Comparing The House is Black and Sin

Upon reading Sin and watching The House is Black, I’m not entirely convinced that Farrokhzad completely believed that the lepers would ever be healed of escape the colony. She shows us a lot of clips of the lepers in the middle of prayers and praise to God, and her voiceover at one point says, “Who is this in hell praising you, O Lord?” It makes me wonder if she is referring to the colony as hell. I also felt a sense of hope for the lepers when the male voiceover was stating facts about leprosy, because he said, “Leprosy is not incurable. Taking care of lepers stops the disease from spreading. Wherever the lepers have been adequately cared for, the disease has vanished.” And inside the colony is where the lepers are receiving the treatment that they need, so it doesn’t seem so farfetched that one day they’ll all be able to leave that place. Towards the end of the movie Farrokhzad says, “The harvest season passed, the summer season came to an end, and we did not find deliverance […] We wait for light and darkness reigns.” And so a message that I got out of this movie was that no matter what awful conditions that may enter your life, keeping a positive attitude and seeing the beautiful things in life can go farther than we sometimes may think. Things will not resolve themselves overnight.

I think Farrokhzad’s poems help us to better understand the feelings of those suffering from leprosy in the movie by writing about loneliness and hurt in terms of lost lovers or things like that, because more often than not we’re more capable of relating to love than to having leprosy. In Sin, the poem “Captive” reminded me a lot of the leper colony in The House is Black. Even though she is not physically imprisoned and the lepers in a sense are imprisoned, I think it relates well to how the lepers feel. She mentions that she daydreams about her escape. I don’t doubt that some of the people suffering from leprosy have thought about the day when they’re able to leave that place. I myself can relate to that feeling. Then in her poem “Mates,” the way she indents lines and separates words is almost literal to the meaning of the words on the page. She writes, “drip drop drip drop drip drop of water” and lays it on the page as if the words were actually drops of water. It’s interesting. And she separates words like “eyes” and “hands” by entire lines which reminds me of the quick cuts of faces and feet and hands in The House is Black. There is also a part in the movie where she makes quick cuts to the beat of a wheel on a wheelbarrow. It’s like the entire movie has a certain rhythm to it, much like her many poems. Reading those poems has helped me understand why she cut the movie the way she did.