“Terrestrial Verses” on the borderline: an interdisciplinary decolonial reading of Forugh Farrokhzad and Frida Kahlo

Abstract

This article studies the social and historical underpinnings of Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem “Terrestrial Verses” (1962) and her documentary film The House is Black (1962) in light of Frida Kahlo’s painting, Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932). I argue that this unlikely comparison—between neocolonial Mexico and postcolonial Iran—helps articulate a decolonial paradigm in Farrokhzad’s poetry that is often subdued in Persian literary studies. Few scholars have approached Frida Kahlo and Forugh Farrokhzad’s works from a post- or decolonial point of view, and almost no one has compared these two artists. Nevertheless, hitherto unseen aspects of their work address their politics, sense of worldliness, visions of decolonization, and dismantling of the colonial residues in their respective cultural contexts through their art and artistic expressions. In terms of Farrokhzad’s poetry, the history of medicine and public health in Iran is of high importance as I make my case. This interdisciplinary and comparative reading results in a new understanding of the epidemic of leprosy as an unintended consequence of the “colonial matrix of power” in Iran during WWI.