Enigma of Exile by Sirous Partovi

Issue 162

Enigma of Exile is an ekphrastic dialogue between my photography and the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad, the most famous female Iranian poet. I first came to the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad as a teenager in Iran, shortly after a college student who was boarding in our home committed suicide. Her death defined my adolescent years. As many young adults I dwelt in dark thoughts romanticizing the macabre. In Forugh’s verses I found a language unknown to me before, a language of dark desires and poignant melancholy. Love and desire, anxiety and fear, loneliness and death, and the relationships between them all were exotic landscapes in which I imagined myself. The verses of her poetry resonated inside my anxious, restless mind.

Forty years since leaving Iran I find myself returning to the verses of Farrokhzad, stumbling over her words in my now broken Farsi. This time, however, I am experiencing her poetry as a seasoned physician who has come to know death intimately. I consider myself an exile, and the lines of Forugh’s poems spin a silken bridge from me back to Iran.

Forugh used symbols to convey her interest in life, death, love, captivity, and freedom. In these photographs, I used some of the same symbols as metaphor for human form, mood, and emotions. Each photograph is not a translation of a line or stanza of Farrokhzad’s verses but a visceral response to her poetry through reflection on my adolescent years. Her poems continue to resonate with me and guide my vision, while sculpting the landscape of my mind- a landscape haunted by melancholic beauty and loneliness and populated with birds who traverse the membrane of dreams and reality.

Sirous Partovi (he/him) lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
sirouspartovi.com | @snpartovi