by Azar Nafisi
If you would seek the moon, it is her face;
If you seek musk, her hair’s its hiding place.
She is a paradise, arrayed in splendor,
Glorious, graceful, and elegantly slender.
Her eyebrows were like a “bow,” her nose a “silver reed,” and her small mouth like “the contracted heart of a desperate man.” I forced my father to repeat the tale of the lovers Rudabeh and Zal so many times that I knew it almost by heart. Rudabeh is perhaps the first in a long line of literary characters over whom I would find myself obsessing and with whom in one way or another I would identify.
When my father told the story, he began something like this: Sam, the son of Nariman, was the strongest warrior in the land of Iran. His wife gave birth to a child who was as handsome as any infant being could be, with a face “as bright as the sun,” but he had the white hair of an old man. Sam was so dismayed by his son’s white hair that he gave instructions for the infant to be abandoned in the woods. His mother tried to save him by leaving him in the vicinity of a high mountaintop where Simorgh, a great mythical bird, lived. Simorgh took pity on Zal, provided him food and shelter, and raised him with her own offspring until Zal grew to be a fine young man, strong and fearless. The traveling caravans passing through the mountains caught sight of Zal and soon his fame spread.
An illustration of Zal and Rudabeh, from my father’s children ’s book.
Since, as Ferdowsi tells us, “neither good nor evil remains hidden,” one night Sam, who had felt some remorse, dreamed that his abandoned child was still alive. The next night he dreamed that a banner was raised on top of a mountain and a youth was leading an army, with a high priest and a wise man riding on each side. Sam regretted his rash deed and after consulting with his wise men set out to search for his son. He discovered him in the land of the magical Simorgh and invited him back to his court, asking for forgiveness. Zal was reluctant to leave Simorgh. But the great bird gave him some of her feathers and told him that whenever he was in trouble he should throw a feather into the fire, and summon her, and she would come to his aid in the shape of a black cloud.
When King Manuchehr, Iraj’s grandson, commanded Sam to go to war, Sam left Zal to rule his lands. “Enjoy life and be generous,” Sam advised Zal. “Seek knowledge and be just.” Zal took his father’s advice and gathered men of knowledge from all parts of the land and studied with them for a long time. Then he decided to make a tour of the vast lands he ruled over. In his travels Zal finally came upon Kabul (in modern-day Afghanistan), which was the capital of the kingdom of King Mehran.
King Mehran’s daughter, the lovely Princess Rudabeh, eavesdropped on a conversation between her parents, heard of Zal’s handsome looks, his courage, and heroic exploits, and fell in love with him. “I’m in love, and my love is like a wave of the sea that’s cresting up toward heaven,” she confided to her servants. “I sleep he never leaves me. The place in my heart where I should feel shame is filled instead with love, and day and night I think of his face. Now, help me, what do you think, what do you advise? You must think of some scheme, some way to free my heart and soul from this agony of adoration.”
“Have you no shame?” the servants admonished her. “Have you considered what this would mean to your father?” They wondered if Rudabeh was really ready to embrace “someone who was brought up by a bird in the mountains, who is a byword among men for his strangeness?”
Her servants reminded her that she could have any man she wanted and should not pine for a foreigner who looked so old and therefore so odd.
Zal’s oddness was one of his attractions for me and it raised Rud-abeh in my esteem that she would choose such a man. I should perhaps say that Father’s way of telling the story was also what made me like her. By the time I read the story myself, I was hooked. Father said, “It was hard for a girl to disobey her parents. Don’t you go getting ideas. If you disagree with your parents, you must have very good reason to do so.”
But Rudabeh had made up her mind and would not be discouraged by prejudice or entreaties. “It’s pointless to listen to such foolish talk. I don’t want the Chinese emperor, nor the king of the West, nor the king of Persia. Sam’s son, Zal, is the man I want. With his lion-like strength and stature, he is my equal. Call him old or young, he will be body and soul to me.”
