Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  My second wedding day, September 9, 1979. From left: Bijan’s mother, me, Father, Mother.

  The morning after the civil service we held two more ceremonies, first a Baha’i ceremony presided over by an Indian woman, then the Muslim marriage. Bijan’s family was Baha’i, a fact that my parents accepted with surprisingly little reluctance. That night some twenty friends and family gathered at Mani’s house. While my sisters-in-law danced, our family stood on the sidelines with silly smiles, looking on with admiration and perhaps even some envy at their ability.

  CHAPTER 22

  revolution

  BIJAN LEFT FOR PARIS RIGHT AFTER our wedding to talk with the leaders of our group there. Armed militant organizations and increasing repression polarized the opposition’s political discourse, radicalizing the student movement abroad. Mother stayed on for two months. She rented an apartment in New York, where my brother was studying, and since Bijan and I had not had time to find a place of our own it was agreed that I would move in with her to work on my dissertation until his return. New York, the locus of most radical activities in the 1930s, was a good place for me to get back to writing my dissertation on Mike Gold and the Proletarian writers of the 1930s.

  Mother never failed to guilt-trip Bijan’s family about his leaving. “Married two weeks and he leaves my daughter for no good reason,” she’d lament, muttering under her breath that he was following in his father’s footsteps—like father, like son. She called his mother to tell her that I was in poor health and overworked and who would have taken care of me had she not decided to stay on? “Is this what is in store for my poor daughter?” Bijan’s mother was in a terrible state for her own reasons. She genuinely believed that government agents might kill Bijan, especially when he traveled in Europe.

  That year, President Jimmy Carter established an office of human rights in the State Department, signaling a change in U.S. foreign policy. At a Hungarian pastry shop on Amsterdam Avenue, not far from Columbia University, my comrades and I discussed the effects of what some called “Jimocracy” on the dissident movement in Iran. A group of nationalists wrote a letter to the Shah asking him to implement the constitution and to limit the role of the monarchy. A human-rights committee formed in Tehran demanded that the rights outlined by Carter should be respected in Iran. Some political prisoners were released and the treatment of those in jails improved. The Writers’ Association held a series of poetry nights at the Goethe Institute in Tehran to overflow audiences, where the lack of freedom of expression was loudly denounced. On the last night, soldiers stood outside in the rain while poets and writers spoke of suppression. The soldiers had been instructed not to use force unless violence broke out and the evening ended without any problems. But a second series of readings at Arya Mehr University was derailed by SAVAK.

  Although secular forces had initiated the protests, Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers were by now gaining prominence in Iran. Too arrogant to think of him as a threat and deliberately ignorant of his designs, we supported him. And yet everything was there for us to see: Khomeini’s book The Rule of Jurisprudence called for the creation of a theocratic state ruled by a representative of God; he had denounced women’s suffrage as a form of prostitution; he had made countless pronouncements against minorities, especially Baha’is and Jews. We welcomed the vehemence of Khomeini’s rants against imperialists and the Shah and were willing to overlook the fact that they were not delivered by a champion of freedom. Khomeini himself very shrewdly refrained from making his plans widely known. He had implied in his public statements that once he returned to Iran he would retire to the holy city of Qom and leave the affairs of the state to politicians.

  For the first decades of the twentieth century, Amoo Said and his generation—men like Dehkhoda, Hedayat, Nima, Dowlatabadi, Rafaat, Iraj Mirza, Eshghi—had all been only too aware of the reactionary role of some clerics. Many wrote scathing satires, criticizing their religious hypocrisy and backwardness. We young revolutionaries had their writings to refer to, but we were inebriated by the moment and blinded by our own passions. Thus, as uprisings spread to key cities like Tabriz and Qom in 1978, we in New York, Washington, and Berkeley attributed them to “our” forces. At a party given by my brother and his roommates in New York, attended by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of the Monthly Review, Sweezy offered to drink to the health of “the first real workers’ revolution.” It took a few months before disillusionment set in. Two years later I published my first essay in English, in the New Left Review, about the dire condition of women after the revolution and signed it AZ.

