>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C. >> Hirad Dinavari: On behalf of the library, I quickly wanted to take a minute to give my condolences to all the Iranian women, Persian-speaking audiences in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and elsewhere for the passing of the poetess Simin Behbahani. It is with a heavy heart that I say this in the exhibition. We have selected a whole section on women who do Persian Poetry and Persian language works from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Simin is one of the most important poetesses of the current time, the Lioness of Iran. And known as the national poet of Iran. Dr. Billington and maybe Jane when they visited Iran in 2004 met with her. She was gracious enough to give her time. And it is a matter of great sadness to us all to see her pass. And with that I'm going to pass the grand to Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz and ask her to introduce our lovely speaker. Thank you very much. There you go. >> Fatemeh Keshavarz: Farzaneh and I go way back. There has been no particularly important turning point in my life in which he hasn't been involved, whether it was being out for tenure or getting promoted or you know, going from institution to institution. To actually reading each other's work and also reading my manuscript and always being a wonderful reader and supporter. So it is with special pleasure that I introduce. Farzaneh did a Ph. D in comparative literature in University of California, UCLA, and I believe she worked with Amin Benoni [spelling assumed]. I also know she worked closely with many other scholars including Ishmat Moyedin [spelling assumed] and others. But I believe that Amin Benoni was crucial. And we do indeed miss him. He's been a really important voice in criticism and particularly poetry. And in her thesis, Fazaneh worked on Forough Farrokhzhad from the feminist perspective. So this has been a topic that's been very close to her heart for a very long time. She's written close to 100 if not more I'm sure articles and book chapters and op-eds and just contributions that just range from highly specialized and scholarly to things that would appear in New York Times or Washington Post. And do that very important job of reaching out to the broader interested public. Her first book, her first major book actually in English, Veils and Words is a classic. It's about wars that women poets and writers, their journey within the Persian culture and you know from 17, 18, 19th century to the present time. And her latest book, which I believe came out in 2011, yes, Words Not Swords, takes that another step forward on what it is that women and women's literature, and looking at it from a gendered lens does to understand the role of these voices, rather than considering them silent or censored. So that has been a tremendous contribution. I believe you're working on a biography of Forough, so we are eagerly looking forward to that and with that I'm just going to invite Fazaneh. Please join me in giving her a very warm welcome. [ Applause ] Farzanah Milani: Thank you for taking the time in the middle of a beautiful Wednesday to come and hear about Forough Farrokhzhad and to listen to me. You honor me with your presence. Thank you again. I'm humbled to talk in the presence of some giants in this field of modern literature. I have my colleague Anna Corinna Cook [spelling assumed] for whose work I have great admiration. I've written about it. So it's not only now that I say it. And of course my dear friend Fatemeh Keshavarz from whom I have learned a great deal. And the rest of you for being here. With your permission I would like to start with a short tribute to a woman I love like a mother. To a poet I admired greatly. I think Iran and all of us Iranians have lost an enlightened voice of conscience, an elegant voice of moderation, an audacious voice of dissent. I really think she's irreplaceable. And there aren't too many things in the world that I think are irreplaceable. Samin Behbahani is irreplaceable. I hope her words and her advocacy for nonviolence, which is central to her work, will spread to the four corners of this troubled world we live in. [ Music ] Naturally, even though our government didn't announce much the passing of this giant of Persian literature, you saw all the people of Iran pay tribute to their poet. In fact, they sang her poems and these were her own words put to music by one of our best singers, Homayoun Shajarian. And you saw him. He was at the funeral crying. Let's switch now to Forough Farrokhzhad. I will tell you a little bit about my involvement with Forough later on. But let me tell you what I plan to do today. As Fatemeh mentioned, I've been working on Forough Farrokhzhad for 37 years and I am finally finishing her biography. So it was really hard to condense it in 45 minutes, in 50 minutes. So I had to make certain decisions. So I'm going to focus first and foremost on the biography of this iconoclastic icon. It's amazing that this woman who chose the penname Iconoclastic [inaudible] has herself become a poet, an icon. But because there is so little information about the first part of her life, we know a lot more about the last 18 years of her life. In my talk I will focus on that part and I think most of that information has not been available. And