Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  IN THE EARLY NINETIES, my father published three children’s books based on classic texts. One of these was a version of the Shah-nameh, known in English as The Book of Kings, written by the epic poet Ferdowsi. In the introduction to his book, my father explains that he first told these stories to us, his children, when we were about three or four years old, and that he continued his tutelage by acquainting us with other great classic Persian masterpieces: Rumi’s Masnavi, Saadi’s Golestan and Boostan, and Kelileh va Demneh. He writes that later we continued to read them on our own. What he emphasizes in this introduction is that Iranians of his day should learn more about their ancestors and their values through a careful reading of the Shahnameh. He says he is happy that through such a medium “Iran is seen, heard and felt in our house today and it warms our hearts …”

  My father’s voice would take on a reverential tone whenever he spoke about Ferdowsi. He taught us that poets demand a special kind of respect, different from the respect we owe our teachers or our elders. Once, when I was very young, perhaps around four, I asked my father to tell me more stories by this Mr. Ferdowsi. Not Mr., he corrected me. He is Ferdowsi the Poet. And for a long time after that I asked to hear stories by the Poet Ferdowsi. My first notion of Iran was formed by my father’s tales from the Shahnameh.

  Ever since I can remember, my parents and their friends spoke of Iran as a beloved but prodigal child whose welfare they constantly quarreled about. Over the years Iran acquired for me a paradoxical identity: it was a concrete place, defined by where I was born and lived, the language I spoke, the food I ate, and at the same time it was a mythical notion, encouraging all manner of virtues and values, a symbol of resistance and of betrayal.

  For my mother there was no other country. She sometimes spoke of other places to which she had traveled. She admired them, but Iran was her home. Whereas my father constantly wrangled and struggled with what it meant to be an Iranian, Mother had no such problems. Certain things were immutable for her. Being Iranian seemed to come with her genes—like her beautiful dark eyes, so dark that they appeared black, or the light olive color of her skin. She criticized Iranians the same way she disapproved of certain members of her clan, but she never related what she perceived as their shortcomings to Iran.

  Mother respected Ferdowsi, as any Iranian would, but she scorned our preoccupation with literature, considering it a waste of time. Later I found a more colorful explanation for her hostility to fiction makers: it occurred to me that she did not want rivals. She had created her own world and her own mythology and had no need for others who made a living of such things.

  WHEN I THINK OF MY FATHER, the first thing that comes to mind is his voice. In different places, walking the streets, sitting in the garden, driving the car, and at bedtime, I can still experience the calm that came over me whenever he would tell a story. I paid attention to these stories and internalized them in a way I never did with real life experiences. Later my father broke my heart, and because I loved him and trusted him as I loved and trusted no one else, I also hurt him and broke his heart. What partly exonerates him now in my mind is his stories. Only those shared moments have remained untainted by our mutual plunderings and betrayals.

  While I feared my mother’s cold outbursts and her persistent demands, I was deeply and constantly afraid of losing my father. I remember so many nights sitting by the window waiting for him to come home, listening for his footsteps in the hall before I could finally sleep. In time I became his most faithful ally and apologist. I felt that he, like me, was a victim of my mother’s tyranny and thus exempt from blame. She resented our shared sympathy and every once in a while burst out in fits of anger. “You, you are made of the same rotten genes as your father,” she told my brother and me in her moments of rage. “You are all waiting for me to die so you will get my inheritance.” I sometimes wondered if she might not after all be right: Was I not made of those same rotten genes?

  If Mother commanded and demanded, my father lured and seduced much like Tom Sawyer enticing his playmates to paint his fence. My relationship with him always had the intimacy of a shared secret, whether we were walking the streets as I listened to his stories, or planning how to please or appease my mother. My father and I were bound by our secret world, and by the intimacy created by our shared moments of storytelling, which simultaneously freed me from the reality around me and transported me to a new realm composed of teasing figments shaped by his voice.

