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Dylan Morrongiello

May 11, 2015

CL 323: Self-Revelation in Womens Writing

The Childhoods of Hurston and Farrokhzad

Zora Neale Hurston and Forugh Farrokhzad have similar relations to their

respective literary traditions. They differentiated themselves from their more

traditional peers both because of their gender and Forughs non-participation in

Muslim and Zoras embracing of her African ancestry. Hurston and Farrokhzad

demonstrated very similar subject interests, due to their modernist perceptions and

separation from their dominant cultures. Both authors presented a great deal of self-

revelation in their literary works. Hurstons self-revelation shows through her

knowledge of Florida culture and her depth of experience, whereas Farrokhzads

self-revelation appears in her frank descriptions of her actions, thoughts, and

feelings. Within this revelation, Hurston and Farrokhzad both note a strong influence

of their childhoods on their adult life and their writings.

Many factors influenced Zora and Forughs childhoods. One important

difference is their financial upbringing and the environment provided by their

families, specifically Hurston and Farrokhzads relations to their mothers. Several

intrinsic characteristics also contributed to their childhood years. Both writers

exhibited natural inquisitiveness in their attitude and demeanor, expressed interests

that were contradictory to the mainstream cultures to which they belonged, and

possessed feelings of isolation and loneliness. Though these variables did not

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always positively influence the writers childhoods, they did mold a childhood that led

to an adulthood characterized by significant literary achievement.

A major difference between Hurston and Farrokhzads childhoods is their

financial circumstances. Hurston grew up in the town of Eatonville, Florida, which is

located approximately 5 miles outside of Orlando. Eatonville was the first

incorporated black community in Florida. In her childhood, Zora was relatively

uneducated and very poor, but was very much immersed in black life, which she

reveals in her writing. When Zora was sixteen, she joined a traveling Gilbert and

Sullivan theatre company to be able to support herself after her mothers death. In

return, the mother of the woman for whom she worked arranged for her to attend

high school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore, which enabled her to later attend

Howard University and Barnard College to study anthropology.

Forugh, on the other hand, was born in Tehran, Iran, into a middle-class

family and her father ensured she was absorbed in education from a young age.

Forughs father had a personal library and taught Forugh to read before she was old

enough to attend school. It was because of this that Forugh developed a love of

literature, which is particularly unusual in a society where most women are illiterate.

After finishing the ninth grade, Forugh left high school to attend a technical school

where she studied dressmaking and painting. Forugh felt that writing poetry became

more natural for her in this discipline.

Both Hurston and Farrokhzad had rather close relationships with their

mothers. However, their mothers treated their daughters very differently. Zoras

mother, Lucy Potts strongly encouraged Zora to be creative. In her autobiography,

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Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston recalls that her mother would always encourage

her children to jump at de sun. Unlike black women of the time, Lucy Potts

possessed a voice and was herself contrary to the gender expectations set by her

society. At the time of her death, Lucy had specifically requested that Zora ensure

her pillow does not get turned over when she dies. Though Hurston was ultimately

unable to fulfill her mothers wishes, this instance shows the will power possessed

by Lucy in her lifetime.

Forughs mother Turan Vaziri Tabar was much more rigid and succumbed to

the gender roles present in Iranian society. Forughs sister Puran described their

mother as a slave to rules and regulations. She describes a moment in Forughs

childhood when her mother berated her after she showed her friends her New

Years Eve outfit, which is an act against Iranian culture. Unlike Zoras mother,

Forughs mother believed her daughter should conform to her cultures expectations

and she imposed her societys gender roles on her. She sought to mold Forugh and

her other daughter into ideal Iranian women that are subservient and loyal to their

men, whereas Lucy Potts sought to give Zora the independent voice that she could

never have herself.

Spiritual independence and a sense of natural inquisitiveness were traits that

characterized Hurston and Farrokhzads childhoods. Hurston wrote in-depth about

her inquisitiveness in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. She writes that she

naturally picked up the reflections of life with her own instruments and absorbed

what she gathered according to her own experience. Zora also possesses a very

fanciful imagination. She explains that she had many imaginary friends as a child,

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and turned inanimate objects into her friends and playthings, such as Miss Corn-Cob

and Reverend Door Knob. When these inanimate objects ceased to commune with

Zora like real men, her imagination shifted to actual men. She tells a story of a

simple man, Mr. Pendir, who lived by himself in Lake Belle, whom Zora turned into

an alligator at night for her own amusement. In her autobiography, she also tells the

story of how she thought the moon was her own special playmate, and how she

became very jealous and upset when a friend told her that the moon was also her

playmate. This attitude and sense of imagination never quite left her in her

adulthood. Zora wrote her novels with a sense of understanding created by her own

influence of experience. This appears most predominantly in Seraph on the

Suwanee, in which Hurston tells the story of a Florida white cracker culture. Her

descriptions of shrimping, the turpentine industry, and the Floridian fauna show her

immense knowledge derived from anthropological experience.

