Valentine's Day of the Dead (Part III)

 

Queen of Spades - screen print - 2022, Mahdieh Farhadkiaei

"In Iranian culture, women have historically cut their hair off in mourning, and over the past week we have seen videos of women snipping their locks at the funerals of loved ones killed by security forces. The act has also become a symbol of bodily autonomy and resistance against the oppressive regime."

- Via the 2022 Guardian article: Something in me sparked’: the Iranian women using art to protest.

"To walk among Iran’s rose gardens in spring is to experience a sensory and cultural journey. The air is thick with the heady scent of blossoms; the early morning sun glints off dew-laden petals; villagers hum songs while harvesting; poets and painters find inspiration in the delicate folds of each bloom. It is a celebration of nature, art, community, and history—a testament to a love affair that has endured for millennia.

In Iran, the rose is more than a flower. It is  memory, passion, spirituality, and identity rolled into a single, fragrant bloom. It embodies the Iranian understanding of beauty and impermanence, connecting the material and the divine, the ordinary and the transcendent. It is, quite simply, the flower of the nation’s heart."

- Excerpted from the online article: Iran’s Enduring Love Affair with the Rose. This information was, believe it or not, new to me and represented yet another thread in the weird web of synchronicities I found myself entangled in.

As it so happens, from mid-May to mid-June in the province of the ancient and beautiful city of Isfahan, Iran, there is the thousand-year old festival of Golab giri, a celebration of rosewater made from the fragrant Damask Rose (inset right), Iran's national flower which grows in abundance there. 

 

•

"I am like a schoolchild madly

in love with her geometry books.

I am forlorn

and imagine it is possible to take the garden to a hospital.

I imagine I imagine

And the garden’s heart has swollen in the heat

of this sun, its mind slowly drains of its lush memories."

- From I Pity the Garden, a poem written by beloved Iranian poet, film-maker, artist and feminist writer Forugh Farrokhzad (December 29, 1934 - February 13, 1967) and translated by Sholeh Wolpé.

Previously in the poem she mourns: "Our neighbors plant bombs and machine guns, instead of flowers, in their garden soil.

They cover their ponds, hiding bags of gunpowder..." and, "I fear the age that has lost its heart, the idleness of so many hands

the alienation in so many faces."

Often compared to Sylvia Plath, her poetry has a similar sense of urgency and rebellion. Their lives shared a similar tragic cast. Unlike Plath, however, Farrokhzad's  material can be wildly erotic and, at the same time, in the Persian tradition of Rumi, the Rose & the Nightingale and the Language of the Birds, strangely mystical.*

I am particularly moved by the line "I fear the age that has lost its heart."

I fear that age is now.

(Continued below the jump...)