Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  Also by Azar Nafisi

  READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN:

  A MEMOIR IN BOOKS

  ANTI-TERRA: A CRITICAL STUDY OF

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV’s NOVELS

  BIBI AND THE GREEN VOICE

  (BIBI E LA VOCE VERDE)

  In memory of my parents, Ahmad and Nezhat Nafisi

  To my brother, Mohammad Nafisi,

  and my family, Bijan, Negar, and Dara Naderi

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE | FAMILY FICTIONS

  CHAPTER 1 Saifi

  CHAPTER 2 Rotten Genes

  CHAPTER 3 Learning to Lie

  CHAPTER 4 Coffee Hour

  CHAPTER 5 Family Ties

  CHAPTER 6 The Holy Man

  CHAPTER 7 A Death in the Family

  PART TWO | LESSONS AND LEARNING

  CHAPTER 8 Leaving Home

  CHAPTER 9 Rudabeh’s Story

  CHAPTER 10 At Scotforth House

  CHAPTER 11 Politics and Intrigue

  CHAPTER 12 Mayor of Tehran

  CHAPTER 13 Rehearsal for a Revolution

  PART THREE | MY FATHER’s JAIL

  CHAPTER 14 A Common Criminal

  CHAPTER 15 The Prison Diaries

  CHAPTER 16 A Career Woman

  CHAPTER 17 A Suitable Match

  CHAPTER 18 Women Like That!

  CHAPTER 19 Married Life

  PART FOUR | I REVOLTS AND REVOLUTION

  CHAPTER 20 A Happy Family

  CHAPTER 21 Demonstrations

  CHAPTER 22 Revolution

  CHAPTER 23 The Other Other Woman

  CHAPTER 24 When Home Is Not Home Anymore

  CHAPTER 25 Reading and Resistance

  CHAPTER 26 Broken Dreams

  CHAPTER 27 Father’s Departure

  CHAPTER 28 The Goddess of Bad News

  CHAPTER 29 Facing the World

  CHAPTER 30 The Last Dance

  CHAPTER 31 The Perils of Love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SUGGESTED READING LIST

  MOMENTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY

  IRANIAN HISTORY

  GLOSSARY

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Copyright

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  All illustrations courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.

  V Azar as a teenager.

  Xvi Azar’s mother and father, Nezhat and Ahmad Nafisi.

  Xix Azar’s daughter, Negar, with her classmates in Tehran.

  4 Wedding portrait of Mother’s marriage to Saifi.

  4 Mother and Saifi on their wedding day.

  5 Mother and Saifi on a picnic.

  9 Mother.

  12 Azar with the porcelain doll she broke.

  13 Azar, age five.

  23 Azar’s baby brother, Mohammad.

  24 Azar and Mohammad.

  28 Street scene of Tehran in the 1940s. (c) Tom Fitzsimmons/ AP Images

  34 Azar and Mother.

  36 Mother’s elementary school picture.

  44 Azar’s paternal grandfather, Abdol Mehdi Nafisi.

  46 Azar’s paternal grandmother, talking with Uncle Hassan, in the 1980s.

  50 The Mother’s King madrasa, Esfahan, 1958. (c) Roger Viollet/ Getty Images

  61 Azar’s step-grandmother.

  68 Dr. Parsay (c) Mansoureh Pirnia, Mehriran Publishing Company Ltd.

  71 Amoo Said.

  77 A page from Azar’s father’s children’s book. Illustrations by Mohammad Ali Davarpanah.

  88 Mr. Cumpsty, “Skipper.”

  89 Scotforth House, in Lancaster.

  92 Azar’s family at Aunt Hamdam’s wedding.

  94 Azar and Mother saying good-bye.

  100 Former Prime Minister Mossadegh at his trial. (c) Bettmann/Corbis

  108 Father, Aunt Nafiseh, and Azar.

  121 Father, as mayor of Tehran, with the Shah and a cleric.

  132 Father meets with French president Charles de Gaulle. (c) Garofalo/Paris Match/Scoop

  134 Father during his incarceration.

  136 My mother, a family friend, Father, and Azar.

  143 Father in jail, with his paintings.

  148 Mother as a member of Parliament.

  169 Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. Photo courtesy of forughfarrokhzad.org

