by Azar Nafisi
So now, let us review all the points we have discussed. Yes, the novel is about concrete living relationships, a man’s love for a woman, a woman’s betrayal of that love. But it is also about wealth, its great attraction as well as its destructive power, the carelessness that comes with it, and, yes, it is about the American dream, a dream of power and wealth, the beguiling light of Daisy’s house and the port of entry to America. It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.
What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then.
Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.
When I left the class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby’s. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?
22
After the class I felt exhausted. I tried to leave quickly, pretending I had some important business at hand. In fact, I had nothing to do. I put on my coat and hat and gloves and left. I had nowhere to go. It snowed heavily that afternoon, and then the sun came out over piles of clean, fresh white snow. I had a friend, a childhood friend I loved a great deal—she was older than me—when I was very young, before I was sent to England. She and I would sometimes walk in the snow for a long time. We would walk to our favorite pastry shop, where they had amazing cream puffs, made with real cream. We bought the cream puffs and went back out into the snow, in whose protective gleam we ate them as we talked nonsense and walked and walked.
I left the university and started to walk past the book-lined street. The street vendors selling tapes had turned up the volume, and they hopped from one foot to the other to keep warm, their woolen hats pulled low over their ears, steam escaping from their mouths and appearing to rise with the sound of the music, rising and disappearing into the blue sky. I walked down the street until the bookstores gave way to other shops, and to a movie house where we used to go as children that was now closed. So many movie houses were burned down during those jubilant days of the revolution! I continued down the street until I came to a square called Ferdowsi, named after our greatest epic poet, and paused. Was it on this spot that my friend and I had stopped to laugh that day as we licked our cream puffs?
As the years went by, the snow became polluted with the increasing pollution of Tehran; my friend was now in exile, and I had come home. Until then home had been amorphous and elusive: it presented itself in tantalizing glimpses, with the impersonal familiarity of old family photographs. But all of these feelings belonged to the past. Home was constantly changing before my eyes.
I had a feeling that day that I was losing something, that I was mourning a death that had not yet occurred. I felt as if all things personal were being crushed like small wildflowers to make way for a more ornate garden, where everything would be tame and organized. I had never felt this sense of loss when I was a student in the States. In all those years, my yearning was tied to the certainty that home was mine for the having, that I could go back anytime I wished. It was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile. As I walked those dearly beloved, dearly remembered streets, I felt I was squashing the memories that lay underfoot.
23
The spring semester started ominously. From the very beginning, there were few classes. For the past year the government had been preoccupied with suppressing opposition groups, closing down the progressive newspapers and magazines, punishing former government functionaries and carrying on a war against the minorities, especially the Kurds. Now it turned its attention towards the universities, hotbeds of dissent, where the Muslim revolutionaries did not hold power. The universities played the role of the now-banned newspapers in protesting the suppression of progressive forces. Almost daily a protest meeting, talk or demonstration was organized at one of the universities, especially the University of Tehran.
One morning as I entered the department building, I could sense that something was wrong. An enlarged photograph of Hashemi Rafsanjani, who at the time was the speaker of the Parliament, was pasted to the wall opposite the entrance. Beside it was a flyer alerting students to a “conspiracy” to shut down the universities. Beneath the photograph and the warning, a large half-circle of students had formed, which seemed to contain smaller half-circles within it. As I drew closer, the students, some of whom I recognized as my own, made way and opened a space for me, in the middle of which I found Mr. Nyazi, arguing heatedly with one of the leaders of a leftist student organization.
Mr. Nyazi was vehemently denying that the government had any intention of closing down the universities. The other student pointed to Mr. Rafsanjani’s speech at Mashad University about the need to purify the educational system and to trigger a cultural revolution in the universities. They went back and forth for some time, encouraged by murmurs from the crowd surrounding them. I did not stay to the end of the arguments; it seemed clear that there wouldn’t be any. In those days the secular and leftist forces dominated the universities, and certain developments were not yet conceivable to some of us. To think that the universities could be closed down seemed as far-fetched as the possibility that women would finally succumb to wearing the veil.
It did not take long, however, for the government to announce its intention to suspend classes and to form a committee for the implementation of the cultural revolution. This committee was given the power to reconstruct the universities in such a way as to make them acceptable to the leaders of the Islamic Republic. What they wanted was not very clear, but they had no doubt as to what they didn’t want. They were given the power to expel undesirable faculty, staff and students, to create a new set of rules and a new curriculum. It was the first organized effort to purge Iran of what was called decadent Western culture. The majority of students and faculty did not give in to this dictate, and once more the University of Tehran became the scene of a battle.
