by Azar Nafisi
Somehow the distance between my home and the university has become hazy in my memory. Suddenly and magically, without passing the green gate and the guard, without passing the glass entrance door to the building with signs denouncing Western culture, I am inside the Faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature, standing at the bottom of the stairs.
As I walk up the stairs, I try to ignore the posters and notices pasted haphazardly on the walls. They are mainly black-and-white photographs of the war with Iraq, and slogans denouncing the Great Satan, namely America, and the emissaries of that Satan. Quotations from Ayatollah Khomeini—WHETHER WE KILL OR ARE KILLED WE SHALL BE VICTORIOUS! OUR UNIVERSITIES MUST BE ISLAMIZED! THIS WAR HAS BEEN A DIVINE BLESSING FOR US!—accompany the pictures.
I could never get over my resentment of those faded photographs, hanging neglected and forlorn on the cream-colored walls. Somehow these shabby posters and their slogans interfered with my work; they made me forget that I was at the university to teach literature. There were reprimands posted about the color of our uniforms, codes of conduct, but never a notice about a talk, a film or a book.
13
About two weeks into my second semester of teaching at Allameh, as soon as I opened the door to my office, I noticed on the floor an envelope that had been pushed under the door. I still have both the envelope and the yellowing piece of paper I found inside, folded once to fit. My name and address at the university is typed, but on the piece of paper there is only one line, childish and as obscene as its message: The adulterous Nafisi should be expelled. This was the welcoming gift I received on my formal return to academia.
Later that day, I spoke to the head of the department. The president had also received a note, with a similar message. I wondered why they told me this. I knew and they knew that the word adulterous, like all other words confiscated by the regime, had lost its meaning. It was merely an insult, intended to make you feel dirty and disqualified. I also knew that this could happen anywhere: the world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.
What hurt, and still hurts, is that this mentality ultimately ruled our lives. This was the same language that the official papers, the radio and television and the clerics from their pulpits used to discredit and demolish their foes. And most of them succeeded at their task. What made me feel cheap, and in some way complicit, was the knowledge that so many people had been deprived of their livelihood on the basis of similar charges—because they had laughed loudly in public, because they had shaken hands with a member of the opposite sex. Should I just thank my lucky stars that I escaped with no more than one line scrawled on a cheap piece of paper?
I understood then what it meant when I was told that this university and my department in particular were more “liberal.” It did not mean that they would take action to prevent such incidents: it meant that they would not take action against me on account of them. The administration did not understand my anger; they attributed it to a “feminine” outburst, as they would become accustomed to calling my protests in the years to come. They gave me to understand that they were prepared to put up with my antics, my informal addresses to my students, my jokes, my constantly slipping scarf, my Tom Jones and Daisy Miller. This was called tolerance. And the strange thing is that in some crooked way it was tolerance, and in some way I had to be grateful to them.
14
Whenever I picture myself, it is going up the stairs; I never see myself coming down. But I did go down that day, as I did every other day. I went down almost as soon as I had reached my office, disposed of the extra books and papers and picked up my notes for my first class. I descended at a more leisurely pace to the fourth floor, turned left and, near the end of the long hall, entered the classroom. The class was Introduction to the Novel II. The author under discussion was Henry James, and the novel, Daisy Miller.
As in my memory I once again open my book and spread out my notes, I glance over the forty-odd faces that stare back at me, seemingly ready at my command. Certain faces I have become accustomed to take consolation from. In the third row, on the girls’ side, sits Mahshid, with Nassrin.
The first day of class the previous semester, I had been shocked to see Nassrin sitting there. My glance had traveled over students’ faces casually and then reverted back to Nassrin, who was looking at me and smiling, as if to say, Yes, it’s me. You have not made a mistake. Over seven years had passed since I had seen little Nassrin with a bunch of leaflets under her arm disappearing into a sunny street near the University of Tehran. I had sometimes wondered what had become of her—was she perhaps married now? And there she was sitting beside Mahshid, with a bolder expression on her face, softened by a pale blush. The last time I had seen her she was wearing a navy scarf and a flowing robe, but now she was dressed in a thick black chador from head to foot. She looked even smaller in the chador, her whole body hidden behind the bulk of the dark, shapeless cloth. Another transformation was her posture: she used to sit bolt upright on the edge of the chair, as if prepared to run at a moment’s notice; now she slumped almost lethargically, looking dreamy and absentminded, writing in slow motion.
After that class, Nassrin had stayed behind. I noticed that some of her old familiar gestures were still with her, like the restless movement of her hands and her constant shifting from one foot to the other. I asked her as I picked up my book and notes, Where have you been? Do you remember that you still owe me a paper on Gatsby? She smiled and said, Don’t worry, I’ve got a good excuse. In this country, we are not short of good excuses.