  On Friday mornings, Father would wake me up early and take me for a long walk. To stem my complaints about the length of these walks, he bought me a special cup that we would fill up from a favorite fountain along the way. He called this our special time, when he would tell stories, and occasionally stop to buy ice cream. With time the characters in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh became as familiar to me as my own family. I could not imagine life without them, and the book itself became a place I loved to visit, knowing that I could knock on that door at all hours of day or night and roam around without restrictions or inhibitions. Later it became a habit, one that I have kept to this day, to open it at random and read a story here or there. I never studied the Shahnameh properly, and never thought of writing anything scholarly about it, perhaps because I wanted to preserve the sense of wonder that came over me when I first heard my father tell its stories.

  Over a thousand years ago Ferdowsi composed a mythical tale of Iran, partly woven out of snatches of history. His epic spanned from the creation of the world up to the Arab conquest in the seventh century, a most humiliating defeat that marked the end of the ancient Persian Empire and the shift of our religion from Zoroastrianism to Islam. Ferdowsi’s aim was to rekindle his countrymen’s pride in their past, and to restore their sense of dignity and heritage. Father kept reminding my brother and me that the history of our country was fraught with wars and conquests—the Persians fought with the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols—and, later, after the Islamic Revolution, he said we faced the worst conquerors of all because they were enemies from within, who nonetheless treated Iranian citizens like conquered subjects.

  The Arabs were pervasive conquerors. The legend was that they insisted on an almost perfect annihilation of Persian culture, especially the written word. Fed up with the decadent rule of the Sassanid kings and their powerful priests—the last Sassanid king, Yazdegerd III, was murdered in 651 by a mill owner at whose home he had taken refuge—many Persians turned to embrace those whom they considered wild barbarians. I remember, as a child, hearing stories about how the Arab caliph Omar ordered his soldiers to burn all the books they found in Iran since the only book people would need was the Koran. My father taught us that much of Iranian nationalism was based on anti-Arab sentiment. He said, We Iranians are too worried about our good image and want to appear blameless in the eyes of the world. So, many of us blame the Arabs. Few question our own role in our defeat. After all, who opened the gates of the kingdom to those barbarians, who facilitated their conquest?

  In his epic poem Ferdowsi sought to conserve and interrogate an irretrievable past, both celebrating and mourning the passing of a great civilization. He brought the old Persia* back to life, re-casting its mythology in the first part of the Shahnameh and its real history until the Arab conquest in the second, gathering the orphaned fragments of our culture and history and giving them a new home in his poetry. Ferdowsi’s impossible achievement was not just to portray the biography of a whole nation, but to foretell the future. After the victory of the Islamic Revolution, I would return time and again to our poets—especially this poet—in order to trace the invisible thread that had led to the creation of the Islamic state.

  As a child my favorite tale of all from the Shahnameh was that of the beautiful Rudabeh and her love affair with the white-haired warrior Zal. Father preferred the story of Feraydun and his three sons, a story that was as personal to him as Rudabeh’s story was to me. It was as if through it he could convey something about himself that he could not otherwise properly articu
late.

  No matter how many times he told a favorite story, Father always got so caught up in it that I felt as if he were simultaneously saying and hearing the story for the first time. I can picture him once more, holding my hand as we walk the wide avenue called Shemiran, which stretches northward toward the snowcapped mountains whose silhouettes I have memorized and can summon up in my mind from wherever I am in the world, just as I can conjure up my father’s stories.

  Feraydun was the king of the world, he would begin, having saved mankind from the Arab-born demon-king Zahak, who with Satan’s help had killed his father and conquered Persia. From Zahak’s shoulders, on the spot that had been kissed by Satan, two vicious serpents sprouted who had to be fed every day the brains of two young Persian men. Feraydun staged an uprising against Zahak, and when he defeated him he kept Zahak in chains at the foot of Persia’s highest mountain, Damavand.

