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Analysis of “The Wave” by Forough Farrokhzad

Forough Farrokhzad was one of the premiere Iranian activist poets who shied away from conventional forms like ghazal, a poem with meter, rhyming couplets, and a refrain.⁹ Neither God nor the Quran are the subjects of Forough’s poems, an omission that made them very controversial and unique in Tehran in the 1930s. Farrokhzad explored conflicts within marriage leading to divorce, and celebrated women’s creativity while denouncing patriarchal conventions. Several of Farrokhzad’s poems adopt a confrontational and argumentative tone against a male subject. In my analysis of “The Wave,” I will evaluate the use of free verse and how it determines the tone, speaker, theme, and purpose of the poem.

“The Wave” is a 25-line poem with six stanzas, each stanza varying in number of lines. It is a free verse poem, and if the reader turns the paper counter-clockwise, one will see a rendering or formation of waves. This makes it, among other things, a concrete poem which creates a visual image of the symbol or metaphor. The ebb and flow of tense matches the formation of the wave: present, present participle, and future tenses. The very first line of the poem is active voice: “you are a wave” followed by present participles: “Grabbing,” “dragging,” “fleeing,” and “watching.”  Towards the end of the poem, the speaker is using future tense: “I will wear a mask” and “And I’ll capture you.” The flow of the poem varies with exclamations, enjambments, and commands. This use of style and syntax shapes the tone of the poem.

The tone of the first stanza is judgmental. The speaker acknowledges the hurt caused by the subject, “to me” and immediately attacks the subject through the use of a metaphor, “you are a wave”. The tide is damaging, “unruly”, and “rebellious.”  Right before the list of negative connotations about the subject, the speaker uses a dash to create a dramatic pause, “you’re a rebellious tide/-in an eternal glide.”  The use of “glide” could be ironic since it means “coast;” however, the emotional and physical distance of the speaker and subject become greater, and there is a massive “drift” between the present and future relationship between them.

There is a shift in tone in the fourth and remaining stanzas due to the emphasis on first person point of view. The fourth stanza contains the central theme and purpose for the poem, “And I now know, the sea of regret-is your native land.” In our seminar, Paul Fry emphasized the value and integrity of a line within free verse. This is an exceptional example of how one line of poetry can be unpacked into various analytical approaches by students. “And I now know…” is reflective and confessional; time passed and the speaker is hurt, full of sorrow, and a sense of anger. The “sea of regret…” is a metaphor to convey emotional turmoil for the subject. The use of the dash, “-is your native language” is an idiosyncratic and defining characteristic of Farrokhzad. According to Farzaneh Milani, Farrokhzad “is a record of her own strict disbelief in ‘blind obedience’ to the patriarchal codes which used to govern her life before her marriage in the form of her father’s orders and, after her marriage, in the shape of her husband’s self-centered desires.”¹⁰ The purpose of this poem is to describe the vast emotional complications of divorce and saying goodbye to a partner. In the 1950s, divorce in many cultures around the world was considered taboo, and many people did not discuss this topic. Farrokhzad wanted to convey these conflicts in her poems, and this objective was groundbreaking not only in a religious culture, but as a secular topic as well. As this example shows, the purpose of such Muslim poems is relatable for readers of many different cultures.

Analysis of “Twigs” by Taha Muhammad Ali

Taha Muhammad Ali left his home village of Saffuriya, which is near Lebanon, during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. After a year in exile, Ali and his family resettled in Nazareth and kept a souvenir shop for more than 50 years. “Twigs” was published in Ali’s collection of poems, So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 a couple years before his death in 2011. Many of the poems in this collection describe the trauma and heartache experienced by Ali and his family when forced to flee his home village, Saffuriyya, by the State of Israel. The central conflict of “Twigs” refers to Ali’s departure from Saffuriya and consequent abandonment of a young woman whom he was supposed to wed in an arranged marriage.

Taha Muhammad Ali wrote about his life experiences in free verse. Like Farrokzad, Ali did not conform to the confining formal traditions of the Muslim poetry that followed much older and equally confining Persian traditions. With an elementary school education, Ali became an avid reader of William Shakespeare and John Steinbeck and saw his poetry as a means to express what he understood and experienced in literature and everyday life. John Palattella, an editor-at-large of The Nation, commented “Whereas [Mahmoud] Darwish and [Samih] al-Qasim, like most Palestinian poets, have favored the elevated and ornate rhetoric of fus’ha, or classical Arabic, Ali writes nonmaterial, unrhymed poems that blend classical fus’ha with colloquial Arabic.”¹¹ Fus’ha is the written and formal language of the Quran and other Islamic religious texts. Ali a middle-class Palestinian poet who was a “Muslim who sells [sold] Christian trinkets to Jews”¹² while alluding to Western thought with Shakespearean references throughout several of his poems. The biographical approach to Ali’s trauma enhances one’s analysis of tone, speaker, theme, and purpose of the poem.