Going to classes became more impossible every day. We were all frantically shuffling from one meeting to another, as if by force of sheer movement we would be able to stop them. The faculty marched, and the students marched. There were many disagreements between the various student organizations.
The students convened demonstrations and sit-ins. I went to these demonstrations, although I felt no affinity at this point towards any particular organization. If the leftists had come to power, they would have done the same thing. This, of course, was not the point: the point was to save the university, which, like Iran, we had all had a hand in destroying.
24
And so began a new cycle of violent demonstrations. We would start marching, usually in front of the University of Tehran, and as we moved, the crowd would increase. We marched towards the poorer areas, and, usually at a narrow alley or a particular intersection, “they” would come, attacking us with knives and clubs. The demonstrators would disperse, only to reorganize quietly farther up the street. We walked the meandering streets and unpaved winding alleys and suddenly “they” would come again and attack us at the point of another intersection, with their knives drawn, and we would run again, and again we would meet at some other point a few blocks away.
I remember one day particularly well. I had left home early with Bijan; he dropped me off near the university on his way to work. A few blocks before the univ
ersity, I noticed a group, mainly young people, carrying signs and walking towards campus. I noticed Nassrin, whom I had not seen for a few weeks. She had some leaflets in her hand and was walking in the front row. At a certain street corner, she and another girl separated from the group and turned into the street. I suddenly remembered that Nassrin had never given me her promised paper on Gatsby; she had dropped out of my life as suddenly as she had entered it. I wondered if I would ever see her again.
I found myself walking with a group of chanting students who had appeared magically. Suddenly, we heard the sound of bullets, which seemed to be coming out of nowhere. The bullets were real. One moment we were standing in front of the wide iron gate of the university and then I found myself running towards the bookstores, most of which had closed because of the unrest. I took cover under the awning of one that was still open. Nearby, a music vendor had left his tape deck running; some singer’s mournful voice lamenting his love’s betrayal.
That whole day was one long nightmare. I had no sense of time or place and felt myself joining groups that sooner or later dispersed, drifting from one street to another. In the afternoon a large demonstration was convened. It soon became the bloodiest confrontation between students and the government. The government had bused workers in from different factories, in addition to its usual goons and thugs and militia, arming them with batons and knives to stage a counterdemonstration against the students. The workers were chosen because of the leftists’ idealization of the proletariat as their natural allies.
Once the guns started to fire, we all ran in different directions. I remember at one point I ran into a former classmate of mine, my best friend from sixth grade, in fact. In the midst of gunshots and chants we hugged, and chatted about the almost two decades since we had last seen each other. She told me everyone was moving towards the hospital near the University of Tehran, where the bodies of murdered and wounded students were supposedly being kept.
Somehow, I lost her in the crowd and found myself alone on the grounds of the large hospital whose name had recently been changed from Pahlavi, the name of the last shah, to Imam Khomeini. The rumor now was that the police and guards had stolen the bodies of murdered students in order to prevent the news of their death from getting out. The students wanted to storm the hospital to stop the transfer of bodies.
I walked towards the main building, and now in my memory I seem to be forever walking towards that building, never quite reaching it: I was walking in a trance, with people running towards me as well as in the opposite direction. Everyone seemed to have a purpose, some destination in mind—except me; I was walking alone. Suddenly, coming towards me, I saw a familiar face: it was Mahtab.
At that moment as I looked at her, paralyzed and frozen, she looked more than anything like a lost animal in danger. Perhaps it was shock that forced her to walk in a straight line, almost mechanically, and not swerve to the left or right, keeping near perfect balance. Imagine Mahtab walking towards me. Two girls block my view, and then she appears, wearing a loose beige shirt over jeans: she moves into my line of vision and our eyes meet. She was prepared to pass me by, but she stopped for a short second. So there we were, the two of us, sharing a moment in our ghastly search. She paused to inform me that “they” had managed to hijack the bodies from the hospital morgues. No one knew where the bodies had been transferred. She said this and disappeared, and I did not see her for another seven years.
As I stood there alone on the hospital grounds, with people rushing around me, I had a strange experience: I felt as if my heart had been torn from my body and had landed with a thump in an empty space, a vast void that I did not know existed. I felt tired and frightened. The fear was not of bullets: they were too immediate. I was scared of some lack, as if the future were receding from me.
25
The students kept a vigil on the grounds of the university, to prevent it from closing down. They kept their vigil until, in what almost amounted to a bloody battle—although the government forces were the only ones with guns—they were evacuated and the militia, the Revolutionary Guards and the police conquered the university grounds.