  Feraydun had three sons, Salm, Tur, and Iraj. As he grew old and the time came to divide his kingdom he decided to test their courage and he attacked each of them at night. The two older sons fled, but the youngest, Iraj, invoking his father’s name, prepared to fight. Having learned what he wanted to know, Feraydun disappeared into the night.

  Feraydun decided to divide his kingdom into three parts and distribute the parts among his sons. “Do you remember what he gave each of his sons?” Father would ask, turning toward me. “Yes,” I would respond eagerly, trying to mimic his words: “To the oldest, Salm, he gave the West. To the middle son, Tur, he gave China and the land of the Turks. And to the youngest, Iraj, he gave Persia.”

  “Yes,” my father would say with approval, “he gave to Iraj the most precious of his possessions: Persia, the land of the warriors.”

  The two older sons were envious of Iraj, because he had received the best land, and they nursed a jealous rage day and night. They sent a messenger to their father, demanding that he “snatch the crown” off Iraj’s head and “give him some dark corner of the earth to live.” Feraydun responded with anger, advising them,

  the heart that’s freed

  From gnawing passion and ambitious greed

  Looks on kings’ treasures and the dust as one.

  When his father complained about his brothers’ jealousy, Iraj responded:

  Our lives pass from us like the wind, and why Should wise men grieve to know that they must die?

  My father loved this line and he usually repeated it, more to himself than to me.

  Iraj decided to pay his brothers a visit and try to reason with them. But blinded by jealousy and greed, Salm and Tur did not heed Iraj’s offer of peace. “You remember what Iraj told them,” my father would say, turning to me and giving my hand a light squeeze. “He tells them not to kill him,” I would say. “Not exactly,” he would respond. “Iraj tells them, Don’t make yourself murderers. Iraj pleaded with his brothers when their intention became clear: You have a soul yourself, Iraj told them—how can you take another’s soul away? But his brothers did not hear him. Tur pulled out his dagger and split Iraj’s body in two. Salm and Tur stuffed Iraj’s head with camphor and musk and sent it to their father with a gleeful message, celebrating the fact that Iraj’s royal line was no more.”

  For Father, the real hero of this story was not Feraydun, but Iraj. “You should remember that Iraj was one of the best men in the Shah-nameh,” he would tell me, breaking into his story again. “Iraj was ready to give up Iran not because he was afraid of fighting, but because he felt worldly goods were not worth causing rancor and divi-siveness between brothers. He had not just physical courage but moral courage, which is much harder to obtain.”

  Later, when I reread Ferdowsi on my own, I understood why the first story my father chose to tell us from the Shahnameh was that of Iraj. He was one of the few characters who did not seek revenge. He was not only brave and just, but, more important, he was good.

  My father had a weakness for goodness in the same way that my mother was fixated on correctness. When my brother was young, Father wrote a story for him and called it “The Man Who Wanted to Be Good.” It was the story of my father’s own life, of how he had always been obsessed with injustice and had tried to be a good man. All his life our father kept reminding us of our duty to be good, a term he assumed to be self-explanatory, though it was, of course, impossible to define.

  “Iraj’s brothers did not understand that the world can be equally cruel to the unjust. Iraj’s wife, Mah Afrid, gave birth to a beautiful daughter who brought Iraj’s grandson, Manuchehr, into the world. Manuchehr, in a mighty battle, beheaded first Tur and then Salm, whose head he put on a spear and sent to Feraydun with a message of victory,” my father would say, giving me a sidelong glance to see how I was taking it.

  When Feraydun heard that Iraj’s death had been avenged, he abdicated his throne to Manuchehr and spent the rest of his days mourning his dead sons.

  And so, heartbroken, weeping for the past,

  He lived tormented till Death came at last.

  O world, from end to end unreal, untrue,

  No wise man can live happily in you—

  But bless’d is he whose good deeds bring him fame;

  Monarch or slave, he leaves a lasting name.

