A Comparative Study of the Devil Poems of Khalil Hawi and Forough Farrokhzad

In the religious context, the Devil’s rebellion in the creation myth represents sin, evil, and eternal damnation. But sometimes writers, by disturbing familiar signs and defamiliarization of names such as the Devil, recreate religious myths which are of a new form and which, regarding their content, oppose the original ones and, thus, are not very consistent with public opinion. The present research, focusing on the practice of defamiliarization of familiar concepts, examines the symbolic representation of the Devil in the poems of Khalil Hawi and Forough Farrokhzad who, with a different conception of this symbol, have transcended the borders of religious concepts. As deconstruction of literary works into their sources and influences destroys their entirety, the article employs a methodology which does not consider the way the text has influenced other texts and has been influenced by them. Thus, we study the poems of two poets who have no relation to each other and are not influenced by each other. In fact, what makes the article to focus on the foregoing poems of Farrokhzad and Hawi is that they enable us to find new meanings in relation to the Devil, meanings which are a form of deviation and a new expression of the concept of the Devil. These points provide a context in which we can study the content of the poems of the two poets in a comparative manner. So, the article tries to reexamine the poems of Farrokhzad and Hawi to demonstrate that they have used Koranic images and stories to recreate the Devil and that how their shared resources such as existential thoughts and familiarity with the works of Western romantics along with their successive failures in life have affected their poems in this regard so that Farrokhzad’s poetry is the cry of the captive humanity and Hawi’s is the scream of a patriot who has reached deadlock.