then in the Q&A I will be honored to answer any questions you have about the second part of her life. I want to tell you a little bit about the trials and tribulations of writing a biography in Iran. Of writing a woman's biography in Iran. And in particular in writing Forough Farrokhzhad's biography. I believe she is the most talked-about Iranian woman. I Googled her about a month ago. I was going to do it last night. I didn't get a chance to be up to date. But a month ago if you do a Scholar Google, Forough Farrokhzhad has about twice as many hits as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who ruled Iran for 37 years. So it would be fair to say that she has become quite popular and she's talked about. And finally I would like to share with you some of her unpublished letters that I have collected over the last 37 years. And that it had taken me so long to finally decide that maybe I'm not invading her privacy to publish them. I have been in possession of some of these letters, not all of them, for a long time. But because they were so personal, I wasn't sure it's the right thing to publish them. But given the fact that there is so much misinformation about her. There is the fact that it's almost a half a century after her death. I thought maybe it would be the right thing to publish this, about 100 pages of unpublished letters along with the biography. So what do we know about Farrokhzhad's early life? You have probably as her birthday January of 1935. It's not the right birthday. There is so many misinformation about her. And I'm not sure I can figure out why, but they're out there. I have seen her birth certificate. So with certainty I can tell you that she was born on Saturday the 29th of December 1934. She was born to Turan Vezitabar and Muhammad Farrokhzhad Aroki [assumed spelling]. You will see again in Farrokhzhad's document her name is Forough Kazemoni Farrokhzhad Aroki [assumed spelling]. That's her birth certificate. And I will get to why Aroki, where does that come from. The child was born Forough Kosimon [assumes spelling], which significantly means eternal light. And of course the occasion of the birth of a child is always a jubilant occasion. And hers was too. Except that it was marred by the absence of the father. Lieutenant Muhammed Farrokhzhad at the time was in prison. And he was the head of Pahlavi royal properties, [inaudible]. And for some reason he and a few others had been put in prison. So when Forough was born, he was not there to welcome his daughter who was his third child. So Mr. Farrokhzhad was released from prison after a year. And like the paradoxical country that Iran is, after a year of imprisonment he returned to his position in Yoshat as the head of the Pahlavi property. So Farrokhzhad was born in Tehran but she spent the first six years of her life not in Tehran but in Nowshahr, which is the northern part of Tehran in the province of Mazandaran. They lived in a beautiful big house. In fact, in front of the castle of [inaudible]. On one side was a forest. On the other side was the Caspian Sea. And Forough loved the forest. And apparently she was constantly running through the forest. What we might not know and I didn't know for a while is that Forough was stunningly beautiful as a baby, as a girl. She had fair complexion, big black eyes and curly hair. Blond, curly hair. Kind of unusual for Iran. And lovingly and I would say ironically she was called Out of Sight Fradanki. Now I say ironically because this little girl was anything but a doll. She refused to be commandeered by strings like a marionette. Throughout her life and beginning from her very early childhood, the prospect of becoming a puppet horrified her. She had a will of her own. She was willful, determined, tenacious. I will tell you, I have interviewed over 60 people, her family members, her close friends and some of her colleagues. And most of the information I give you today are things that I have cross-referenced. I've heard some things, if they were not cross-referenced I've tried to avoid saying them. But almost any people who knew her as a child told me that first of all when they were in Nowshahr she preferred the forest. And when they moved to Tehran when she was six years old, she preferred the street. She was constantly fighting boys and often gave them a good beating. She scaled walls. I've heard from a couple of people that she was like little [inaudible]. Agile like a cat. Really nimble with gravity-defying agility. She jumped. She climbed trees. This is not image of a young girl in Iran of the '30's. She was fearless and daring. And these words basically didn't exist in her lexicon. A little bit about Forough's parents, because they in their own right are really fascinating people and we don't hear about them. In particular, we barely every hear about the mother who was a fascinating woman. She too was a subversive woman. She was born in 1913. She was unveiled before the Underling Act of 1936. She went to the American school in Tehran. She was not yet 16 when at a party in the house of her relative she met this young Lieutenant Mohammed Farrokhzhad who was 11 years older. She fell in love with him and he fell in love with her. Turan had lost her father before she was even born. Her mother, lovely mother, and in fact Forough has a few references to her grandmother