This song was conceived as a companion piece to Ravel’s Shéhérazade, offering a different view of the infamous enslaved storyteller from the One Thousand and One Nights. I set the words of another Persian queen: Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), the queen of modernist poetry, whose transgressive feminist language revolutionized Iranian art. Scheherazade’s experience of female captivity is not unlike that which Farrokhzad underwent, and which millions of Iranian women continue to endure.