  Demonstrators protest against the Shah, near the White House.

  The Confederation of Iranian Students planned huge demonstrations in Washington, D.C., on November 15, 1977, during the Shah’s state visit to the United States Bijan, who had just returned from France, went directly to Washington and I joined him there. Nearly two thousand students gathered around the White House, escorted by mounted police. I along with two other women from different factions gave speeches and shouted out slogans. A few of the Shah’s defenders had gathered close to the White House lawn, their voices drowned out by our slogans: Death to the Shah; CIA agents, U.S. advisors out of Iran; Iran the next Vietnam; U.S. get out of Iran.

  The next day The Washington Post published the famous picture of the Shah and Carter on the White House lawn. The tear gas used against the demonstrators had spread to the lawn and the Shah, bending his head with a handkerchief to his eyes, looked as if he were crying. We did not know then that he had cancer, nor could we imagine how confused he had become as he watched (back in Iran) hundreds of thousands of what he thought had been his loyal subjects protesting his rule. When I returned to New York the next day, I had almost lost my voice. I concealed my participation in the demonstrations from my mother, who would have strongly disapproved. She made another phone call to Bijan’s family to complain about her daughter’s frail state and her son-in-law’s utter disregard for her well-being.

  The Shah and President Carter at the White House.

  A few days later she returned to Iran and I went to D.C. again to join Bijan. We finally settled in D.C, where he went to work for a construction company and I started, at last, to focus on my dissertation. I turned the living room of our rented apartment into my office, and as soon as I woke up and showered I would take my coffee back to bed and read the news about Iran. One corner of our bedroom was soon filled with old coffee-stained copies of The Washington Post and The New York Times. Some mornings I would go to the Library of Congress, where I spent delicious hours looking through old microfilms of The Masses, The New Masses, and other publications from the thirties for my dissertation. Usually Bijan picked me up after work and we would walk around Dupont Circle, eat something, and go home.

  IN AUGUST 1978, Cinema Rex in Abadan, a port city on the edge of the oil fields, was set on fire by arsonists and over four hundred people were scorched to death. The Shah’s government denied any involvement in the incident and claimed it was the work of the religious opposition. Both the secular and religious opposition fired back, accusing the regime of committing the crime with the express purpose of blaming them to undermine popular sympathy. It was significant that the fire had taken place during the holy month of Ram adan. Few people believed what the government said, and the atrocity became a symbol of the lengths to which the Shah’s regime would go to preserve power. For weeks Cinema Rex was evoked to remind us of the fact that there could be no dialogue, no compromise, with a regime as brutal as this. Photographs of innocent victims who had gone to the movies that afternoon stared at us from the pages of newspapers and the pamphlets that appeared denouncing the perpetrators of this most heinous crime. The callous brutality of the act was another argument for the overthrow of the Shah’s regime.

  After the revolution, the families of the victims demanded justice. To their dismay and surprise the new Islamic government ignored them: their protests and sit-ins were attacked, and sever
al prosecutors resigned in the middle of the investigations. Because of public pressures, many people, guilty and innocent alike, were arrested and executed. In some cases it was blatantly obvious that the charges were trumped up—one officer who was found guilty and executed had not even been present in the city at the time. A young man who had been directly involved claimed he had confessed to the authorities but no one would take him seriously. Hysteria and outrage eclipsed all facts. People believed what they wanted to believe.

  Later it emerged that the fire had been planned not by the Shah’s government but by sympathizers of the religious opposition, who felt that with this act they could accelerate the revolutionary process. Because the investigation had been muddled from the start, the truth came out piecemeal. The Islamic government and the official news organs hid the evidence and tried to blame the Shah. The greatest crime the Shah’s police had been guilty of, in this case, was bad judgment. Panicked and overwhelmed, they had acted foolishly: seeing a group trying to light a small fire in a corner and hoping to catch the culprits before they could escape, they ordered that the doors be shut until the firefighters arrived. By then, the fire had spread to the whole building and burned almost everyone.

