Allyson Hallman: The House Is Black / Sin

     The message I got out of The House Is Black is that even if your circumstances are difficult and painful, sometimes you don't really have another option. "Man is a problem solver"--if your problem is your circumstances, you are the one that's going to fix it, so make the best of it while you can. The lepers were in pain, and they were quarantined in a colony and cut off from the rest of the world, but they continued to practice their religion(s), play games, sing, dance, attend school, and entertain themselves because they had some degree of control over their situation.

     In Sin, specifically in her poem “On Loving,” Farrokhzad writes, “Yes, so love begins, / and though the road’s end is out of sight, / I do not think of the end. / It’s the loving that I love,” and in the next stanza, “Why shun darkness? / The night abounds with diamond drops.” Upon reading this part of the poem, I compared it to The House Is Black and the message that I got out of it. The people in the colony don’t give up and spend the rest of their lives sulking because they have leprosy; they make do with what they have, not thinking about how they’re shunned from society, and they concentrate on the now, not the end. Just as Farrokhzad repeats shots quickly in the film to make sure we haven’t forgotten them, she repeats certain stanzas in many of her poems in Sin to make sure we haven’t forgotten them, either.