Parwana Fayyaz’s Three Dolls and the Politics of Femininity

Afghani poet Parwana Fayyaz’s poem Three Dolls is shaped by her lived experiences of war, exile and state oppression. Caught in the crossfire of foreign invasions, civil war, and Taliban rule, Fayyaz’s poem focuses on the small, intimate acts of survival in the midst of devastation. Her poem struck a deep chord with me, because like Fayyaz, I also have sisters and her poem reminded me of our relationships with our dolls, and who they came from.

When I was growing up in Kenya in the 1980’s, my mother’s sister, my Masi, made a doll for my baby sister. It wasn’t really a doll in the usual sense, but more like a cotton pillowcase shaped like a doll’s body, with a printed face and strawberry dress which my aunt had stuffed and sewn using blanket stitches around the edges. I remember it distinctly, how it arrived in a parcel from Mombasa, where she lived, to Nairobi, where we were and the excitement at receiving it. It was a symbol of my Masi’s affection for us. My sister named her Polly and would sleep with her under her head every night, as though it offered her some protection.

Much earlier, when I was two years old, another Masi, had bought me a doll. My parents had travelled for a few months and left me in the care of some relatives. My Masi visited me every evening, and much later she told me how I had cried inconsolably, and she had brought me the doll with silver hair to cheer me up. The doll was named Silvie, and she hung around until my late twenties when I finally gave her up. Polly too, stuck around for many years, and only, after a decade of being washed and dried in the sun, when she was a faded, unshapely figure of just lumps of cotton wool, she was laid to rest.

In her poem Fayyaz writes about how her mother lovingly crafted three dolls from garden sticks, pillow stuffing, and scraps of fabric. I was reminded of my Masi sewing Polly for my sister. But, in Fayyaz’s case, the bare essentials involved in the creative making were materials borne from necessity.

Their figures were made with sticks

gathered from our neighbour’s garden.

She rolled white cotton fabric

around the stick frames

to create a skin for each doll.

Then she fattened the skin

with cotton extracted from an old pillow.

With black and red yarns bought from

uncle Farid’s store, my mother created faces.

A unique face for each doll.

Large black eyes, thick eyelashes and eyebrows,

Long black hair, a smudge of black for each nose.

And lips in red.

Our dolls came alive,

with each stitch of my mother’s sewing needle.

Fayyaz speaks of the dolls in a personal, conversational tone. The images she creates highlights how each sister chose a doll, and named it.

And finally, we named our dolls.

Mine with a skirt of royal green was the oldest and tallest,

And I called her Duur. Pearl.

Shabnam chose a skirt of bright yellow

and called her doll, Pari. Angel.

And our youngest sister, Gohar, chose deep blue fabric,

and named her doll, Raang. Color.

For Fayaaz and her sisters Duur, Pari, Raang, became symbols of comfort, and resilience, both for her as an individual but also for the collective memory of the family. An intergenerational, eternal connection between a mother and her daughters and between the sisters themselves, and she notes how the dolls outlived them.

They lived longer than our childhoods.

Despite the ravages of war outside, her mother’s creativity, the act of making the dolls for her daughters, becomes a form of quiet resistance. The dolls in Fayyaz’s poem are symbols of connection to the past and suggest that the love and connection nurtured in familial relationships can survive even in the most violent of circumstances. Through honouring her mother’s act of crafting, the poet demonstrates how Afghani women, through their creativity and resilience, carve out spaces of love and agency 

within the chaos of war.

Walking through the streets of London, recently, I came across a plastic doll lying on the pavement. The head was by the dustbin, the body across the street. The face, though still fixed in a smile, was missing one of its bright blue eyes. The empty socket, even though it was just on a toy, gave me the shivers. There was something violently careless in how the naked doll had been discarded, the force in its beheading, and a kind of indifference in the separation of head and body. How do we  discard memories and how do we hold onto them? Did this doll ever have a name and who did she belong to?

I was reminded of my visit to the Afghan war rugs exhibition at the British Museum. As I wandered among the handwoven depictions of helicopters, tanks, and battlefields, thinking about how domestic and violent histories are often stitched together, sometimes literally, I noticed other artefacts on display. In one of the glass cabinets was a small, doll- sized model of a burqa. Curiously, it was reportedly sold to soldiers for them to take home as gifts, presumably for their daughters to dress their dolls. Or, the other suggestion was that they used these as covers, to hide their bottles of alcohol, from immediate detection. The contradiction between the two, a garment meant to conceal or protect, miniaturized for a doll and repurposed for play or kitsch, shocked me.

In that moment I recalled Fayyaz’s poem, The Three Dolls, but I also remembered Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad’s poem, The Wind-Up Doll, where she depicts the doll as reduced to being just a plaything for men-something mechanical and disposable. Between these poems and the object in the museum, the doll became for me, not just a child’s toy, as it had been while growing up, but a metaphor for something political: a site where power, gender, and violence intersect. Both poets use the metaphor and explore their personal, cultural and historical circumstances. Though separated by time and style, both use the doll as a symbol to illustrate the female experience, in the context of war, gender, and social constraint. However, while Fayyaz’s Three Dolls reclaims it as a symbol of maternal care, memory, and survival, Farrokhzad’s Wind-Up Doll explores the metaphor as a critique of repression and emotional stagnation.

