iranian Icarus, LMEI, SOAS University of London скачать в хорошем качестве

“Remember Flight”: Forugh Farrokhzad, the Iranian Icarus, LMEI, SOAS University of London

This lecture titled '“Remember Flight”: Forugh Farrokhzad, the Iranian Icarus' was the second of four lectures on Forugh Farrokhzad by Farzaneh Milani. Part of the Yarshater Lecture Series in Persian Literature. You can find out more about this event at https://goo.gl/5nvQE3 You can find out more about this event series at https://goo.gl/SdEFiq The twin topics of flight and captivity constitute the very basis upon which Farrokhzad’s body of work is built. The complex interconnectedness between space, power, and literary productivity is a key to a better understanding of her work. Metaphors of control—walls, veils, imposed silences, fences, cages, blind windows, closed doors, and iron bars—exist in her work side by side with the desire to sprout wings, to fly, flee, run, dance, and sing. Like the many birds that wing through her poems, she never relinquished the desire to fly and soar into the many pleasures of the gateless sky. Having suffered the constraints of gender apartheid on her body and voice, Farrokhzad knew all too well that power is closely interconnected to the control of space. Indeed a woman not only needs a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf remarked in her seminal work A Room of One's Own, but also the freedom to leave it and return to it at will. A room without that very right is a prison cell; a house without it turns into house arrest. The unconditional, untainted, and unrestricted right of entry and exit is a basic individual and human right and central to Farrokhzad’s artistic universe. It epitomizes in its embodied form the capacity for exercising and enjoying an elemental sense of self-propelled, self-willed, and self-choreographed freedom. Her work, which epitomizes a profound challenge to sex-segregation and is a relentless search for the open road, for physical mobility and personal growth, is the tale of an Iranian Icarus, who knew the consequences of her desire but did not fear them and refused to live a life disciplined by delineated spaces. Farzaneh Milani is Raymond J. Nelson Professor and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and former Director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia. She has published several books, most recently Words, not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2011; co-winner of Latifeh Yarshater Award), and over one hundred articles, epilogues, forewords, and afterwords in both Persian and English. She has served as the guest editor for special issues of Nimeye-Digar, Persian Language Feminist Journal, IranNameh and Iranian Studies: Journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, Reader's Digest, USA Today, and contributed to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. She has presented 240 lectures nationally and internationally. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women's Studies in America and a Carnegie Fellow, Milani was the recipient of the All University Teaching Award as well as Zintl Leadership Award (2015). Chair: Narguess Farzad, SOAS