The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  Between Tom’s manipulative fakeries, Pap’s rants and raves, the duke and the dauphin’s molestations of language to cheat decent people out of their livelihoods, and the pious Miss Watson’s stories about heaven and hell, everyone in this book is in the business of making up stories, but is there anyone among them who is more genuine and true to his heart than Jim? It turns out that this uneducated man is far more learned when it comes to matters of the heart than the educated guardians of morality and has far more common sense. Ignorance of the heart, in this book, is the greatest sin.

  Huck’s relationship with Jim provides his wandering with a legitimate meaning and purpose. In fact, by choosing the most dangerous company possible, that of a runaway slave, Huck goes not just against the values of the small town he has left behind but against his own better judgment. With Jim, the real adventures of Huckleberry Finn begin. Away from the authority of the white masters, away from the house that enslaves Jim and oppresses Huck, they create a world with their own rules.

  As they navigate, observing the “lonesomeness of the river,” they are constantly threatened by the danger and violence that emanate like poisonous fumes from the land and its “smothery houses”: the feuding between the seemingly civilized and churchgoing Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, the cold-blooded and open killing of a helpless drunk, seething mob anger, the tarring and feathering of the duke and the dauphin. Charlatans, murderers and decent, God-fearing people will all hunt down runaway slaves. These events gather to create a symphony of savagery and fear, variations on human cruelty and brutality, inviting us to agree with Huck that “it was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.”

  From its first to its last page, Huck Finn shows us that everything that is accepted as the norm, as respectable, is in essence not normal or respectable. It is a book in which “educated” people are the most ignorant, stealing is “borrowing,” people with “upbringings” are scoundrels, goodness is heartless, respectability stands for cruelty, and danger lurks, most especially at home. It is a book in which being “white” is not a badge of honor and you will go to hell if you do the right thing. In fact, apart from Huck himself and the three orphan sisters whose inheritance he tries to preserve, there is hardly a white character in the book who does not do something either despicable or idiotic. Each time Huck wonders how someone like Jim can be so “white,” he is denying that the values of humanity and decency are in fact “white” and suggesting that perhaps their rightful owner is a slave named Jim.

  While there is a great deal of violence in the book, not once does Twain show us a physical act of violence against a slave. Perhaps this is because it would take away from the deeper violence, the humiliation and annihilation of a person that results from refusing to acknowledge him as a human being, the desire to generalize him out of existence, to deny him human feelings and emotions. Within the confines of this upside-down world, the only way for Huck and Jim to survive is to be dead, which is why, all through their journey, they conceal their real identities and take on various disguises. Yet the book is not about the search for identity; it is about the necessity of hiding one’s true self.

  This flight and violence and obfuscation presented us, in Tehran, with a startling similarity to our own lives. Farah and I knew something about this, because in those post-revolutionary days we all went underground and learned to hide our true selves. When you live in an authoritarian state, to remain alive you have to pass yourself off as someone else. Jim and Huck break every possible rule by lying, cheating and stealing. But we believe them to be good and true. So they force us to question and reexamine what we would consider to be basic, unchanging moral principles: Under what conditions might it be right to lie, to break the law, to cheat, to blaspheme?

  12

  It is intriguing how memory hangs on to small details, saving the scraps of experience for the time when those insignificant details will shape the tone and texture of that lost time. I was reminded recently of the two times I saw Farah after her return to Tehran. The first time, I was still teaching at the University of Tehran; it must have been 1980, because the veil had not yet become mandatory. I saw her sitting on the steps of the Faculty of Literature and Foreign Languages, talking to a friend. Farah was an adjunct, teaching English in the same department where I had a full-time position. The other time, my husband and I saw her standing by a Coca-Cola kiosk, a bottle of Coke in one hand, deep in conversation with a woman I did not know. Both times, we greeted each other briefly but did not stay to talk or exchange contact information. And both times, she gave me a very particular smile.

  Farah conveyed a great deal through her smiles. Sometimes I felt she used them instead of words, challenging you to try to catch their meaning: there was the conspiratorial smile, and the manipulative or appeasing one, the knowing smile, the secretive smile and then the one that signified distance. That was the smile she had offered me on those two brief encounters in Tehran. While acknowledging me, she wanted to go no further than that chance meeting.

  In those days, I was used to furtive looks—I can still picture my student Razieh in the street by the university after one of the regime’s massacres, coming toward me from the opposite direction, or a former student activist at Berkeley silently catching my eye. Even my own cousins Saiid and Fahimeh could not be acknowledged in public. This made them all so close and yet so distant, as if they already belonged to another world, predicting the ghosts they would soon become.

  The next time I saw Farah was in the United States in 1990, eight years after she had left Iran. I was there for only three days, for a conference. She came to pick me up in her car, looking buoyant; I remember she wore a cap that made her look like a young boy. We had lots of fun, giggling and laughing like teenagers, and talked about everything but the thing that had divided us: the movement and politics in Iran. It was a sign of the changes we had both undergone since we last sat opposite each other in Chicago that we wanted to reconnect based on what had first brought us together: our family ties and our friendship.

