Chapter Three - Parvīn Iᶜtiṣāmī’s Socio-political Engagement

Summary

Abstract

Parvīn Iᶜtiṣāmī is among the women who wrote socio-politically engaged poetry. This literary genre, known as Committed literature, started and flourished as a medium of self-expression for the intellectuals during the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (1905-1911). As a woman experiencing the fundamental transformations in her society after the Revolution, Iᶜtiṣāmī expressed her thoughts about the major issues of her times. She wrote poetry with significant constitutional themes such as female emancipation, social justice, and criticism of the state. Iᶜtiṣāmī's socio-political engagement has generally been ignored in her scholarship because the patriarchal culture in which she wrote excluded women from the sphere of intellectual endeavours. This chapter focuses on several of Iᶜtiṣāmī's poems to demonstrate this overlooked dimension in her poetry.

Keywords: Committed literature, Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), socio-political engagement, patriarchy

Introduction

In her brief lifetime in the early decades of the twentieth century, Parvīn experienced two events in Iran's modern history. These events were the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 and the establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty by Riżā Shah (r. 1925–1941), which instigated major socio-political transformations in Persia. As a female poet, she transgressed the gender limit of silence set for women in the Iranian-Muslim culture by entering the male-dominated space of classical Persian poetry. Along with her male counterparts, she wrote about the socio-political issues of her times. A few scholars have referred to Parvīn's awareness of the contemporary issues in her society. Among them, Dabashi suggested that Parvīn was one of the most sensitive poets to social issues. In his study, Dabashi refers to themes such as denunciation of tyranny, praising revolt, challenging legitimacy, and portrayal of poverty as examples of Parvīn's social consciousness. Parvīn's socio-political engagement, among the other aspects of her work, has not received due attention. In this chapter, through close reading of her poems, I demonstrate how Parvīn expressed her thoughts about socio-political issues of her times, although she composed her poetry in the classical style. An overview of the two historical incidents and their impact on the poetry of the period clarifies why it is important to analyse Parvīn's socio-political poems.