Blasted Braincell

The Word flows through us in innumerable ways. The first time I heard the name of Forough Farrokhzad, I immediately thought of our own Parveen Shakir. It was Dr. Sara Haq’s class on Gender, Sexuality, and Islam where she was mentioned. We were reading about resistance poetry written by Muslim women and Farrokhzad’s story fascinated us. It was the uncanny resemblance between her and Parveen Shakir’s life and death. To chart out the similarities between the two would only do injustice to the nuance of how we perceive them both. If two is enough to make a pattern, then the fact that one’s mention made us think of the other says something about the way in which the state and religio-patriarchal institutions look at artists who may be marginalized in some way. It is also interesting for me to think about how these two were not completely isolated from their own contexts. In fact, they were abject subjects who failed to assimilate into the status quo but their identities, struggles, and the ...