Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  Majid, who had surprised everyone with his precocious poetry, had become the young hope of a group of influential intellectuals in Esfahan. He was a perpetual rebel, repudiating his parents’ faith and way of life. Majid never did anything halfway. In his twenties he dropped poetry and picked up politics, choosing to follow the most militant form of Marxism. He vowed that he would not write another poem until after the workers’ revolution. “What have you done for the revolution?” he would ask me seriously, even before we had any hint that there might actually be one. Studying, reading literature, all this was bourgeois and antirevolutionary Once we had a fierce argument over his claim that ironing was a bourgeois activity. He drove me crazy, but I admired his tenacity and single-mindedness, both of which I felt I personally could do with more of. He pursued poetry, and later politics, with all his heart and soul. I wish now that I had asked him then, “Why did you abandon poetry? How could you forget that the greatest changes in this country were brought about as much by its poets as by its politicians?”

  Back in Tehran, Majid fell in love with a young woman by the name of Ezatt whom he met through his revolutionary activities. His youngest sister, Noushin, also met her husband, Hussein, in this way. The four of them participated in the shantytown uprisings on the outskirts of Tehran in 1977.

  In a manuscript addressed to his wife, Majid describes how their romance flourished during those unreal days between February 1, 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran, and February 11th, when he asserted his power over the country. I never met Ezatt. In photographs she looks slim and boyish. He describes her as a tomboy, with a slender neck, slim, but not short like his sister Nafiseh. In a poem he has her in a khaki coat, “Small, slender, with bony cheeks.”

  On February 8th, Majid and a dozen university students went to a factory on the outskirts of Tehran. Because of the unrest, the plant had had no sales for the past eight months and the owner had not paid his workers their wages. Two workers brought the owner to the front yard. “He was chubby and tall, with big red cheeks.” Majid writes. “He was scared and could hardly talk. We didn’t know what to do. Some of the workers talked boldly and the owner listened politely. The government was dying and could no longer back him. But the workers had our support. Finally it was decided that the workers would elect a council to manage the production and sales.” As Majid went home, a group of soldiers shot into the air and cyclists with covered faces belonging to the Marxist Fedaiyan Khalgh Organization asked people to go to the Farahabad Garrison to support the rebel airmen’s uprising. Majid passed a young man teaching his eager pupils how to make Molotov cocktails. The next morning he opened the door to his wife, Ezatt, who had just returned from Esfahan, and he clasped her, shivering from the cold, in his arms. “The moment of uprising had come,” he writes. Love and revolution, what could be more romantic?

  That day Majid, Ezatt, Hussein, and Noushin rode their motorcycles to the Farahabad Garrison to support the insurgent soldiers. They climbed inside a tank and drove to the dreaded Evin Prison, which had been overtaken by protestors. The jailers had left in great haste and in the kitchen they found huge colanders, half-filled with rinsed rice. “A group of armed civilians tried to push the people out and control the prison,” he writes. “They were trying to organize the first prison unit of the new regime.” Next they went toward another prison, Qasr. “I saw that power is not a divine gift. The magic was gone. Prisons, garrisons, and royal palaces had all become naked buildings with no extraordinary protection. The Shah, ministers, SAVAK agents, and military generals were of the human race with no noble blood in their veins. Now the new power has sprayed a new magic potion in the air. It put on a clerical turban and garb and grew a beard to hide its human origin.”

  WHILE WE INDULGED in the euphoria of playing around with tanks and Molotov cocktails, increasingly the slogans focused on Aya tollah Khomeini and his emerging role as the sole leader of the revolution. Leaders of the Nationalist group, whose mentor, Mossadegh, was betrayed by Khomeini’s mentor, Ayatollah Kashani, now deserted their old ally, Bakhtiar, and rallied around Khomeini. There was an air of smug certainty to all of this: so many believed that once Khomeini was on Iranian soil, he would retreat to the holy city of Qom. He did return to Qom for a while, but not to retreat, and soon the violence that he had first advocated against the Great Satan and its domestic lackeys would be turned against his own supporters, both secular and Muslim.

  Bakhtiar went into hiding and finally left Iran secretly in April of that year. (He was murdered by the agents of the Islamic Republic in his apartment in Paris on August 7, 1991.) There was chaos in the streets and the only force that could sustain order was the now divided army, whose barracks were stormed by the members of militant armed organizations and thousands of ordinary people overtaken by revolutionary zeal. On February 8th Khomeini announced a provisional government headed by a moderate Muslim dissident, Mehdi Bazargan. In his speech introducing Bazargan, he referred to himself as a person who had authority “through the guardianship [velayat] that I have from the holy lawgiver [the Prophet].” He said that the provisional government must be obeyed because it was not ordinary government and that “Revolt against God’s government is a revolt against God. Revolt against God is blasphemy.” To consolidate his power, Khomeini began to form parallel organizations to the army and police forces: revolutionary committees and revolutionary militia, armed organizations whose power was unspecified and unlimited. At first the revolutionary committees were unarmed groups whose role was to help suppress the chaos and protect communities, while at the same time arresting counterrevolutionaries, which at first meant supporters of the old regime but soon extended to liberal and radical forces. It wasn’t long before the committees became the guardians of our morality and began arresting citizens for a whole range of crimes, from blasphemy to possession of alcoholic beverages and Western music. On February 11th, the Supreme Military Council unanimously decided to declare itself neutral and ordered all military personnel to return to base. That day Ayatollah Khomeini and his provisional government declared victory. For several weeks, despite the protests from human-rights organizations and from the moderate elements within the new revolutionary regime, hundreds of officials of the old regime were summarily executed.