She was brief in recounting the seven missing years of her life. In the barest outline, which I never dared ask her to detail, she informed me that soon after that day when I had last seen her, she and a few of her comrades had been arrested while distributing leaflets in the streets. You remember those days the regime went crazy attacking the Mujahideen—I was really very lucky. They executed so many of my friends, but initially gave me only ten years. Ten years was lucky? Well, yes. Do you remember that story of the twelve-year-old girl who was shot as she was running around the prison grounds asking for her mom? Well, I was there, and I did want to shout for my mother, too. They killed so many teenagers, I could’ve been any one of them. But this time, my father’s religious credentials paid off. He had friends in the committee—in fact, one of the haj aghas had been his student. They spared me because of my dad. I got preferential treatment. After a while my ten years were reduced to three and I got off. Then for a while they wouldn’t let me pursue my education and I was, still am, under probation. I was only allowed finally to enroll in college last year. So here I am. Welcome back, I said, but remember—you still owe me a paper. I tried awkwardly to take her story as lightly as she intended me to.
I can still see Mahshid smiling her placid porcelain smile. Nassrin has a lethargic look about her—I always got the feeling she had not had a good night’s sleep—but she will turn out to be one of my best and sharpest students.
To their right, by the wall, are the two members of the Muslim Students’ Association. I have forgotten their names and they will have to endure the unpleasantness of being renamed: Miss Hatef and Miss Ruhi. They are all negative attention. Every once in a while, from beneath their black chadors, which reveal no more than a sharp nose on one and a small, upturned one on the other, they whisper; sometimes they even smile.
There is something peculiar about the way they wear their chadors. I have noticed it in many other women, especially the younger ones. For there is in them, in their gestures and movements, none of the shy withdrawal of my grandmother, whose every gesture begged and commanded the beholder to ignore her, to bypass her and leave her alone. All through my childhood and early youth, my grandmother’s chador had a special meaning to me. It was a shelter, a world apart from the rest of the world. I remember the way she wrapped her chador around her body and the way she walked around her yard when the pomegranates were in bloom. Now
the chador was forever marred by the political significance it had gained. It had become cold and menacing, worn by women like Miss Hatef and Miss Ruhi with defiance.
I will return to the beautiful girl with the too-sweet face in the fourth row. She is Mitra, who always gets the highest grades. She is quiet, barely says a word in class, and when she does, she expresses herself so calmly that sometimes I miss her point. I discover Mitra in her exam papers and, later, in her class journal.
Across the room, on the men’s side, is Hamid, who will soon marry Mitra and go into computers. He is clean-shaven, handsome and intelligent, his smile carefree as he talks to his friends on either side of him. Just behind Hamid is Mr. Forsati. I see him always in a light brown coat and dark trousers. He too is smiling, but I discover that his smile is part of his physique. He has a beard, but it is trimmed and not full. He belongs to a new brand of Islamic students—very different from Mr. Bahri, with his fierce faith in revolutionary principles. Mr. Forsati is a Muslim, but he is not particularly devoted to the religious ideals that shaped the first generation of Islamic students. His interest, first and foremost, is in getting ahead. He doesn’t seem close to anyone in the class, yet he is probably the most powerful person there, because he is the head of Islamic Jihad, one of the two lawful student organizations in Iran. The other, the Muslim Students’ Association, is more revolutionary and Islamic in its practices. I soon discover that if I want to show a video in class or to organize a speakers’ series, I will have to convince Mr. Forsati to lobby on my behalf, which he usually does with pleasure.
As I talk, my gaze involuntarily shifts to the last chair by the wall in the last row. Since the beginning of the semester, I have been both irritated and amused by the antics emerging from this corner of the room. Usually, midway through the lecture, the tall, lanky occupant of that chair—let us call him Mr. Ghomi—would lift himself up halfway, and, without waiting to rise fully or for me to give him permission to speak, begin to enumerate his objections. It was always objections—of this I could be certain.
Sitting beside Mr. Ghomi is an older student, Mr. Nahvi. He was more composed than his friend. He spoke calmly, mainly because he was always very certain. There were no doubts in him that might emerge in the form of an occasional outburst. He spoke clearly and monotonously, as if he could see each word forming in front of his eyes. He often followed me to my office and lectured me, mostly about Western decadence and how the absence of “the absolute” had been the cause of the downfall of Western civilization. He discussed these matters with assured finality, as facts that could not be argued. When I spoke, he paused respectfully, and as soon as I finished, he would go on in the same monotonous way and continue exactly where he had left off.
This was the second time Mr. Ghomi was taking my class. The first time, my first semester at Allameh, he hardly ever attended, under the pretext that he was in the militia and involved in the war effort. His war efforts always remained vague: he had not enlisted and had never been to the front. The war had become a good excuse for some of the Islamic activists to force undeserved privileges from the faculty. Mr. Ghomi flunked the finals and missed most of the tests, but he resented me nonetheless for failing him. I never quite knew if the lie about the war had become so much a part of his life that he had begun to believe in it, but he seemed to be genuinely hurt and for no good reason I felt almost guilty every time I encountered him. Now he came to the class regularly—more or less. Whenever I confronted students like him, I missed Mr. Bahri, who had had enough respect for the university never to abuse his position.