  177 Mohammad and Azar, on her first wedding day.

  188 A newspaper clipping announcing Father’s release from jail.

  202 2,500th anniversary celebrations at Persepolis. (c) Horst Faas/AP Images

  205 Azar and her second husband, Bijan.

  208 Azar’s second wedding day, September 9, 1979.

  211 Demonstrators protest against the Shah, near the White House, 1977. (c) Bettman/Corbis

  212 The Shah and President Carter at the White House. (c) AP Images

  215 Ayatollah Khomeini, in exile. (c) AP Images

  218 An Iranian woman with a portrait of Khomeini, 1979. (c) Christine Spengler/Sygma/Corbis

  222 Iranian women protest against the Islamic dress code, 1980. (c) Bettman/Corbis

  226 Shahran, Azar, Bijan, and Mohammad, 1983.

  231 Azar teaching in Tehran.

  231 Azar with her students.

  236 Mother on her pilgrimage to Mecca, in the mid-1970s.

  239 Bijan with the writer Houshang Golshiri.

  249 Fariba’s birth certificate.

  258 Father with his young granddaughters.

  259 Bijan, Negar, and Azar at the Caspian Sea.

  264 The cousins: Sanam, Dara, and Negar.

  267 Negar and Dara at kindergarten.

  282 Mother in her final years, among her photographs.

  293 Azar with Negar, Father, and Dara, in the early 1990s.

  310 Father with Mohammad’s son, Sina, in 2002.

  PROLOGUE

  Most men cheat on their wives to have mistresses. My father cheated on my mother to have a happy family life. I felt sorry for him, and in one sense took it upon myself to fill the empty spaces in his life. I collected his poems, listened to his woes, and helped him choose appropriate gifts, first for my mother and then for the women he fell in love with. He later claimed that most of his relations with these other women were not sexual, that what he yearned for was the feeling they gave him of warmth and approval. Approval! My parents taught me how deadly that desire could be.

  As a family we were fond of telling stories. My father left behind a published memoir and a far more interesting unpublished one, and over fifteen hundred pages of diaries. Mother did not write but she told us stories from her past, usually ending them by saying, But I never said a word, I kept silent. She genuinely believed that she never talked about her personal life, although in her own way she often spoke, it seemed, about little else. She would not have approved of my writing a memoir, especially a family memoir. Nor did I imagine that one day I would find myself writing about my own parents. It is such a strong part of Iranian culture to never reveal private matters: we don’t air our dirty laundry in public, as Mother would say, and besides, private lives are trivial and not worth writing about. Useful life stories are what matter, like the memoir my father finally published, a cardboard version of himself. I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.

  My father started to keep a diary when I was four years old. The diary is addressed to me. He gave it to me decades later, when I had children of my own. The first few pages are about how to be good, how to be considera
te toward others. Then he starts complaining about my mother. He complains that she no longer remembers that she once liked him and enjoyed his company. He writes that, although I am just a child, I am his only solace and support. He advises me that if I ever marry I should seek to be a true friend and companion to my husband. He describes one incident when he and my mother were quarreling and I, like “an angel of peace,” tried to distract and entertain them. My empathy was as dangerous as any clandestine activity: here was a sin Mother could not forgive. My brother and I tried to please them both, but no matter how hard we tried—and we tried very hard—they were never happy. My mother would turn her head away from us and gaze into the distance with a knowing nod to some invisible interlocutor, seeming to say, Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?, as if she knew my father would be unfaithful to her long before he even considered it. She acted upon this knowledge as an accomplished fact and seemed to take a perverse pleasure when it all became true.

  My father and mother, Nezhat and Ahmad Nafisi.

  When my mother was very ill, a few years after my family and I had left Tehran for the United States, I was told that for many days she had refused to go to the hospital unless the lock to her apartment was changed. That man and his floozy would break in just as they’d done before, she muttered, and loot what was left of her possessions.

  “That man and his floozy” were my father and his second wife, whom she blamed for all of her misfortunes, including the mysterious disappearance of her collection of gold coins and two trunks of silver. No one, of course, believed her. Accustomed as we were to my mother’s fictions, we indulged her without paying much attention.

  She would evoke shadowy figures who, one by one, had been lost to her—her mother, her father, her first husband—and hold us responsible. Ultimately, not one of us was able to step out of her invented world. She demanded that we remain faithful not to her, but to her story.

  My father’s fictions were more straightforward, or so I believed for a long time. He communicated with us through stories about his life, his family, and about Iran—a subject he was almost obsessed with—drawing on the classic texts of Persian literature. This is how I first discovered literature and learned about my country’s history. He also told us his version of my mother’s fictions, so that we constantly vacillated between two shadow worlds.

  All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.

  Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, like an imaginary friend (or foe) or a secret concubine, constantly beckons, reminding us of our loss. What is memory but a ghost that lurks at the corners of the mind, interrupting our normal course of life, disrupting our sleep in order to remind us of some acute pain or pleasure, something silenced or ignored? We miss not only their presence, or how they felt about us, but ultimately how they allowed us to feel about ourselves or them.