I knew by heart the scene when Zal first came to visit Rudabeh at her palace. I had imagined that scene so concretely that I was a little disappointed when I was first able to read it myself in Ferdowsi’s actual words. From her high palace window, Rudabeh heard Zal outside, and she loosened her hair, “which cascaded down, tumbling like snakes, loop upon loop.” She said, “Come, take these black locks which I have let down for you, and use them to climb up to me.” Zal gazed in astonishment at her face and hair but refused to do as she asked. Instead, he took a lasso from his page, looped it, and hurled it upward without saying another word. The lasso caught on the battlements, and Zal quickly climbed up its sixty cubits. They embraced, kissed, and drank wine.
From moment then to moment their desire
Gained strength, and wisdom fled before love’s fire;
Passion engulfed them, and these lovers lay
Entwined together till the break of day.
So tightly they embraced, before Zal left,
Zal was the warp, and Rudabeh the weft
Of one cloth …
Their union was opposed by both sides. Although Rudabeh’s father’s kingdom was now under Iran’s rule, he was a descendant of Iran’s most hated enemy, the devil-king Zahak, and neither side trusted the other completely. King Manuchehr and Zal’s father, Sam, admonished Zal for wanting to wed someone from Zahak’s lineage. The lovers had to overcome great obstacles, connive, and pass trials before they could finally marry.
Soon after their marriage, Rudabeh became pregnant. Hers was a very painful pregnancy, making her face as sallow as saffron. She complained to her mother that she seemed unable to carry the heavy burden inside her, and that she felt she was dying. One day she fainted and none of the physicians could revive her. Zal, distressed, remembered the feathers Simorgh had given him to summon her in times of trouble. He lit a feather; Simorgh appeared. She told him he must celebrate because he would soon have a son who would be unique in the whole world for his courage and goodness.
Rostam had to be fed by ten wet nurses, and when he was weaned, he ate enough for ten grown-up men. He was handsome and strong, like his heroic grandfather, and with the same warrior-like qualities. And for over four hundred years, Rostam was the champion and protector of Persia, without whom no king could have ruled in safety. His courage was unequaled in the whole wide world and so was his cunning.
Later, when I read the Shahnameh I thought of how Father had presented Rostam as almost flawless, but he had one fatal weakness: he was too involved with affairs of state to make room for the more enduring affairs of the heart. Rostam mistakenly killed his son Sohrab in a battle. I would like to think that this refusal to allow a space for the heart cost him dearly. But that is another story.
The men in the Shahnameh were first and foremost identified by their show of physical courage; they were warriors, although the most sympathetic ones, like Iraj, were complicated and tender, with moral courage and integrity. But the women, like Rudabeh, possessed a different kind of courage, more private but no less essential. Rudabeh brought to the story the personal feelings and emotions that men like Rostam shunned or ignored. How shabby all the glories the magnificent warriors gained when devoid of the love for which Rudabeh was ready to give her life!
Rudabeh is one of the many important women in the Shahnameh who are of foreign origin. She is mainly remembered as Rostam’s mother. Her father-in-law, her husband, and, later, her son are the ones who perform feats of valor, go to war, and win glory for their land. Ferdowsi’s women’s claim to immortality is their role as mothers, wives, or mistresses. They display a different kind of courage, asserting themselves against
all odds and choosing the men they love. In the parallel world of fiction Ferdowsi created characters who defied the norms of his own society and broke its taboos. These women, without any public pretenses, with their open and unabandoned sensuality, their firm persistence, were far more romantic and appealing to me than any male hero.
There are women in the Shahnameh, like the beautiful Gurd Afrid, who showed courage, such as donning men’s clothing and fighting on the battlefield. But it was women like Rudabeh who planted in my mind the idea of a different kind of woman whose courage is private and personal. Without making any grand claims, without aiming to save humanity or defeat the forces of Satan, these women were engaged in a quiet rebellion, courageous not because it would get them accolades, but because they could not be otherwise. If they were limited and vulnerable, it was an audacious vulnerability, transcending the misogyny of their creator and his times.