  Where was I when we discovered the truth? What did I do? Did I read the papers, discuss the news with friends, express outrage, and go on eating my ice cream? Was that the day I returned home pleased with myself because a class on Tom Jones had gone particularly well? The worst thing about such acts is that they leave no innocents: everyone is implicated, even the victims, or bystanders such as myself.

  Not long after the Cinema Rex tragedy, Bijan made another trip to Paris, to discuss the future of our group. He returned disenchanted with the leaders, who immediately started a Stalinist-style campaign against him. While he was in Paris his mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer that had metastasized to her brain. Some in the leadership used Bijan’s mother’s illness against him, accusing him of reneging on his political commitments in order to tend to his mother. Tending to one’s mother was seen as a bourgeois affliction.

  For someone as committed and loyal to his political beliefs and to his family as Bijan, this was exceptionally difficult. Although he seldom spoke about it, he did not sleep much at night. His mother died within a few months. I too was pressured to make a choice between my political commitments and personal loyalty to Bijan. In the end we were both isolated and disenchanted. Perhaps I owe my dissertation to that disenchantment, as I was finally forced to focus on my writing.

  The more I delved into my dissertation the more disillusioned I became with its subject, a proletarian writer of the thirties, and his ideological stance. I started to read Richard Wright, Arthur Koestler, and Ignazio Silone, whose experiences of communism resonated with my own activities in the student movement, and I began to wonder, how can one remain loyal to one ’s progressive ideals without clinging to a destructive ideology?

  IN THE FALL OF 1978, Iraq expelled Khomeini in a bid to improve its relations with Iran. From his obscurity in Karballa, where he had cultivated a network of clerics and allies, suddenly he was thrown onto the world stage. His projected image as a man of God, at once imposing and otherworldly, was perfectly encapsulated by a photograph of him sitting under an apple tree in the small French village of Neauphle-le-Château. Soon international media and all manner of Iranians—seculars, nationalists, even radicals—would make the pilgrimage to Neauphle-le-Château to pay their respects, to appease their curiosity, and, for some, to size up a potential future leader of Iran. The paradox of the man of God turning his back on the world while at the same time conspiring and planning to take it over would fascinate his millions of admirers.

  Ayatollah Khomeini, in exile in Paris.

  In January the Ministry of Court in Tehran had published an article in the official newspaper, Etelaat, under the title “Black and Red Imperialism.” The two enemies of democracy and freedom were identified as communists (red imperialism) and the radical clerics led by Khomeini (black imperialism). The article had triggered demonstrations in the holy city of Qom that left six dead. Forty days later, in keeping with the Muslim cycle of mourning, there were demonstrations in Tabriz and three more deaths. In demonstrations in the city of Yazd on the fortieth day commemorating the deaths in Tabriz, the Shah was compared to Yazid, the murderer of the martyred Imam Hussein. Throughout the early part of 1978 the Shah vacillated between crackdowns and reconciliation. On September 6th, several thousand participated in demonstrations on the festival of the Eid al Fetr, ending the month of Ramadan. The Coalition of Islamic Societies added to the slogan “Liberty and Independence” the words “Islamic Rule.”

  When I spoke on the phone with my father, who was in Paris on business, he sounded excited by the changes in Iran. He kept repeating that for centuries Iran had suffered at the hands of absolutist mon-archs and reactionary clerics, and this was a chance to get rid of both. “I almost feel sorry for the Shah,” he said, “with all the sycophants surrounding him, telling him he is the shadow of God on earth.” Ill with cancer, confused and hurt by the people’s reaction, insecure about international support, especially that of the Americans, the Shah seemed to have lost his will. He did not want more violence, and he refused to act upon the advice of those who suggested he crack down on the demonstrations and let the army loose on the people. It was, as so many suggested at the time, a little too late for this gesture of goodwill.