Mr. Ghomi came fairly regularly to class the second time around, and every time he did, he created some sort of commotion. He decided to turn Henry James into the biggest issue between us. He thrust his hand up at every opportunity and asked, or rather stated, his strident objections. James was his favorite target. He never questioned me directly—he did so obliquely, by insulting James, as if he bore a personal grudge against him.
15
When I picked Daisy Miller and Washington Square for my class, I never thought that Miss Daisy Miller and Miss Catherine Sloper would become such controversial and obsessive subjects of discussion. I had chosen the two novels because I felt they were more accessible than some of James’s longer later works. Before James, we had read Wuthering Heights.
My emphasis in my introductory course was on the ways in which the novel, as a new narrative form, radically transformed basic concepts about the essential relationships between individuals, thereby changing traditional attitudes towards people’s relationship to society, their tasks and duties. Nowhere is this developing change so apparent as in relations between men and women. Ever since Clarissa Harlow and Sophia Western—two modest and seemingly obedient daughters—refused to marry men they did not love, they changed the course of narrative and laid open to question the most basic institutions of their times, beginning with marriage.
Daisy and Catherine have little in common, yet both defy the conventions of their time; both refuse to be dictated to. They come from a long line of defiant heroines, including Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre. These women create the main complications of the plot, through their refusal to comply. They are more complicated than the later, more obviously revolutionary, heroines of the twentieth century, because they make no claims to be radical.
Catherine and Daisy seemed too exacting to many of my students, who were more practical and did not understand what the fuss was all about. Why did Catherine defy both her father and her suitor? And why did Daisy tease Winterbourne so? What was it that these two difficult women wanted of their bewildered men? From the very first moment she appears with her parasol and her white muslin dress, Daisy creates some excitement, and some unrest, in Winterbourne’s heart and mind. She presents herself to him as a puzzle, a dazzling mystery at once too difficult and too easy to solve.
Somewhere around this point, as I begin to move into a more detailed discussion of Daisy Miller, Mr. Ghomi raises his hand. His tone is one of protest, and immediately it puts me on the defensive and irritates me. What is it, he asks, that makes these women so revolutionary? Daisy Miller is obviously a bad girl; she is reactionary and decadent. We live in a revolutionary society and our revolutionary women are those who defy the decadence of Western culture by being modest. They do not make eyes at men. He continues almost breathlessly, with a sort of venom that is uncalled-for in relation to a work of fiction. He blurts out that Daisy is evil and deserves to die. He wants to know why Miss F in the third row felt that death was not her just reward.
Mr. Ghomi makes this little speech and sits down triumphantly, looking around him to see if anyone will challenge him. No one does. Except me, of course; they all expect me to perform the task. Mr. Ghomi always managed to divert the class from its course. At first I would get angry with him, but in time I came to see that sometimes he articulated sentiments that others did not dare express.
When I ask the class what they think of this, no one speaks. Mr. Ghomi, encouraged by this silence, raises his hand once more. We are more moral, because we’ve experienced real evil; we are in a war against evil, he says, a war both at home and abroad. At this point Mahshid decides to speak. If you remember, she says quietly, James experienced two terrible wars. When he was young, there was a civil war in America, and before he died he had witnessed the First World War. Mr. Ghomi’s response was an imperceptible shrug; perhaps he felt those wars were not the righteous ones.
I see myself sitting in my chair in silence. The silence seems deliberate. After the class I continue to sit in my chair, caught in a vacuum of light coming from the large curtainless windows that cover one side of the room. Three of my female students come and hover by my desk. “We want you to know that the majority of this class disagrees with those guys,” one of them says. “People are afraid to talk. This is a controversial subject. If we tell the truth, we’re afraid he will report us. If we say what he wants to hear, we are afraid of
you. We all appreciate your class.”
Yes, I thought as I walked home that evening and, long after that, whenever this conversation returned to mind. You appreciate the class, but do you appreciate Daisy Miller? Well, do you?
16
If Mr. Ghomi had strong opinions about the Daisy Millers of the world, the class vacillated with the novel’s hero, Winterbourne. With the exception of A Doll’s House, there was no other work to which they responded so passionately. Their passion came from their bewilderment, their doubts. Daisy unhinged them, made them not know what was right and what was wrong.
One day at the end of class, a timid girl who sat in the front row but somehow managed to create the impression that she was hiding somewhere in the shadow of the last row hesitated shyly by my desk. She wanted to know if Daisy was a bad girl. “What do you think?” she asked me simply. What did I think? And why did her simple question irritate me so? I am now positive that my hedging and hesitation, my avoidance of a straight answer, my insistence on the fact that ambiguity was central to the structure of the Jamesian novel, badly disappointed her and that from then on I lost some of my authority with her.
We opened the book to the crucial scene at the Colosseum. Daisy, defying all caution and decorum, has gone to watch the moonlight with Mr. Giovanelli, an unscrupulous Italian who follows her everywhere, to the chagrin of her correct countrymen and -women. Winterbourne discovers them, and his response says more about his character than hers: “Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of horror; and, it must be added, with a sort of relief. It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed upon the ambiguity of Daisy’s behavior and the riddle had become easy to read. She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect.”