There is an overwhelming tone of sadness and despair in “Twigs.”  Life is short, and the speaker is unable to take comfort in “music,” “poetry,” or the entertaining and cerebral Shakespeare play, King Lear. The actual poem itself is rather short, five stanzas, forty lines, with several lines consisting of three words or less. The syntax of the lines mirrors the tone, especially in line 18. “Exist” is the sole word in line 18 and presents a paradox for the reader. Prior to line 18, the speaker has divulged the magnitude of an undefined love. Life is short, but the speaker wants to establish a legacy “beyond the realm of women.” “Beyond the realm of women” refers to something transcended, a memory or feeling far removed from native land, territory, or country that once belonged to “ordinary people.” “Women” could be a metaphor for motherland, meaning Ali wrote poetry that would be read beyond Saffuriya, and Ali’s inability to return to his native land resulted in “sixty years” of yearning. Ali’s popularity and legacy as a poet far exceeds the jurisdiction of Gailee, Israel, and the Middle East.

For most of the poem, the tone is weary, but the speaker acknowledges faith in the fourth stanza, disclosing an inner strength. “Water is the finest drink” refers to Quran (31:30), “God preferred water over any other created thing and it the basis of creation…” Ali linked a core belief of Islam to the central theme of the poem: life is brief, but remembering our faith and what truly nourishes us will heal our “weary heart”; we have the ability to let go of the past, and “hate will be the first thing to turn to dust within us.”  Ali became a world renowned poet with limited education, but it took him a long time to reconcile himself to the past. He achieved what the speaker hopes to accomplish by creating “a measure of splendor in people’s hearts” through his writing and established a legacy through his art. Poetry and faith are synonymous for the speaker, who relinquishes “all of sixty years” of regret, hatred, and “all that we’ve longed for” at the very last moment of life in the hope of eternal peace.

Time Segments and Description of Episodes of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

Episode 001-How Muslim Are You?

0:00-16:35 Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed and Zahra Noorbakhsh describe their current jobs as satirical writers and comedians, explaining what they hope to achieve in their conversations through this social medium, and Zahra shares a prime example of how her mother wanted her to assimilate into her new school by not wearing a hijab, but bought her “hammer pants,” which, however, were not fashionable at the time. After 16:35, Taz and Zahra start to discuss another podcast, Serial, about a criminal investigation of Adnan Syed, a Muslim teenager accused of murdering his girlfriend.

Episode 002-Valentine’s Day is Haram

0:00-15:30 Taz and Zahra debate right away whether or not Valentine’s Day is forbidden or haram for Muslims. Taz says, “Everyone should love everybody.”  Zahra responds with “That is stupid.” Both Taz and Zahra erupt in laughter and share childhood and adolescent memories about Valentine’s Day, and Taz markets her Valentine’s Day card collection as another means “to disrupt the narrative of what it means to be Muslim.”  Once Taz and Zahra finish their segment on Valentine’s Day, they debate whether or not pork is haram for religious, health-safety, or economical reasons.

Episode 005-Shame on You

5:16-8:56, 14:00-23:30 This is probably one of my favorite segments from the first year of the podcast. Taz reads a Facebook post from a man who calls the girls “disgusting” and “shameful.”  I don’t know if I would have the guts to read this post aloud, but Taz and Zahra created this podcast to interpret and explore this very moment. Taz was upset by the word “shame” because it reinforces a strong patriarchal tone, and she argues women are shamed by men and not the other way around. Zahra agrees, but she sees shame as a physical attribute: a body image problem. Zahra claims there is a lasting traumatic impact that shame has on a woman, because she feels controlled by it. Zahra refers to Brene Brown's Ted Talk on “Listening to Shame”¹³ which is a tremendous resource for all educators working with both male and female adolescents, explaining how shame is contextualized by both genders. Zahra describes what it was like for her to admit to her father for the first time she was dating non-Muslim men, and to open lines of communication enough to admit to him what it was like to go on some really horrible and also awesome dates. Her father told her he wants her to be respected and cherished no matter what, and Zahra is grateful she was honest with her father. Taz commented on her lack of dialogue with her parents about dating, but she identifies her dating schema as conservative and looks for someone who “believes in spiritual practice and had faith…” because values need to be shared and will impact a relationship.