  I hesitated to ask her about her time in Iran, uncertain what wounds I would reopen. By then her escape from Iran had become history, and thus a story, with carefully worn contours. In my memory of those two times I saw her in Tehran, we both appeared nonchalant and carefree, but in reality they were dark days, filled with so much anxiety and fear about the war with Iraq and the constant violence. It had become customary to hear about relatives, friends and students who had been arrested, tortured and killed. A lucky few managed to flee the country, but I had my share of cousins hiding out or killed, friends on the run, students executed. Farah’s was one story among many. That was the time my nightmares began, and to this day they are with me.

  For a long time, Farah was reticent to talk about those days. It was years before she finally agreed to divulge something of her story, when her sister persuaded her to sit for long hours for an interview that Mahnaz later transformed into a more fluid narrative and published in her book Women in Exile. At the time, Farah did not want to reveal her own identity, partly for security reasons and because she still hoped to go back to Iran. So in the book she refers to her husband as Hormoz and to herself as Azar.

  Farah had returned to Tehran in jubilant exultation in February of 1979, a week after the revolution. One can only imagine her emotion when, for only the second time since she had left Iran at the age of ten, she found herself diving down through the mountains into the Tehran airport. All of the borders were closed in the first days of the revolution, and her group had been stranded in Germany. “So we did what we knew best,” she explained. “We protested. And it worked.” A plane was sent for them, and all of those who had supported the revolution from afar returned together in triumph. On landing in Tehran, the religious students left the plane chanting, “Long live the Islamic revolution,” while Farah and her comrades walked out shouting, “Long live freedom and liberty.” The airport was controlled by the
Revolutionary Guards and closed to commercial air traffic. There was no doubt from the start that the guards were firmly on the side of the Muslim students. “Within four years of that day,” Farah said, “all but one of my friends who came with me on that plane were dead.”

  In Tehran, Farah didn’t call her father or her husband’s parents. “The revolution,” she said, “took priority over all ties and relationships.” She found a job teaching English, but as in the United States, she devoted herself mainly to her revolutionary activities.

  Faramarz arrived shortly afterwards—he had stayed behind to rally together more student supporters. By then the divisions had become more violent. I remember how one moment we were all dancing in the streets and kissing one another—communists, Islamists, and bazaaris—and the next those same streets were barricaded by violent protests and the songs gave way to the sound of bullets. It started with the persecution of secular leftists, then the nationalists, and finally the Islamists who disagreed with Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.

  The leftist groups who were very active before and during the revolution did not have much popular support in Tehran. Farah describes how, after a large workers’ demonstration, she and a few others from her group stayed behind to talk to the workers. “They listened politely, but as we turned to leave, one of them called to us, waving his hand. ‘Bye-bye!’ he said in English, grinning with amusement. Nothing seemed to express more clearly the foreignness of our contingent to those workers whom we had thought our natural allies.”

  By then Farah had lost her faith in Marxism. She felt vulnerable, and, like so many members of partisan and ideological groups, she was afraid to be branded a traitor by people who had become like a family to her or of appearing, as she put it, “passive, afraid, bourgeois.” Faramarz found it more difficult to part with either his group or his ideology. He was, by Farah’s account, not so much a believer as “a prisoner of the mind-set he had helped to create. He was one of the leaders who had helped radicalize the group. He had motivated others to become ‘revolutionaries,’ unbending, unafraid, and unchanging. And now he had to stand up to the young radicals and face their contempt. He knew they would interpret the change in him as loss of courage, as choosing the personal above the cause. They would consider him a cop-out. He had taught them to think this way, and so he wavered and waited, not willing to save himself alone, not able to save the others, his mind in terrible turmoil.”

  It is heartbreaking how Farah used to talk of those moments of tranquillity when, despite the ominous signs surrounding them, she and Faramarz came close to having a “normal” home life. She once told me how surprised she was by this newfound sense of happiness amid the uncertainty and violence of the revolution. She was trying to establish a language school, and Faramarz was rediscovering his family and his talent for crafts and carpentry. “Our daughter was now an energetic two years old. I was pregnant with my second child. . . . We read and talked and listened to music and watched the latest American films on video, which, strangely enough, were regularly smuggled into Iran. We took very little security precaution for a group fast becoming one of the priority targets for the regime. Some evenings, when there was no video to watch, we would get together with friends and each act out a whole film for the others. We laughed mindlessly at someone’s depiction of Manhattan; we were excited and frightened by a rendering of Psycho.

  “I was very happy with my life, but also constantly afraid,” Farah said. “At the end of each day, I would breathe easier and say to myself, Another day and no disaster. At the beginning of each day, the thought crossed my mind that this may be the last day of peace and safety.”