in her poetry. And the more I've learned about [Foreign name], the more I have come to appreciate those lines about the grandmother in Forough's poetry. Both of them were very opposed to this wedding. But she was adamant she wanted to marry him. And they did. Turan was a very hardworking woman. Everybody talks about her proclivity for outspoken simplicity and honesty. She had a hard time lying, as her daughter will later. I think one of the most beautiful characteristics of Forough Farrakhzhad is her incapacity to lie. I'm not saying she never lied. Such a person probably doesn't exist. But in a culture of walls and veils and masks and masquerades, Forough Farrakhzhad was herself as much as it was possible to be. Once she was chosen as the mother of the year. This is her. This is before the age of 24. She had already four children. And by the age of 35 she had seven children. And she had a few pregnancies that did not go to full term. Now what about the father? Let me tell you one other thing that I find so fascinating about Turan Farrakhzhad. She was a doll collector. And because dolls are so central again in Forough's life and in Forough's poetry, one of her most beautiful poems is [foreign words], "One Can Be Like a Doll." To say, "Oh yes, I'm so very lucky all the time," and be full of pretenses all the time -- she didn't like that. Turan Farrakhzhad was a doll collector and she wanted to be buried with her favorite dolls. Unfortunately, due to the laws of the land, she was not granted this last wish of hers. I have seen some of her dolls and when they told me this story it made me really sad that they wouldn't even allow her to do that. But her dolls were very important in her life. You would think after seven children -- yeah. Now just a little bit about the father. Muhammad Farrokhzhad Aroki, he was a self-made man. His last name actually was Rezohi. And when he was in prison earlier, he had had a few experiences in prison, he was reading Persian literature, poetry. He loved Persian poetry. And he came across the word Farrokhzhad and loved it. So he decided to change his last name. So he changed it from Rezohi to Farrokhzhad. And because he was from Tajrish in northern Iran and at the time in pre-Islamic Iran Tajrish was called Araq. Some called it Arap Ijam. And then later on it was called Araq. So you see in legal documents, and I've seen -- at the beginning I would see all these documents about Forough Farrokhzhad, Forough Farrokhzhad Aroki. What is this Aroki coming from? So that's where it comes from. And later on of course it was deleted and rarely anybody knows them as Farrokhzhad Aroki. But all their documents, and I have seen many of them, the father, the mother -- in all of them it's Aroki. They have that. So he was 14 when he was going to marry the widowed sister according to the customs of Tajrish. The brother had passed away and he was to marry the wife, the widowed wife. So the day of the wedding he decided to flee, to leave Tajrish and to go to Tehran. He did so. He went to Tehran with very little cash but an abundant supply of energy and audacity. He was a very adventurous man, audacious is the right word. He joined Reza Han. At the time Reza Shah was not Reza Shah yet. He joined Reza Han's Cossack Brigade. And then when Reza Han became Reza Shah, soon he sent him to Nushsash as the head of his properties. That's how they ended in Nushash. The first granddaughter -- I'm sorry, the first daughter, was born in Nushash actually. After the abdication time of Reza Shah, the family moved back to Tehran. He joined Dejan Darmari and he changed a few jobs. And then around the revolution he retired. He stayed home and he died in 1992 at the age of 90. Now what about Forough? So at the age of six they come back to Tehran. She first goes to [inaudible], kindergarten. And then to Sarush, educational elementary school, which is a good educational school. It is interesting. At the time there weren't too many coeducational schools. But that was a coeducational school in their neighborhood in [inaudible]. That's where they lived. Then she goes to [inaudible] and eventually she decides to go to a technical school for her high school. Because she was interested in painting and sewing. Before finishing high school she fell madly in love with a neighbor, literally door-to-door neighbor who happened to also be a distant relative, a distant cousin of her mother. His name was Parviz Shapour. The parents were adamantly opposed to the marriage, but Forough attempted her first suicide at that tender age. She was absolutely adamant that that's the man she wants to marry. Eventually, on September 14th, 1950 they got married. Three or four months earlier, the sister, Puran had also been married in the same house. Forough's marriage from all accounts was quite different. It was very simple. There are absolutely no pictures of that wedding because they wanted to save money. That was not an extravagant wedding. It was only for tea and sweets, which usually is unusual in Iran. The bride did not have her own gown. She borrowed the gown of her sister. She borrowed the ring, the emerald ring of her sister. Even the mirror and the candleholders belonged to Puran. So this is one of the earliest pictures that we have of the bride and the groom. Just to tell you a little bit about the groom, Parviz Shapour who was also significantly 11 years older than Forough Farrakhzhad, exactly like the age difference between the father and the mother. And throughout her life Forough Farrakhzhad was consistently more interested in men who were older. 