A Tiny Place to Live, a Tiny Place to Die:An Ecofeminist Reading of Ahmad Shamlu’s “Ayda in the Mirror”

Ecofeminism is a recent critical approach in literary studies that aims to reclaim the dignity of women and nature by demonstrating the negative effects of patriarchal ideologies in anthropocentric societies marginalizing women and nature. Ecofeminists find the solution of this problem in identifying and changing the socio-cultural constructs and stereotypes that lead to oppression. Both women and nature play a crucial part in Ahmad Shamlu’s poems, and on a closer inspection one might observe the same thematic concept in his poetry, namely the association of the feminine with nature and the othering of both. Considering this aspect of his poetry and adopting ecofeminism as its critical approach, this study as a qualitative library research conducted in the form of content analysis, and it examines ecofeminist themes in one of his poems “Ayda in the Mirror.” Based on the binary oppositions culture/nature and man/woman, the positions of the feminine figure (Ayda) and nature are discussed. According to the findings of the study, Ayda is considered to be a part of nature and even superior to it. The speaker finds himself inferior to her, while he needs her for his own rebirth, that is, a form of life that would be far removed from the subjectivity imposed upon him by the dominant cultural hegemony. However, in the last analysis, as the present paper argues, in order to escape culture, in addition to the dominant cultural stereotypes about women and nature as symbols of beauty and fertility, the speaker has to have recourse to the same cultural institutions, most prominently poetry.

کلیدواژه ها:

ecofeminism ، othering ، culture ، nature ، femininity ، “Ayda in the Mirror”