  Then, after the ouster of the first Iranian president, Bani-Sadr, one faction in their group decided on armed insurrection against the regime. I cannot imagine how, even then, they could have believed that they would ever garner enough support to destroy the new Islamic state. But these were giddy times, when toppling governments seemed like child’s play for a band of passionate revolutionaries. The place they chose for their insurrection was Amol, a beautiful small town near the Caspian Sea. After months of discussion among themselves, Faramarz and Farah openly declared their opposition to the plan, earning the contempt of the radical faction within their group. “Faramarz was called a coward and an opportunist by the very people who once circled around him to speak.” The insults and intimidation served only to strengthen his resolve. Farah couldn’t remember whether he resigned or was pushed aside from his leadership position in the group, but still he did not quit.

  In politics, the world is divided into good and bad, and obviously we are on the side of the good. We know we will not go through the pain of investigating, doubting and being doubted. Questions of ethics and principle shift from individual choice to that of the group. Only in this instance, Farah blinked. The group was going too far, and she had the strength to do what few of us can: assert her own private sense of right and wrong and distance herself from the group. It is what Huck did when he broke from Tom and his band of robbers.

  By January 1982 the group had moved weapons, tents and food supplies to the forests near Amol. Their attack was planned for January 25. That morning, nearly a hundred men and women attacked the headquarters of the police and guards in Amol. They fought for fifteen hours. Many were killed and many more captured. As Farah told Mahnaz, “The leaders had planned for victory but not for retreat.”

  The regime at first kept the news of the attack quiet. Farah and Faramarz heard about it by word of mouth. They should have left then. There were people being tortured in prison who sooner or later would reveal their names and whereabouts. Faramarz and a few others who had opposed the plan but remained loyal to the group thought they should not abandon their friends in hard times like these and just went on with life. “Like a sparrow confronting a cobra, we were paralyzed,” Farah said. It is important to understand how far they had moved ideologically and emotionally from the time when Farah had sought friendship and support—“a home,” as she called it—in the movement.

  Farah and Faramarz celebrated the Iranian New Year, Nowrooz, on March 21, as usual. They lived perhaps with more intensity than before but “with no conscious recognition of impending disaster.” They made fun of the mullahs on television. “We laughed at their vulgarity, their crassness and stupidity,” Farah said. “But even though we were looking at them from the vantage point of our Western upbringing, which made them appear even more ludicrous, we thought of them as ours to deal with, our problem. This feeling of belonging to a society, identifying with it in spite of its faults, is something I have never felt before or after this period. I have never again been a participant in the life of a nation.”

  Finally, six months after the Amol attack, Faramarz asked Farah to contact a relative to find out how her brother had been smuggled out of the country. Faramarz had to go to another meeting, and she was to meet him at his mother’s house for lunch. In Mahnaz’s account, she describes how, as Farah walked to his mother’s house, she went over all the things she had to tell him, for she always ended the day by telling Faramarz everything. More students had registered for her school, and she felt they were close to making a decision about their future. It was a hot summer day, and she was seven months’ pregnant. “But I felt light and happy, walking briskly, smiling at my own shadow.”

  He didn’t show up for lunch. At six o’clock that evening, she went back to their apartment. She sat on the floor and stared at the carpet and waited. She went to the nearest phone booth at eight.

  How do you write about such things? It is as if, by recounting them, you are participating in inflicting pain. When Huck tells us about the clan warfare between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, his non-description makes the horror of the atrocities he witnessed all the more real. “I ain’t a-going to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night to see such things. I
ain’t ever going to get shut of them—lots of times I dream about them.”

  Every time I review Farah’s story and others like it, I am reminded of what an acquaintance told me at the start of the revolution: “I cannot believe we welcomed our own murderers into town with festivities and joy, carrying them on our shoulders.” We all seemed to be playing a role onstage, only suddenly the knives were real.

  Farah was lucky to find a temporary shelter at a good friend’s house with a gorgeous garden, close to the dreaded Evin prison, where her husband and his comrades were kept. “It was strange to be in that beautiful garden with its ancient oak trees and the stream passing through the peaceful landscape,” she told Mahnaz. The garden was close enough to the prison compound that she could hear, at dawn, the loudspeakers sounding out the call to morning prayer. She said that the sound shook the house. “Every morning at dawn I walked to the wall at the bottom of the garden to listen to the chants of the prisoners. I thought if I listened carefully I would be able to distinguish [his] voice among all the others’. I thought if I concentrated enough he would feel my presence nearby. I refused to think of torture. I refused to think that [he] would probably not be among those prisoners.”

  13

  During her last years, but especially that final year, a circle formed around Farah, consisting of her family and friends. Her second husband, Habib, was both a witness and a participant in the comings and goings within this increasingly private world. Each one of us was honored with a special role in Farah’s life, and everyone was more than his or her assigned role: Mahnaz was more than a sister, Neda more than a daughter, Nema more than a son, Hamid more than a brother, Jaleh more than a former comrade and best friend, Roshanak more than a former sister-in-law, Bahram more than an intellectual companion, and within that exclusive list I was left with the role of more than a childhood friend. We all knew and talked about the fact that no matter what happened in the future, our small group would always be bound by our love for Farah, by the privilege of having shared the secret sorrows and joys of those moments we spent together because we had spent them with her.