The Poetry of Simin Behbahani

Introduce your students to the poetry of Simin Behbahani, Iran’s national poet who died this week. Her poetry tells us a lot about Iran after the revolution.

Although Behbahani wrote a lot about love, she also tackled political and social issues in Iran after the revolution of 1979. Some of her accolades include the the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom in 2009, and two nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Her poetry reveals both her love for Iran and her concern about the excesses of the new regime after the revolution. She wrote a lot about women’s rights, and about the plight of those who opposed the regime.

In one of her most famous poems, My Country, I Will Build You Again, part of which President Obama quoted, she “expressed the fragile optimism of a nation still convinced that it had just staged a democratic revolt—not one to usher in a new Islamist dark age,” notes the Wall Street Journal.

You can read some of her poems on her home page.  And the BBC has good obituary here.

Below you can see a clip from the PBS NewsHour in which University of Virginia scholar, Farzaneh Milani, talks about the life of Simin Behbahani.