  On January 16, 1979, the Shah left Iran. Before leaving, to appease the opposition, he appointed a liberal nationalist ally of Mossadegh, Shahpoor Bakhtiar, as his prime minister. That was when I had my first serious fight with Bijan—if one can call it a fight. About a month before we ’d had a falling-out, one whose cause I cannot even remember. Since then Bijan had given me the silent treatment. He did not argue or shout, he simply withdrew. When I say he withdrew I mean not just from the fight but from everything. While he was growing ever more reserved, reducing our communications to the few necessary words, I had been brooding. I would wake up in the morning exhausted, having carried on into the night the fight we had avoided during the daytime. This desperate situation was further proof to me that marriages did not work. At least they did not work for me. Better cut your losses, I thought, while you still can.

  That night we drove to a friend’s house in silence. During dinner there were the usual arguments about the Shah and Khomeini. We all gathered by the television to hear about Bakhtiar’s appointment—the fifth and final prime minister in less than two years. “I think if the left and the secular forces in Iran are wise,” Bijan said mildly but firmly, “they will gather behind Bakhtiar. He is a genuine democrat and a seasoned politician. We all must rally behind him.”

  “That is bunk,” I said. “Bakhtiar is a compromiser.” “And what has he compromised?” Bijan asked. “He is disbanding SAVAK, he will bring forward a liberal government, and he will prevent Kho meini from gaining more power.” But I, like so many others, was for a complete break with the Shah. Nothing less than the overthrow of the regime would do. I started to recount, with the righteousness attendant on such extreme positions, all of the crimes committed by the Shah. Bijan looked at me and said with disdain that I need not trouble myself telling him about the Shah’s crimes. He did not pursue the argument, which of course fired me up even more.

  On our way home, after driving in silence, I blurted out, “I want a divorce.” There was a pause: Bijan was genuinely shocked. Whatever he had expected, it was not this. “Why?” he said, “why on earth would you think that way? We have such a good relationship.” “We have hardly been speaking,” I said, “for the past month.” He tried to convince me that he loved me and that no matter how angry he might have been—and when he was angry he could not speak about it—nothing had happened to make him think for a moment that we should divorce. He said, with some desperation, “There are other ways of expressing yourself, you know, than with words.”

  ON FEBRUARY 1, 1979, Khomeini mad
e a triumphant return to Tehran, where millions flooded the streets to welcome him. When asked by a journalist how he felt about being back home after almost eighteen years, he said, “Nothing.” Ayatollah Khomeini had been elevated to Imam, a title given in Shia Islam to the successors of the prophet Mohammad. To use his name in vain or insult him would now entail serious consequences. Thousands of Iranians, some of whom I knew to be perfectly sane, including my secular and reasonably educated aunt Nafiseh, had spotted his image in the moon. Later, when I made a derogatory comment about him, she said, “Darling, please don’t say such things. My mother told me about a woman who slandered him and a cat jumped out of the garbage can and bit her arm so severely that she died.”

  An Iranian woman with a propaganda poster of Khomeini.

  If my aunt saw Khomeini in the moon, there were others in my family who saw possibilities that only a year before might have seemed equally illusory. My cousin Hamid, the least political of Uncle Abu Torab’s children, who, after getting his master’s degree in media and film from UCLA, had returned home to help build the film and media department at the Open University, now found little room for himself and his American wife, Kelly, in Iran. They picked up and left for America, while his younger brothers Majid and Mehdi, who had been associated with a radical Marxist group, returned home from the U.S. For the young generation, my generation, we who had such romantic longings for revolutions and upheavals, the image we saw in the moon was that of a future where, in unison with the proletariat, we would liberate the country and live happily ever after. Except that there seemed to be something terribly wrong in the way the dream was shaping up.