Revisiting Forough Farrokhzad’s ironic depiction of the ‘Frontier of Gems’

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Iranian women's voices

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Very often, I read self-congratulatory essays about how bravely Iranians resist tyranny, how successfully they have pushed the boundaries. However, as a woman living in Iran, though never intending to dismiss any civic achievements, I find it difficult to accept such self-reassurance. In order to imagine and bring into being a better world, we must first acknowledge the stark reality. There are many acts of protest – often costly – exhibited and exaggerated in the media, and sometimes translated into acts of ‘heroism’, depending on the stance of the publication, but in the long run, countless sacrifices have rendered society indifferent to injustice.

As an academic who sees trips to other countries as a far-fetched dream – thanks to a devalued Iranian currency and because of the hardships of travelling with an Iranian passport – here I am, in my small apartment, reading poetry and writing essays. The university is closed due to energy shortages and so we have to work remotely. Although thinking about Iran and writing this in 2025, I can seek consolation in the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, who in her 1963 collection, Another Birth, and in particular the poem, ‘O, You Frontier of Gems’, lamented the predicament of derailed modernisation.

In ‘O, You Frontier of Gems’, as Shara Atashi translates ‘Ey Marz-e Por Gohar’ – words taken from the opening of Iran’s unofficial national anthem, ‘Ey Irân’ – Forough announces her triumphant victory in gaining an identity within a bureaucratic system. And out she pours the tale of her successive failures to identify with the state-sponsored discourse of patriotism, her inability to breathe clean air, to pay bills, to find a job, or to write modern poetry in the midst of traditional rhyme-seeking versifiers. She cannot find herself a place in journals with erotic women on their covers and cannot participate in radio programmes that only broadcast banal games catering to the lowest levels of intelligence. She is frustrated to see Iranian intellectuals, beholden to the West, translating disempowerment into poverty and leaving ignorance untouched.

She feels like Iran’s legendary river: ‘Yes, I am alive, like Zayandeh Rood, and shall drink from what is alive in the confines of the people’. She imagines participating in lotteries and after ‘puffing grams of first-class pure stuff / and gulping not-so-pure Pepsis / and uttering some mystic aahs and oohs’, hopes to become an official member of the pensive philosophers. She mocks the scientism of her era, recounting the inventions as artificial clouds and neon lights. She sneers at the huge swan statues in the squares of Tehran, and despises the angel statues that advertise stasis.

Throughout the poem, she does not get out of her room. Despite expecting to step into existence, she only peeps out from behind a curtain, to be met with the ominous, dark vistas of Bullet Park and Execution Square. She wants to deliver a lecture, and gives an imaginary speech from the ledge of her apartment window in front of an imaginary audience about the necessity of living – ending the image with cleaving the top of her own head with a pickaxe as a ceremonial opening rite. A last ironic comment on her triumph comes in the final stanza, when she speaks of throwing herself from the ledge to be embraced into the bosom of the motherland – in the free fall of fake poetry, fake intellectualism, fake scientism, fake art and fake media.

As a woman living in Iran in 2025, sitting in her room typing this essay, I feel the poet’s exuberance: the end of the poem is eerie, the failure to exist so desolate, but the book’s title, Another Birth, reminds me that Forough is alive, and that the suicidal jump symbolises a radical birth into a different world, a world sensitive enough to be traumatized each time it confronts tragedy and capable of responding to it.

© Laleh Atashi

Laleh Atashi

Laleh Atashi is an Iranian writer and teacher of English literature.