Farrokhzad’s Wind-Up Doll, was written in the early 1960s, when the poet was living during a time of profound political and cultural change in Iran. Under the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran was undergoing a rapid process of modernization, which included social and legal reforms aimed at improving the status of women. However, these reforms were contradictory; on the one hand they promoted a Westernized vision of women’s roles while on the other, they reinforced traditional, patriarchal structures. Farrokhzad, a feminist poet and filmmaker, and castigated for her sensual work, was one of the few to critique the State and its repression and objectification of women.

The Wind-Up Doll addresses the emotional and social confinement of women under the Iranian regime, gives voice to the women living under patriarchy, and tells how their silencing by the State forced women to become like unfeeling wind-up dolls.

Like a wind-up doll one can look out

at the world through glass eyes,

spend years inside a felt box,

body stuffed with straw,

wrapped in layers of dainty lace.

The image of the wind-up doll in Farrokhzad’s poem is a metaphor for a passive, manipulated femininity and a symbol of how the Iranian State reduced women to mere objects of display, satisfaction, and obedience. Her poem is thus a scathing commentary on the regime’s sexual, social, and even existential repression of women.

Although the cultural lenses are distinct, there are some commonalities in both poems. The idea of the doll in Fayyaz’s and Farrokhzad’s works takes on more than just a figurative role. It becomes a tool of power, control, and agency, reflecting how women’s lives and their bodies also have been moulded by the forces of history,  society, and war.

In Fayyaz’s poem, the doll is a symbol of maternal love, creative survival, and resistance to state violence. In Farrokhzad’s case, the doll represents how the state and patriarchy objectify women and coerce them into embodying the cold, mechanical nature of societal expectations. While in Fayyaz’s poem, the dolls are named and dressed in specific colours and fabrics which give them a type of personality and unique identity, in Farrokhzad’s poem the wind-up doll is unnamed- she could represent any and every woman. For both poets, the named and unnamed dolls, as the main focus in their poems, are symbols of how women endure difficult times at the hands of patriarchy, but keep centred and made alive. While Fayyaz’s dolls speak of resilience, care, and emotional continuity, Farrokhzad’s wind-up doll, with its passivity and lifelessness, is about the state’s silencing of women’s voices.

I return to that disturbing moment I encountered in London, where I found the doll was carelessly discarded on the street, and am reminded of the suffocating conformity and disposability of Farrokhzad’s wind-up doll. At the same time, I recall the tender defiance of Fayyaz’s mother’s handmade creations which takes me back to my own childhood, and how the doll remains a powerful symbol of the support and resilience of intergenerational love, solidarity and sisterhood.

Three Dolls

During the wars,

my mother made our clothes

and our toys.

For her three daughters,

she made dresses and once,

she made us each a doll.

Their figures were made with sticks

gathered from our neighbour’s garden.

She rolled white cotton fabric

around the stick frames

to create a skin for each doll.

Then she fattened the skin

with cotton extracted from an old pillow.

With black and red yarns bought from

uncle Farid’s store, my mother created faces.

A unique face for each doll.

Large black eyes, thick eyelashes and eyebrows,

Long black hair, a smudge of black for each nose.

And lips in red.

Our dolls came alive,

with each stitch of my mother’s sewing needle.

We dyed their cheeks with red rose-petals,

and fashioned skirts from bits of fabric,

from my mother’s sewing basket.

And finally, we named our dolls.

Mine with a skirt of royal green was the oldest and tallest,

And I called her Duur. Pearl.

Shabnam chose a skirt of bright yellow

and called her doll, Pari. Angel.

And our youngest sister, Gohar, chose deep blue fabric,

and named her doll, Raang. Color.

They lived longer than our childhoods.

From Forty Names, Carcanet Press, Parwana Fayyaz

Wind-Up Doll

Even more, oh yes,

one can remain silent even more.

Inside eternal hours

one can fix lifeless eyes

on the smoke of a cigarette,

on a cup’s form,

the carpet’s faded flowers,

or on imaginary writings on the wall.

With stiff claws one can whisk

the curtains aside, look outside.

It’s streaming rain.

A child with a balloon bouquet

cowers beneath a canopy. A rickety cart

flees the deserted square in haste.

One can remain fixed in one place, here

beside this curtain…but deaf, but blind.

With an alien voice, utterly false,

one can cry out: I love!

In the oppressive arms of a man

one can be a robust, beautiful female–

skin like leather tablecloth,

breasts large and hard.

One can stain the sinlessness of love

in the bed of a drunk, a madman, a tramp.

One can cunningly belittle

every perplexing puzzle.

Alone, occupy oneself with crosswords,

content with unimportant words,

yes, unimportant letters, no more than five or six.

One can spend a lifetime kneeling,

head bowed,

before the cold altar of the Imams,

find God inside an anonymous grave,

faith in a few paltry coins.

One can rot inside a mosque’s chamber,

an old woman, prayers dripping from lips.

Whatever the equation, one can always be a zero,

yielding nothing, whether added, subtracted, or multiplied.

One can think your eyes are buttons from an old ragged shoe

caught in a web of anger.

One can evaporate like water from one’s own gutter.

With shame one can hide a beautiful moment

like a dark, comic instant photo

rammed deep into a wooden chest.

Inside a day’s empty frame one can mount

the portrait of a condemned, a vanquished,

a crucified. Cover the gaps in the walls

with silly, meaningless drawings.

Like a wind-up doll one can look out

at the world through glass eyes,

spend years inside a felt box,

body stuffed with straw,

wrapped in layers of dainty lace.

With every salacious squeeze of one’s hand,

for no reason one can cry:

Ah, how blessed, how happy I am!

From Sin, and other poems, Forough Farrokhzad