11, Mr. [Foreign name] is even older. I will talk in a minute about Nasir Hodajaj. He was even older. So she was interested in older men. Shapour was born in 1923. He graduated from Tehran University. His field was economics and he was working at the time of the wedding in the ministry of finance in Tehran. Soon after the wedding, the couple moved to [Foreign name], which is a southern part of Iran. Parviz Shapour was an artist. He was what [Foreign name] called [Foreign words], which is a fusion of caricature, airborne drawings and dexterity with words. In fact, many people have told me one of the main reasons Forough fell in love with him was because he was so wonderful with words. And if you read his books and his [inaudible] you see that it's with perfect economy, and he really says a lot in those. He was working for Thohir Magazine for a while. And his drawings were exhibited in Tehran twice that I know of. And recently even in New York. So you know, he was an artist in his own right. Usually many of the people who have lived around Forough Farrokhzhad have been overshadowed by her iconic by her iconic status. And I think Parviz Shapour is one of them. Their son Kamyar was born two years, a year and a half after their wedding on June 19th, 1952. The mother was still a teenage mother. And he was around two years old when Forough published her first -- this is Forough before she had nose surgery. And when she was still in [Foreign name], early Forough Farrakhzhad. This is one of my most precious pictures. This is after Kamyar was born. The man in this corner is Parviz Shapour and the first woman on the right is Forough Farrakhzhad. And this is Forough with Kamyar. Kamyar was about two. So when Kamyar was about two years old, his mother started publishing poems. She wanted to publish in magazines as it was customary at the time. You start in magazines in journals and then you graduate to your own collections. So you might have heard that one day she went to the office of [Foreign name], which at the time was one of Iran's most popular magazines. We're talking about early '50's. Mr. Mushisi the poet was the person in charge of the literary page. And he had never met her. And unannounced she knocks at the door and enters the room of Mr. Mushisi. She's very nervous. Mr. Mushisi told us before he passed away. Mr. Mushisi was also one of our major literary figures and a very kind person. She's kind of shy and shivering and her fingers are ink stained. And in her early life, Forough always wrote with ink that was green. Green ink was the ink she always used. So it was green. So Mushisi didn't know what she wanted. And she handed three poems to Mushisi and said that she would like him to publish these poems. Now please consider the audacity of a woman who is barely 20 who goes unannounced, unknown to the office of a magazine, finds her way to the office of the editor in chief of the literary section. And Mushisi looks at the poems and the first one he sees is called Sin. It's a beautiful poem, short poem, 12-line poem. [ Speaking foreign language ] "I sinned. I sinned voluptuously in the arms of the man that was fury," and it goes on and on. It's a reversal of thousands of years of Persian literature. It was always men who talked about their love for a woman or a feminized lover. And here was this woman singing her love for a man. It was quite clear that it was a woman writing for a man. And Mushidi was quite taken. She said she had two others and Mr. Mushidi told her, "I would need to consult with my editors." He said he was concerned about the safety of the magazine, about the reaction of the people. And he consulted the editorial board. And most of them wanted the poem to be published. They thought it's a good poem, it's interesting. It's a novelty. One person, Mr. [Foreign name], the editor in chief, was the most adamant. He said, [foreign expression], "Of course. Publish it." I don't know, that was not a good translation. How would you translate that? "Sure, let's do it." Let's do it and get it over with, exactly. So as Mushidi said, [foreign expression], "We published it, but it didn't go well." Because although some people loved the poem, there were a lot of people who were totally shocked and aggravated by this poem. Love poems, adulterous relationships, are a dime a dozen in Persian literature. We have plenty of adulterous women in Persian literature. So what was it about this poem that became so scandalous that brought Forough immediately to a level of notoriety, of scandal that was unheard of before her? What was in this poem that shocked and titillated the readers? Because it really did titillate a lot of people too. I have a few suggestions and I'm sure there are plenty more. This woman calls herself a sinner. The poem is called Sin and she begins with I, which his very unusual, an autobiographical statement for a woman. In a culture where autobiographical statements and life narratives are not quite allowed. At least they were not allowed. Now everybody is writing a memoir. And my aunt too. But back then it wasn't like that. We didn't have