It was during one of these vigils that I saw Mr. Bahri. The night was filled with anxiety, as well as the false coziness of such events, as we sat on the ground in close proximity, exchanging jokes, information or stories, sometimes arguing away the pleasantly warm nights. He was standing alone in a dark corner, leaning against a tree. So what do you think of this? I asked him. He smiled a precocious smile and said, No, ma’am, what do you think? Mr. Bahri, I said slowly. What I think is becoming increasingly irrelevant. So irrelevant, in fact, that I think I will go home, grab a good book and try to get some sleep.
I knew I had startled him, but I had also startled myself. All of a sudden I felt as if this was not my fight. For most of those present, the excitement of the battle meant almost everything, and I was not excited, not in that way. Did it matter to me who closed the university down, whether it was my leftist students or the Islamic ones? What mattered was that the university should not be closed at all, that it should be allowed to function as a university and not become a battleground for different political forces. But it took me a long time, in fact seventeen more years, to finally digest and formulate this understanding. For the time being, I went home.
Soon after that, the government managed to shut down the universities. They purged the faculty, students and staff. Some students were killed or jailed; others simply disappeared. The University of Tehran had become the seat of too much disappointment, too much sorrow and hurt. Never again would I rush so innocently, so eagerly, to a class as I did in those days at the dawn of the revolution.
26
One day in the spring of 1981—I can still feel the sun and the morning breeze on my cheeks—I became irrelevant. Just over a year after I had returned to my country, my city, my home, I discovered that the same decree that had transformed the single word Iran into the Islamic Republic of Iran had made me and all that I had been irrelevant. The fact that I shared this fate with many others did not help much.
In fact, I had become irrelevant sometime before then. After the so-called cultural revolution that led to the closing down of universities, I was essentially out of a job. We went to the university, but we had nothing much to do. I took to writing a diary and reading Agatha Christie. I roamed the streets with my American reporter, talking about Mike Gold’s Lower East Side and Fitzgerald’s West Egg. Instead of classes, we were summoned to endless meetings. The administration wanted us to stop working and at the same time to pretend that nothing had changed. Although the universities were closed, the faculty was required to be present and to offer projects to the Committee on the Cultural Revolution.
These were idle days, whose only enduring feature was the lasting friendships we formed with colleagues in our own and other departments. I was the youngest and newest addition to the group and had a great deal to learn. They told me about the pre-revolutionary days, about excitement and hope; they talked about some of their colleagues who had never returned.
The newly elected committee for the implementation of the cultural revolution visited the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences and the Faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature at the auditorium in the School of Law. Despite the formal and informal instructions to the female faculty and staff on the issue of the veil, until that day most women at our university had not obeyed the new rules. That meeting was the first I had attended at which all the female participants wore head scarves. All, that is, except three: Farideh, Laleh and me. We were independent and considered eccentric, so the three of us went to that meeting unveiled.
The three members of the Committee on the Cultural Revolution sat rather uncomfortably on the very high stage. Their expressions were by turns haughty, nervous and defiant. That meeting was the last at the University of Tehran in which the faculty openly criticized the government and its policies regarding higher education. Most were re
warded for their impertinence by being expelled.
Farideh, Laleh and I sat together conspicuously, like naughty children. We whispered, we consulted one another, we kept thrusting our hands up to talk. Farideh took the committee to task for using the university grounds to torture and intimidate the students. I told the Revolutionary Committee that my integrity as a teacher and a woman was being compromised by its insistence that I wear the veil under false pretenses for a few thousand tumans a month. The issue was not so much the veil itself as freedom of choice. My grandmother had refused to leave the house for three months when she was forced to unveil. I would be similarly adamant in my own refusal. Little did I know that I would soon be given the choice of either veiling or being jailed, flogged and perhaps killed if I disobeyed.
After that meeting, one of my more pragmatic colleagues, a “modern” woman, who decided to take up the veil and stayed there for another seventeen years after I was gone, told me with a hint of sarcasm in her voice, “You are fighting a losing battle. Why lose your job over an issue like this? In another couple of weeks you will be forced to wear the veil in the grocery stores.”
The simplest answer, of course, was that the university was not a grocery store. But she was right. Soon we would be forced to wear it everywhere. And the morality squads, with their guns and Toyota patrols, would guard the streets to ensure our adherence. On that sunny day, however, when my colleagues and I made our protest known, these incidents did not seem to be preordained. So much of the faculty protested, we thought we might yet win.