Simin Behbahani (1927-2014) was an award winning poet who used verse to fight injustice, known as “the lioness of Iran.”
Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know -- but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Leading Ladies, Activists, STEMinists, Local Legends, and many more. Encyclopedia Womannica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures.
Encyclopedia Womannica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Liz Smith, Cinthia Pimentel, Grace Lynch, and Maddy Foley. Special thanks to Shira Atkins, Edie Allard, and Carmen Borca-Carrillo.
We are offering free ad space on Wonder Media Network shows to organizations working towards social justice. For more information, please email Jenny at jenny@wondermedianetwork.com.
Follow Wonder Media Network:
Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Our local legend is an award winning poet who used verse to fight injustice. Known as “the lioness of Iran” let’s talk about Simin Behbahani.
Siminbar Kalili was born in 1927 in Tehran. A love of poetry ran in her family -- it was also the force that brought her parents together. Simin’s mother, Fakhr-e Ozma Arghun, submitted a poem to a magazine edited by Abbas Khalili, a translator and poet. Abbas was so taken by the writing that he proclaimed he wished to marry the author -- and he did!
Just three days after their wedding, Abbas was exiled for articles he had written challenging the ruling dynasty in Iran. Abbas’ conflicts with the regime caused him to be largely absent during Simin’s childhood. Abbas did not meet Simin until she was 14 months old, and then did not see her again until she was 11.
As a result of his prolonged absences, the marriage deteriorated. Simin’s parents divorced when she was three years old. Simin was then raised by her mother and step-father, another journalist, who continued to instill in her a love for literature and poetry. Simin started writing her own poems at age 12, and by 14, had her first poem published in a literary journal.
As a teenager, Simin was a member of the youth branch of the Iranian communist party. That fact and allegations that she wrote articles criticizing her school in the student paper led to Simin’s expulsion from school.. Looking back on the experience, she said the school president had insulted her and slapped her. She said:
“From that time the purpose of my poetry has been to fight injustice.”
Simin then enrolled in midwifery school and later pursued a law degree, although she never used it. For most of her career - over 20 years - she taught high school physics, chemistry and literature.
In 1947, Simin met and married Hassan Behbahani, an English teacher. Together they had three children, two sons and a daughter. The two were married for 22-years before divorcing in 1969. Simin remarried the following year but was widowed 14 years later. She chronicled the pain of losing her second husband in her poem ‘That man, my fellow companion’.
While Simin’s poetry had always been flavored with social commentary, her work took on a new social consciousness after the 1979 Iranian revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq war.
One unique feature of Simin’s poetry was her reinterpretation of the ghazal form. These traditional sonnet-like poems, customarily featured a Persian man admiring a woman. But Simin played with these gender dynamics, placing a woman as protagonist gazing upon a wide variety of subjects, including war, self-determination and the human rights abuses of the Iranian regime.
She was criticized by hardline Iranian news-sites as unpatriotic, calling her poetry slanderous in a way that could only benefit Iran’s enemies. But Simin saw herself as a patriot, insisting that her writings were only ever intended to make Iran better.
One of her most celebrated poems, “My Country, I Shall Build You Again”, written in the midst of the Iraq-Iran war in 1982 is considered a generational anthem. It begins:
"My country, I will build you again,
If need be, with bricks made from my life.
I will build columns to support your roof,
If need be, with my bones.
I will inhale again the perfume of flowers
Favoured by your youth.
I will wash again the blood off your body
With torrents of my tears."
Simin continued to be a divisive figure in Iran well into the 2000s. In 2006, a newspaper was shut down by Iranian authorities merely for printing one of her poems. In 2010, when she was 82 years old - and nearly blind - she was stopped in the airport and interrogated about poems she’d written the year prior that criticized a fraudulent Iranian election.
Despite the backlash she received at home, Simin was internationally celebrated for her work as a poet and activist. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 and 2002. She was awarded the Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammet grant, which called her the “voice of freedom rising against repression everywhere.” In 2002, the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation honored her for the unparalleled beauty of her poetry and lifelong devotion to justice. In 2008, her dedication to improving the lives of Iranian women was commemorated with the Latifeh Yarshater Award.
Simin passed away on August 18, 2014 in Tehran. She was 87 years old. Her funeral was attended by thousands, including prominent artists and human rights activists with commemorative celebrations occurring worldwide.
Simin’s body of work includes over 600 poems captured in 20 books on subjects ranging from revolution to freedom of speech, war to prostitution. She was a fierce critic of Iranian religious authorities and fought tirelessly to advance the rights of women.
Farzaneh Milani, a professor at the University of Virginia who translated many of her poems said of Simin, “She became the voice of the Iranian people. She was the elegant voice of dissent, of conscience, of nonviolence, of refusal to be ideological.”
All month, we’re talking about Local Legends. For more on why we’re doing what we’re doing, check out our newsletter, Womannica Weekly. Find us on facebook and instagram @encyclopediawomannica. You can also find me on twitter @ jennymkaplan.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!