The Western Reception of Forugh Farrokhzad: New Orientalism and Confessional Poetry

Abstract

The following study proposes to deconstruct the mythologising of Forugh Farrokhzad (1934/5-1967), a poet known mostly as Iran’s Sylvia Plath. This kind of analogy is based on interpretative and cultural preconceptions that connect women’s poetry with personal experience and amount the poetic voice to the empirical reality. Beyond that biographical obsession, reified through the export of confessionalism, comparing the two writers also implies appropriation of Forugh Farrokhzad to a Western cultural and literary field. By analysing a few poems, taking a close look at her interviews, and examining the historical context, I shall try to demonstrate that Farrokhzad is actually split between two worlds. Therefore, to associate her with Sylvia Plath can be read as an example of what Fatemeh Keshavarz, a researcher on Persian literature, calls the New Orientalist narrative.