biographies or autobiographies by women. So the poem starts with I. "I sinned." But more importantly, she has sinned but she is not repentful. In fact, throughout the poem she is quite exhilarated. Something mysterious has happened to her. The poem is about the awakening of a woman to sexuality, to the joy of physical union. She has never experienced it before and she has at this time and she's writing about it. So she's talking about it [Foreign name], but she's also talking about freedom of expression. "I committed a sin. Yes, it is a sin. But eat your heart out. I am not repentful. And I'm going to tell you all about it." More importantly, this adulterous woman, unlike the slew of adulterous women in Persian literature, does not undergo a religious awakening. She is not taken to the right path through marriage. She does not blame the man, which is admirable in her poem. She takes full responsibility for her act. Unlike most adulterous women, and conveniently, she does not commit suicide. She does not kill herself. And she's not killed by some mysterious disease either. She stays alive and she's well and she's going to go on. So but I think even more important than all of these things was the layout of that first poem. Look at it. So this whole piece, most of it is about her picture. I mean there are two pictures, and a biographical stretch. And if you read the biographical sketch, it's all about the fact that this is a married woman. She has a child who is two years old. She has beautiful disheveled hair. She has beautiful black eyes that are penetrating. So the focus is on her body and on her marital status. So in other words, whoever wrote that early piece wanted to make sure that this woman committed this pleasurable act of union with a man who is not her husband. The layout of the magazine turns a poem into a testimonial of sorts. It's almost like a report. At the time, many Iranian poets had chosen pseudonyms. Forough Farrakhzhad could have done the same. In fact she did use pseudonyms, pen names, later for some of her prose writing. Two very interesting pen names. [Foreign name], the Iconoclast, and [Foreign name], Born of Fairies. That I know of. There might be others that I'm not still aware of. Forough found herself at the eye of the gathering storm. The father, Mr. Farrakhzhad, was furious with the publication of this Sin. And of course the husband was as well. I have heard that when this poem was published, and I don't say that with joy -- my heart goes to him -- Mr. Shapour, Parviz Shapour the husband, did not leave home for a whole week. He just could not face the world. And you understand, in a culture where the honor of a man depends on sexual acts of women. And to me that's the prison, but that is nonetheless how it is, how it was back then and how it is to a certain extent today. This is Nasir Quidiar [spelling assumed]. Not much usually is known about him, which is interesting. I will tell you, he is the man for whom Sin was published. He is the beloved of Sin. And I'm not intruding upon Forough's privacy. In a minute you will see that. At the time in the '50's it became the talk of town in Tehran. It's often mentioned that Forough Farrokhzhad published her first poetry collection when she was 17. I have not come across any such poems or poetry collection. Her first collection is called Captive. And it was published in 1955. Most of the poems in it are in fact written in 1953 and 1954. So I don't know how she could have published Asir when she was 17. So I think that's a false statement. Asir was by itself a novelty. For the first time in Iranian literary history, a woman from a non-literary family was publishing a collection of poems. Prior to her, none of the poems, none of the poetry collections by our women writers have been published by people who were not in literary families. [Foreign names] and the list goes on and on. Significantly, the poem Sin which brought Forough to fame and notoriety was excised from Asir. And apparently the relationship with Quidiar had gone sour. So soon Asir became a highly acclaimed poem because it was unusual poetry. It had 44 poems. And it had an introduction by Mr. Chafa. So I asked Mr. Chafa. I said, "How did you end up writing this introduction to Asir?" Again, the story is so important if you want to put it in the context of the difficulties women confronted in becoming writers or poets in Iran of the time. So apparently the publisher had told Forough that in order for her poetry collection to be published, they would want her to have a major writer write an introduction to the collection. So one afternoon, as Mr. Chafa told me, there was a knock at the door. He goes to open the door and there is a young woman there with a book in her hand. And she introduces herself and Mr. Chafa immediately recognizes him because at the time many people, definitely people in literature knew of Forough Farrokhzhad, the poet of Sin. And she was invited in. And she tells him, "I'm here because I want you to write an introduction to my book. And that's the reason the publisher wants you to do that. Would you consider doing it?" And Chafa says, "Of course I will do it." So that's how Chafa wrote the introduction. So Asir was published without Sin, but significantly also without an afterword that Forough had written to it. And that afterword, if you