The issue of discontinuity, the formation of the corporeally delimited self, the innovation of a feminine poetic subjectivity, and the opposition between religion and secularism have dominated much of contemporary scholarly discourse on Furūgh Farrukhzād's (1935-1967/1314-1346 sh.) poetry. However, this paper focuses on the centrality and implications of prophetic enunciations as they appear in her poetic career. Particular focus is placed on Farrukhzād’spoem “Conquest of the Garden” and its reliance on a hyperbolic rhetoric of prophecy and argues that her poetic metaphors and allusions to theological topoi puts into doubt the possibility of any form of absolute subjectivity that is fixed, autonomous, and infinite.
Through a series of movements, Farrukhzād achieved a unique form of poetic expression in which the temporally specific, immanently historical, and socially turbulent forcefully penetrated the perennial and timeless mode of prophecy. In this respect, Farrukhzād should be properly situated in her historical conjuncture where there was a keen interest in creative, idiosyncratic, and even iconoclastic reconfiguration of religious and prescriptive prefigurations.
This essay traces the demythologization of the biblical/Qur'anic story of the Garden of Eden at the heart of “Conquest of the Garden” and shows how Farrukhzād’s poem mimics and subverts the story’s structure, infusing it with new meaning, and reflects on the consequences of poem's commentary on the loss of transcendental certitude with regard to temporality and subjectivity.
Concerning temporality, Farrukhzād uses the “I” of subjective utterances to persistently negotiate the moments of immediacy and infinity that revolve around the poem's theological topoi. However, the presence of this opposition between corporeally finite and infinite spatio-temporal spaces does not lead to a linear progression or a simple transcendental synthesis in Farrukhzād’s poetic assemblage. Rather, through a movement of negotiation and negation, Farrukhzād’s “I” enters the genre of the fragment, whose virtue is that it rejects the dominance of any authoritative discourse. While the aesthetic forms present in “Conquest of the Garden” resists teleological progression, where there is no sense of directing or orienting utterance itself, this paper reflects on the consequences of a loss of transcendental certitude with regard to the emergence of non-synchronous forms of temporality.
