Once a Dewdrop: Essays on the Poetry of Parvin Etesami

by Heshmat Moayyad (Editor)

241 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1994

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

These essays present the range of critical or popular response to probably the greatest female Iranian poet of the 20th century. As probably could be expected, some of the people whose status E’tesami challenged moved to invalidate her, and their main line of attack was to question her identity as a woman. They said that the intellect shown in these poems was utterly unlike the mind of a female. Such intellect was “manly,” “asexual,” or “cold and distant,” whereas a woman would be sentimental. Some accused that it must have been her father who wrote the poems, and Parvin had lied to claim herself the author. She replied with a poem including the line “Parvin is not a man.” Even decades later, a critic named Fazlollah Garakani wrote a whole book trying to prove that the poetic masterpieces attributed to E’tesami could not possibly have been written by such a “timid,” “cross-eyed” female. Seeming to sympathize with this poor woman, he claimed that she had been wrongly “accused” of being a poet. Fereshteh Davaran argued that E’tesami clearly “lacked femininity,” because women express their sexuality through “coquetry, flirting and loving” (pp. 84–85).