  How did my mother allow us to feel about her? The only way I can bring myself to confront her loss is to ask this question. At times I have wondered if she wasn’t always lost to me, but when she was alive I was too preoccupied with resisting her to realize it. There was something touching in the way she talked about herself and her past as if she too were an invention, occupying the body of another woman who teasingly appeared to us in glimmers, like a firefly I am after those firefly moments now. What did they reveal of my mother and of us?

  In my last years in Iran, I became fixated on my mother’s memories. I even took from her several photographs. It seemed the only way of gaining some access to her past. I became a memory thief, collecting her photographs alongside pictures of the old Tehran in which she grew up, married, had her children. My curiosity veered into the realm of obsession. Yet none of this really helped. The photographs, the descriptions, at some point even the facts, are insufficient. They reveal certain details, but they remain lifeless fragments. What I am searching for is the gaps—the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible.

  I do not mean this book to be a political or social commentary, or a useful life story. I want to tell the story of a family that unfolds against the backdrop of a turbulent era in Iran’s political and cultural history. There are many stories about these times, between the birth of my grandmother at the start of the twentieth century and my daughter’s birth at its end, marked by the two revolutions that shaped Iran, causing so many divisions and contradictions that transient turbulence became the only thing of permanence.

  My grandmother was born when Iran was ruled by a destabilized absolutist monarchy and was under rigid religious laws that sanctioned stoning, polygamy, and the marriage of girls as young as nine. Women were scarcely allowed to leave their homes, and when they did they were chaperoned and covered from head to toe. There were no schools for women, although some among the nobility provided their daughters with private tutors. And yet there was another side to this story, pale flickers of a future revealing itself through the cultural and political crisis that would upend all those old rules. My grandmother witnessed the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, the first of its kind in the Middle East, which helped usher in modern Iran, galvanizing different strata of society, including the progressive clerics, minorities, intellectuals, some members of the nobility, and women, some of whom had started to support the revolutionaries, setting up underground groups and demanding access to education. By 1912 Morgan Shuster, an American financial advisor to Iran, marveled at the leaps Iranian women had made in such a short period of time, embracing new freedoms that had taken years, even centuries, for Western women to achieve. “The Persian women since 1907 had become almost at bond the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world,” he said. “That this statement upsets the idea of centuries makes no difference. It is fact.”

  My daughter, Negar (second from left), with her classmates in Tehran. All the female schoolchildrenwere forced to wear the veil after the revolution.

  How can I describe the fragile, conflicted nature of my mother’s childhood and youth in the mid-1920s and ’30s, by which time the flickering possibilities had taken over to such an extent that she could appear in public without a veil, go to a French school, and meet and fall in love with her first husband while dancing at a wedding—all impossible two decades before. Yet there was another aspect to her times, a refusal to relinquish the vanquished past. When, in 1936, Reza Shah Pahlavi, in his efforts to hasten the process of modernization, issued a mandate that made the unveiling of women mandatory and banned traditional clothing for men, my paternal grandmother, like so many other Iranian women, refused to leave her home. Reza Shah’s edict was finally rescinded in 1941, although its memory still ignites fresh questions and divisions.

  By the time I was growing up, in the 1950s and ’60s, we took our education and our books and parties and movies for granted. We witnessed women becoming active in all walks of life, governing in Parliament—among them, briefly, my own mother—and becoming ministers. But then, by 1984, my own daughter, born five years after the Islamic Revolution, would witness the return of the same laws that had been repealed during my grandmother’s and my mother’s lifetimes. My daughter would be forced to wear a veil in first grade and would be punished for showing her hair in public. Her generation would eventually find its own brand of courage and resistance.

  In this book my interest is not in a general recitation of historical times but rather in those fragile intersections—the places w
here moments in an individual’s private life and personality resonate with and reflect a larger, more universal story.

  Those intersections between the private and the public were what I was looking for when I started to write my first book, in Iran, on Vladimir Nabokov. I wanted to discuss Nabokov’s novels in light of the different times I had read them. That was impossible, not just because I could not frankly write about the political and social realities of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran but also because personal and private experiences were treated by the state as taboo.

  It was around this time that I started making a list in my diary entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About.” Under it I wrote: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran.” I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had never imagined.

  There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives. Long before I came to appreciate how a ruthless political regime imposes its own image on its citizens, stealing their identities and self-definitions, I had experienced such impositions in my personal life—my life within my family. And long before I understood what it meant for a victim to become complicit in crimes of the state, I had discovered, in far more personal terms, the shame of complicity. In a sense, this book is a response to my own inner censor and inquisitor.

  Perhaps the most common of all narratives is one about absent parents and the urgent need to fill in the void created by their deaths. The process does not lead to closure—at least not for me—but to understanding. It is an understanding that does not necessarily bring with it peace but perhaps a sense that this narrative might be the only way through which we can acknowledge our parents and in some form bring them back to life, now that we are free, at last, to shape the boundaries of our own story.