  At this point I should have felt happy because the good guys had finally won, but almost every time my father told this story he added that while Iraj’s name and legacy were restored, from that moment on the land of Iran saw no peace. “This is how the world gave birth to Iran,” he concluded, “and the conflicts continue to this day. In the Shahnameh, the Iranians were mostly good men, followers of Iraj, courageous and just. I wish I could say the same for Iran today, for in actual fact our country is sometimes more the land of Salm and Tur than of Iraj.” We would walk in silence for a while, until Father would say, “How about an ice cream?”

  Ferdowsi’s Iran was the magnificent paradise I came to believe in as a child. It was an endless green pasture, populated with heroes and queens. I was for some time under the illusion that my country was as splendid as the edifices its classical poets had built out of words.

  NOT JUST DAMAVAND WITH ITS SNOW CAPPED PEAK, but all those mountains toward which my father and I walked almost every Friday during my childhood are forever associated in my mind with figures he conjured up. It never went away, that other world just behind the mountains, where Feraydun and his three sons, the White Demon, the legendary bird Simorgh, and the beautiful Rudabeh all lived side by side, reenacting the same tales over and over.

  * The name Iran, meaning the land of Aryans, has existed for centuries. The Greeks knew as Persia the region that was in ancient times the seat of the great Persian Empire. The British also referred to the region as Persia. In 1931 Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, officially changed the name to Iran.

  CHAPTER 3

  learning to lie

  MANY YEARS AGO, a psychiatrist told me that my problems could be traced to my brother Mohammad’s birth. He said that this event, diverting my mother’s attention from me, caused me to experience “death.” He was a follower of the Melanie Klein school of psychiatry and I was rather irritated by the way Klein, like so many others, reduced everything to one component—in her case, death. How could we ever cure ourselves of death? Soon I started arguing with him, taking on Melanie Klein instead of focusing on my own problems.

  All the same, my brother’s birth must have been traumatic. I was not yet five, but I remember the night my mother was taken to the hospital. I was left behind with the housekeeper, whom my mother loved and revered and we all called Naneh. She had taken me to the front steps, where we sat until dawn, waiting for my father to come home with the news. Naneh had packed her bags, ready to leave if the new baby was a girl. She hated girls and for a year she had made me feel that hatred. She would go around the house saying, “A girl is like a candle in the daylight and a boy is a lamp at night.” She refused to call me by my name, and referred to me as “girl.” Mother was so devoted to her that she n
ever paid attention to my complaints and always took Naneh’s side.

  I believed my mother loved Mohammad in a way she never loved me. Although she later denied it, she used to say that when he came into the world, she felt here was the son who would protect her. I was always amazed that my mother, who had suffered so much at the hands of men, could have such confidence in them.

  From then on we were seldom alone or intimate. She resented what she called my stubbornness and I was hurt by the burden of her impositions. She froze me out, and I tried to remain impervious to her complaints.

  My baby brother, Mohammad.

  I craved her approval, which she never gave. She praised my achievements, grades, and such, but I felt that I had in some indescribable way disappointed her. I wanted her to love me. I resisted her, but went out of my way to attract her attention. Once when I was barely seven I threw myself down a flight of stairs leading from the house to the backyard. Another time, not long after that, I heard her talk with a friend about someone who had committed suicide by slashing his wrists, so I tried to slash mine with my father’s razor, in my own bedroom, in front of the mirror, when the detested Naneh walked in and, rather than stop me, left the room to call my mother. Unimpressed by my desperate act, Mother banished me to my room for the rest of the day.

  I AM ABOUT FIVE, Mohammad is a few months old, and we have just moved to a new house. The windows are shaded and the room on the ground floor is cool, semidark, and very quiet. My mother sits me on the floor and places herself opposite me. Now, she says, tell me where you and your father went last Thursday. I say, We went to the movies. Who was with you? No one. She asks me the same question, again and again. She tells me how she hates liars. One thing, she says, one thing I have always tried to teach you is never, never lie. I say I am not lying. I feel cold and frightened. I want her to hold me and kiss me, but she is frowning. She says people saw me with my father and a woman. Tell me, she says, tell me: Who was the woman?