My role models as I grew up were the imaginary women of my father’s stories—not the passive heroines of fairy tales, the “good” girls handsomely rewarded for their goodness, but rather the erotic and sensual women of Ferdowsi. Later, when I finally read Vis and Ramin, the book Amoo Said had given me before my departure for England, I found there another extraordinary tale that affected me deeply. In all of these works, I could detect the faint scent of a repressed sensuality coming through women’s idealized figures. The story of Vis and Ramin, written forty years after Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, also dates back to the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian Iran and appears to be another attempt to celebrate and retrieve Iran’s past culture. It is told mainly from the viewpoint of its beautiful and daring heroine, Vis. There was an eloquent earthiness, a healthy sexuality in Vis that gave flesh and blood to the poetry’s abstractions. Look at these magnificent women, I thought, created in such misogynistic and hierarchical societies, yet they are the subversive centers around which the plot is shaped. Everything is supposed to revolve around the male hero. But it is the active presence of these women that changes events and diverts the man’s life from its traditional course, that shocks him into changing his very mode of existence. In the classical Iranian narrative, active women dominate the scene; they make things happen. As I continued to read Iranian poetry, I was not surprised that almost a thousand years after Gorgani immortalized Vis in his poem, we have a woman called Forough Farrokhzad who celebrates her lover in poems of unabashed sensuality and honesty. Our best poetry has always been rulebreaking and subversive, always redefining and reshaping reality and our perception of it. I would find traces of these insubordinate women in the modern female poets. Not just Forough Farrokhzad but Alam Taj and Simin Behbahani, and in the works of Western fiction, in Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Stendhal’s Madame de La Mole and Mathilde. Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson’s annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting.
THE WEEKS BEFORE my departure for England went by quickly. There was a popular song at the time by a famous singer about his beloved’s departure. Calling her “my newly arrived spring,” he laments her departure and hopes that she will remain faithful to him. Every time she heard it, my mother would turn to look at me, her eyes glittering with tears. By now she was too busy preparing for our trip to wrangle with me, although we had our moments, fighting over what clothes to take, how long I could stay out with my friends. She and Monir joon had been busy knitting scarves and sweaters that would last me many, many years. England was cold, she said, and I would need them all. My brother had announced a ceasefire in our regular fights, and he even stopped eavesdropping on my conversations with friends. There was always some sibling rivalry between Mohammad and me, despite our great affection for each other. On my part it was tinged with jealousy because of the attention my mother paid him. But his was more tender: although I sometimes hurt him and my mother encouraged him to complain about me, he never told on me. Perhaps he did not so much want to compete with me but to share my activities—after all I was his big sister. He eavesdropped on my conversations with my friends and imitated me by writing his own memoirs in my diary—I still have the pages written in his childish hand: “Dear diary, I am a nine years old boy and I am writing in my sister’s notebook …” But he was also very innovative, trying to set up a chemistry lab or a library with the help of our uncle. In time the rivalry faded into a genuine sharing of common interests.
What I remember from the day of my departure is a series of very noisy good-byes, mingled with shameless tears, hysterical protests, and the sudden silence of the airplane announcing the irrevocable fact that no amount of self-pity could reverse the turn of events. I tamely sat by the window and suddenly felt as if Mother and I were the only two people in the world. She showed me how to buckle my seat belt and held my hand in hers while I tried to fight back the tears. After a while she started to talk to me very softly. I was lucky, she said, I had parents who cared for me, who loved me enough to accept this separation, but she had never had the joy and comfort of having a mother. “I want for you what I never had,” she said. After a while her voice became dreamy and took on a singsong tone as she told me a story she would repeat many times in the years to come.