Forugh Farrokhzad also possessed a similar natural inquisitiveness.

However, opposed to Hurston, this inquisitiveness was present as a sense of

instinct. Forughs life closely resonated with nature, so many of her ideas and her

literal development occurred with a natural progression. In her poem Another Birth,

Farrokhzad describes her childhood nature as one who plants their hands in the

garden. Naturally, Forugh was a rebellious child and her sense of instinct led her to

the alley with the boys, in which she was blown away by her first marriage. By the

time she was sixteen, her independent spirit began to strike acquaintances with

boys in her neighborhood, and she married her distant relative Parviz Shapur, after

much insistence by Forugh, when she was sixteen.

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In their childhoods, both Hurston and Farrokhzad expressed interests and

behaviors that did not conform to their cultures pre-conceived gender norms. In her

autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road, Hurston describes many moments of her

childhood in which she exhibited this sort of behavior. Zora was not only a naturally

inquisitive child. She was also very insistent. In her childhood, Hurston sought to

create a unique identity for herself. She was not able to simply conform to any belief

that was presented to her without questioning it.

Farrokhzads had an intense sexual interest in her childhood. As a child and

as an adolescent, she was naturally curious about her body. She writes in an early

poem entitled Awareness about how her body, on its first day of adolescence,

began to open in innocent amazement. In another poem, Those Days, Forugh

presents a childhood that is filled with nostalgia and innocence, and a contrasting

adolescence that she describes as those days of wonder at the bodys secret. This

sexual interest was also very much present in Farrokhzads adulthood, where she

demonstrates rejection of Iranian sexual values. In arguably her most famous poem,

The Sin, Farrokhzad describes a first-person recollection of a sexual encounter

with a man who is not her husband. Unlike the Iranian society, which viewed

premarital or extramarital sexual pleasure a grave sin, Forugh saw it as a natural

function within a relationship.

Because of these interests and behaviors, Hurston and Farrokhzad both

reveal feelings of isolation from their respective cultures and traditions in their

childhoods. Both writers existed within societies that suppressed women. In the

African American culture, women suffered retribution from the dominant white

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culture as well as the black male culture. In the Iranian tradition, women are strictly

subservient to men. Several passages in the Koran back this assertion.

In her childhood, Zora was never particularly friendly with her peers. She was

isolated because of her natural curiosity and her excellence in the classroom. As a

child, Hurston mostly kept to herself and her imagination. She credits the sense of

imagination to her interest in reading as a child. In school, she was a very avid

reader, having read from authors such as the great Greeks, Robert Louis

Stevenson, and Hans Andersen. She would always read through to the end of her

school reader before the rest of the class. In Dust Tracks on a Road, she describes

a time when two white women recognized her literary excellence in the classroom.

This gift of educational excellence was also a curse. Zora explains how her

elaborate stories and imagination kept her from making friends with the other school

children. Even at a young age, Zora recognized that she was different from her

peers. They wouldnt understand her imaginative personality and would simply laugh

off her extravagant story-telling. Hurston had a mature sense of understanding that

her peers did not possess.

In her poem Friday, Farrokhzad describes the isolation she felt on Fridays

in Tehran. According to the Iranian tradition, Friday was the weekly day off. In

Forughs early years, this means that Friday was, for most Iranians, a day of

window-shopping and visits with relatives. However, because Forugh was an

unchaperoned teenage girl, Fridays were for her a day of loneliness, when she was

forced to stay indoors because of her gender and young age. This poem seems to

characterize Forughs adolescence, in that it represents a period of time in which the

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Iranian society muffled Forughs femininity and thus repressed her budding

sexuality. These feelings of loneliness followed Forugh into her adult life. She writes

in her poem Those Days that that girl who once enjoyed all of the simplicities and

frivolities of childhood has now become a lonely woman. In her life, the

companionship of a male partner never satisfied her. It wasnt until she discovered

her love of writing poetry and resolved to live her life according to that love. She

reveals these sentiments in Conquest of the Garden when she expresses her

determination to follow the dictates of her heart.

As is true of any life, childhood plays an important role in the development of

human beings into adulthood. Both Zora Neale Hurston and Forugh Farrokhzads

experiences and attitudes in childhood influenced their individuality in adulthood and

their dedication to writing. While many factors contribute to this development, it

becomes clear that some aspects had more influence than others. Financial

upbringing and family relations are a significant dynamic in the development of the

two writers. However, there were also several inherent factors present in the

childhoods of the two writers, such as their natural inquisitiveness and their

rebellious behaviors that also contributed to their development. It is a combination of

these variables that create a unique voice for the writers, allowing their literary works

to stand out as individual and removed from the literary and cultural traditions to

which the writers belong. Their writing transcends their cultural norms to create an

experience that is universal for the reader. In their departure from their mainstream

cultures, Hurston and Farrokhzad are able to better illustrate their respective

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experiences in life, in a manner that is purely original and not influenced by a

dominant authority.