have not read it, may I suggest you read it. It's called Tozi. It is really a manifesto for Forough Farrokhzhad. I don't know why it was excised and I don't know why it's not reprinted anywhere. I will be happy to send you a copy of it if anybody is interested in it. I think we should all read what a barely 20-year-old woman wrote about poetry and about women's lives in Iran at the time. In Asir and then later in the [Foreign name], Walls, Rebellion and Reborn, the other four collections, these are the four collections that Forough published during her lifetime. There are a few central themes that are central to her life. So I'm going to quickly try to just enumerate them. First of course is motherhood. Farrokhzhad was a teenage mother and in the letters that you will see published in the biography that hopefully will be published soon, the pain of being separated from her son. And the love that she had for her son is really central, not only to her poetry but also to all the letters, to many of the letters. And in fact, because she chose poetry as a vocation, as a profession, she was denied her right of motherhood. Fatherhood in Iran is a grant, is a granted phenomenon. All you have to do is to contribute physically to the act of conception. A mother becomes a mother with birth of the child, but to remain a mother she has to earn that. Motherhood is not a right for Iranian women. Motherhood is a privilege. And because Forough Farrokhzhad divorced her husband and because she chose to be, as she called it, she constantly said it in the letters, in the poems, "I want to become a great poet." She said that since she was 19. "I want to become a great poet. And I can't reconcile that with a life of domesticity and raising children." But that didn't mean that she didn't want to have her instinct as a mother denied. So that caused her great pain as many of you know. After Mr. Quidiar decided to publish the detail of his relationship with Farrokhzhad in a serial called [Foreign name], she was considered a promiscuous woman now, not only by her own admission but also by the admission of the lover. And not only she was divorced, she was denied custody rights of her son and eventually visitation rights with her son. That pain remained with her for the rest of her life. It's interesting to note that before the Feminine Mystique was published in the US and before Of Women Born of [inaudible] was published in the US, Forough Farrokhzhad had talked about both those issues in her poetry. In particular her first two poetry collections which for some reason is not considered due recognition in Iran. Everybody talks about Reborn and nobody talks about those three first poems which are the pain of a woman who is trying to break free from these molds that are imprisoning her. Again, it's not that she didn't want to be a mother. She wanted to reconcile it with being an artist. And that right was not granted to her. This is a picture of [Foreign name]. So after the publication of [Foreign name], Forough attempted another suicide. She was taken to psychiatric hospital. She was hospitalized, institutionalized for a month. She was given electric shock therapy. And when she left, this is a picture soon after it. She decided to leave Iran. She left Iran on a cargo plane. And in some of the letters that you will read in the published letters you see how she has to scramble to get the money to go to Europe. She wanted to study. She went to Italy and then she went to Germany. She worked while she was in Italy. She did some dubbing, she did some sewing. And after 16 months she decided to return. She needed Iran and she needed the language and the people. She went back to Iran and of course not having high education it was hard to find a job. So she was introduced to Galistan Film Studio. Mr. Galistan, a pioneer of Iranian cinema and Iranian literature, hired her as a filing clerk. So she started her position there to be economically independent and to finally have a room of her own. She started working there, showing afterward a very passionate, lustful, loving relationship developed between the two. And for the last eight years of her life, Farrokhzhad had a very intense relationship with Galistan. As you know, her fourth poetry collection is dedicated to EG, Ebrahim Golistan. Some of the poems in [Foreign name] I believe are the most beautiful poems a woman has ever written about a man. I often tell Mr. Golistan I think he's the prince charming of Persian literature. No man, to the best of my knowledge, has been loved and adulated the way Mr. Golistan has been in Persian literature in Forough's poetry. Forough started travelling. Mr. Golistan recognized that she is highly talented. She showed interest in film. And in 1962 she was sent to a leprosarium. Bhabubhaki Leprosarium. In which she made the movie -- I assume most of you have seen it. If not, please allow me to recommend you watch that film. It's a 22-minute documentary. It has been considered by many Iranian and western film critics as one of the best 10 documentaries made in the world. And this young woman in her 20's with minimal possibilities and resources made this amazing movie. My introduction to Forough Farrokhzhad was actually through that film. I vividly recall the first time I saw that film. Images of disfigured patients of leprosy. It was a summer day