“I was four years old,” she said, holding onto my hand as if to prevent me from slipping away. “We were living in a house in the middle of a very large garden in Kerman—that’s where we lived then—there are so few of them left now, those old Persian gardens with tall trees and running streams and miniature wildflowers growing on their banks. I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of women crying. I ran into the living room and found my aunt, my Naneh, the servants, all gathered in the room. My father was also there. Nobody paid any attention to me. Father walked out onto the verandah and I followed him. I think the moon was out although it was still very dark out there. I was afraid of the trees and their shadows and had almost to run to keep pace with him as he walked along the large stream that ran the length of the garden. Then, suddenly, he stopped. I stopped with him. There, on the ground by the stream, was my mother’s body.”
And this was my mother’s only memory of her own mother. Later, in telling the story again, she decreased her age from four to three and finally to two. My step-grandmother would tell me that Mother was a grown girl when my grandmother died, at least seven or eight, but her account was contradicted by my mother’s paternal aunt—an ally against my step-grandmother—who said my mother was very young when her mother died. Her mother’s age was equally variable: in the early accounts my grandmother was eighteen when she died, and later Mother settled on sixteen. But this really did not matter, what mattered was that she died very young, when my mother was a small child.
I am struck now by the fact that each time my mother told this story over the years she told it in the same order. She always veered into the dreamy and mechanical tone her voice took on whenever she was excavating memories in which we had no share. Oddly enough, this made her account even more poignant. While the woman who danced with Saifi was unknown to me, this one, frozen with fear, looking at her mother’s corpse, was all too familiar.
She always stopped her story right at the point of discovery. In those days, the wealthy washed their dead in the streams running through their gardens before taking them to the morgue. I often tried to picture the scene, following my mother along the stream and coming to a standstill by my grandmother’s corpse. I tried to imagine what happened next. Did she understand what it meant? Did her father finally notice her and take her away with him? Did he hold her in his arms?
The dead become frozen in the fixed caskets we create
for them. They change as we change, especially those who die young like Saifi or my grandmother. That is what makes it so strange now, not that my grandmother died, but that no one had any memories of her, no one would say, this was your grandmother’s favorite dish, or this reminds me of Shamoluk Khanoom. Not once did my grandfather talk of her. We did not even know where she was buried. I doubt my mother ever visited her grave or knew where it was. It pained me enormously and made me feel sympathy for Mother, even when I was angry with her, because the only thing she could remember of her mother was her death, and she never, not once, recalled anything about her mother alive.
That flight to London was memorable for many reasons, but the few minutes it took my mother to tell me that story, the pressure of her hand holding mine, and the silence that followed have always remained with me. I had little feeling then for the dead grandmother I knew nothing of. It was only with time that I would come to focus on her. But the story of her death had a miraculous effect on my feelings and attitude toward my mother. It made me empathize with her, and somehow it explained her anger. I wished I could resurrect my grandmother, to relieve her and my mother from that one scene, that one night, when she died. It made me want to console my mother. I regret now that I never did. Instead, I nonchalantly asked, “And then what?” She didn’t answer. Unlike Father, who told us long stories about himself and always analyzed them, my mother constructed her stories in such a way that they had no beginning or end. They were usually composed of a single event, a momentous occasion offered as a puzzle, insinuating all manner of significance.
Like Saifi’s, my grandmother’s absence made her more present in our lives. As time went by we became increasingly aware of how her death had defined everything my mother had become. In Cinderella, as in Snow White, the dead mother is an excuse, her absence more important than her presence. Stories need conflict and sorrow, they need fear of loss and hope of retrieval. Had my grandmother lived, there would have been no need for a stepmother. It is the wicked stepmother who is so colorful, so beguilingly alive—her wickedness sets off a whole series of actions and reactions. My mother was also acting out a version of a fairy tale, only her Prince Charming had died on her. Nor were the rewards for her patience eternal peace and happiness.