in Tehran. The smell of jasmine everywhere. I remember what I was wearing, where I was sitting. Certainly I saw these images on the screen of the television. I could neither look at these images nor could I take my eyes off. It was the most powerful visual poetry I have ever seen. Since then, Forough Farrokhzhad became my companion. Her poetry became my garden, my home. Every time I go to it, it's welcoming. I smell my childhood. I regain the lost time. It's beautiful poetry and it has a special meaning for me. So I came to this country in 1967, December of 1967. I wanted to do my dissertation. My major was French literature and I was going to write my dissertation on Flaubert and his search for the ideal woman and the perfect words. My argument was that neither will be possible because they don't exist unless you change your perspective. But so thanks to Dr. Banani, my teacher and my mentor, I switched major again and I decided to write my dissertation on Forough. But I was going to write my dissertation on her biography. So that's in the '70's. I went to Iran repeatedly for my research. And soon I realized that writing her biography was impossible. To give you quickly the reasons why, many men were all too eager to share with me their love affair with Forough Farrokhzhad. I was not interested in that. Those who knew the most will tell me, what's the point of talking about a dead person? Many people made fun of me. So in America they give a Ph. D for a woman who barely got her high school diploma. And on and on. I have often told Mr. Golistan, so I can tell you that. And when I finally met Mr. Golistan and started asking him about Forough Farrokhzhad, he looked at me. He said, "Miss Milani, I have heard you are a good cook." And I thought he was trying to compliment me, the idiot that I was. And I said, "Who told you?" He said, "Your teacher Dr. Banani tells me you are a good cook." And Mr. Banani was a chef. I said, "If he says it, maybe I am not a bad cook." I was still clueless. He said, "I have a suggestion for you. Why don't you write a cookbook?" So that was the end of my biographical enterprise. But I promised myself I will keep working at it. And I have for 37 years. It has been a while, but I have finally almost done it. And I will quickly tell you before I finish where I got after all these years of agony and not knowing what to do, where I found my model. And how I'm trying to do this biography. The film, The House is Black is the biography of a leprosarium, at least that's how I see it. It's about life of patients in a leprosarium, a colony where lepers were ostracized and literally imprisoned. The way she tells the truth, the way she doesn't sugarcoat anything. The way she does not invade privacy, the way she is devoted to imparting truth as she saw it without judging, without moralizing, was a lesson to me. This is a tall order for any biographer. And I'm not sure I will succeed. But I can tell you with certainty that it has been my model. You know, I would like to be revealing but not voyeuristic. I would like to be candid, but not judgmental. I would like to be informative but respectful of someone who suffered all her life because her privacy was not respected. So that's also the reason that I have been sitting on some of these letters for decades. Because those letter were not addressed to all of us. Those letters were addressed to one person. And I was not sure, even though the people that I have come into contact, the people I have interviewed, were kind enough, generous enough to give me those letters. And I knew I have to share it with people, but I wasn't sure I'm invading. I'm not invading her privacy. So finally after seeing that film, and after seeing what she has done to leprosy, which is a disease that we always covered up, I said, "No, she now belongs to Iranian literature. She now belongs to Iran." And after 50 years, after so many misinformation and so much information and misinformation on her, we need to hear her own voice. So these are pictures of the son she adopted at the leprosarium. She came back with this son Hossein Mansouri and again she is to the best of my knowledge the first woman who began this idea of single parenthood and adopting a child. These are precious pictures that I don't think you've ever seen before of Forough at the leprosarium. And finally just to give you an idea of the published letters. Altogether Forough has published a little less than 80 letters that have been published so far. Most of them were published, 56 letters. 55 to Parviz Shapour and one to his mother. So a total of 56 in a collection [Foreign name], A Man the First Throb of My Loving Heart, for her husband. It is a very interesting, fascinating book. And just a few other short poems. All of these letters have been censored in a way. There are words missing, a sentence missing, a paragraph missing. I have chosen not to do that. Not a single word will be deleted from the 30 letters. And I'm going to have her own handwriting side-by-side with the transcribed version of it so that you can read for yourself. As you see, the letters span from her early teenage years to the last 15 letters she wrote from Europe to Mr. Golistan. And I think they are very important literary documents. Thank you very much for listening. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.