  The Islamic vigilantes roaming the streets were declared by the new leaders to be voices of the people. Khomeini issued an edict making the veil mandatory, which he was forced to retract after women organized huge demonstrations and sit-ins, shouting, “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western. Freedom is global.” But the vigilantes attacked unveiled women, sometimes with acid, scissors, and knives. The family protection law was soon abrogated, and religious laws became the law of the land, lowering the legal age of marriage (for women) from eighteen to nine, legalizing polygamy and “temporary marriages,” defrocking female judges, and introducing stoning to death as punishment for adultery and prostitution.

  Women protest against the Islamic dress code, 1980.

  CHAPTER 23

  the other other woman

  BY THE TIME I FINISHED DEFENDING my dissertation, in the summer of 1979, and left with Bijan for Tehran, I had few illusions about the new government in Iran. My parents had been summoned to the revolutionary tribunals. Mother was ordered to repay the wages she had received as a member of Parliament and most of the property in their name was confiscated, but they were not jailed or executed like so many other government officials of their rank. My mother’s votes against the capitulation law and family protection law were counted as points in her favor. Father’s life was saved because of his jail time and his secret service records, which revealed his alleged sympathy for the protestors during the June uprising of 1963. Sometimes he would remind us with wonder that Mr. Rahman had told him that his time in prison would save him from a bigger disaster down the road. Mother would shake her head knowingly. “Who believed in him?” she would say, as much to herself as to any of us. “Who kept him around, despite all you
r efforts to throw him out of the house?”

  While I was in America, my parents moved to a new house in the northern part of Tehran, opposite what was once called the American Hospital, which would soon be turned into a hospital for the veterans of the Iran-Iraq war. When we moved back Bijan and I decided to stay with them. The arrangement was intended to be temporary, until we both found jobs and a place of our own, but like so many temporary arrangements it soon devolved into the norm. Mohammad had his own place but he visited often, especially on Fridays for my parents’ coffee sessions, which were in full force.

  The large room on the ground floor of the new house saw many charged and heated debates: the fate of the country was at stake and everyone, except our charming and lethargic colonel, had something to say. Father still had high hopes for the revolution: he kept repeating his thesis that if we could get rid of the two oppressive forces of absolute monarchy and orthodox religion by strengthening the moderate secular and religious forces, we would be on the right course. He felt that Prime Minister Bazargan had the power and the will to unite the democratic-minded groups and individuals into one front—an illusion that was soon put to rest.

  At this point both Shirin Khanoom and my mother were admirers of Khomeini. Mother furiously defended him against a growing contingent of young skeptics composed of my brother and me and our friends. She could find nothing wrong with a leader who practiced her religion, as she put it. “Your religion!” someone shot back. “Nezhat Khanoom, if he could he would have you and your daughter and every single woman in this room wrapped in black from head to toe.”

  My mother rejected such conjectures, passing around bowls of fruit and handing out the coffee and small pastries. “It isn’t right to peddle in rumors,” she said. “He is firm, he knows how to rule.” Impatient recitations about the latest outrages committed by the revolutionary guards did not move her. She insisted the violence was not Khomeini’s will but the work of a few extremists who would soon be punished.

  It was not long before she could not remember a time when she had defended Khomeini. News of the atrocities committed by the new regime ate away at our festive mood, and dashed our hopes for change. A number of colleagues and friends were killed by the regime—Mr. Amirani, the editor in chief of Khandanyha, who had supported my father so bravely during his years in jail, and the soft-spoken and good-natured Mr. Khoshkish, my mother’s bashful suitor, who had been the head of the central bank, were both murdered without trial or formal charges. There were others: my former school principal Dr. Parsay; General Pakravan, who had been instrumental, incidentally, in saving Ayatollah Khomeini’s life in 1963; our old foe General Nas-siri; and many others who had in fact been against the Shah’s system, including some, like my cousin Said, who had spent time in the Shah’s jails. Later the killings would extend to ordinary people whose sin was simply slandering Khomeini or Islam. The regime rounded up gays, adulterers, those it deemed to be prostitutes, as well as some minorities, especially the Baha’is. By the time the American Embassy was seized, on November 4, 1979, and the moderate prime minister, Bazargan, fell, my parents’ honeymoon with the revolution was over.

  ON THE FIRST FRIDAY after our return to Tehran, Mother was eager to introduce me to a new guest. She explained that the woman in question was an associate of Uncle Ali, who headed a well-known hospital in Tehran. “I have heard so much about you,” Ziba Khanoom said with a meaningful smile, her tone too intimate for someone I had just met. She stayed for lunch after the other guests had left, and was joined by her husband and her ten-year-old daughter, a pretty, shy girl who despite her shyness seemed to be quite at home and whom my mother pressed with chocolates. After lunch Father took us out to the garden. “Your father has spent so much time on this garden,” Ziba Khanoom said with admiration. “Every single flower he has planted with his own hands.”

  Mother had been the first to discover her. She met her on a visit to Uncle Ali’s hospital, where Ziba Khanoom was on the administrative staff. Mother had taken an instant liking to her and invited her, and later her family, to our house. By the time I returned with Bijan to Iran, Ziba Khanoom and her husband were among my parents’ closest friends. Apparently the affair had started when my father and Ziba Khanoom took to complaining about their respective spouses. “He is cold,” my father told me in confidence, “and surprisingly indifferent to the charms of a passionate and loving woman.” Nothing like two disgruntled spouses to bring about a conspiracy of affection.

  Ziba Khanoom was prettier than Shahin, and more conventional.

  A little plump, overdressed, a great cook, and an efficient housewife who worked hard and well, without any of Shahin’s pretensions. At the start of the revolution, when the new government was arresting functionaries of the old regime and my parents worried that Father would be called in, Ziba and her husband had given him shelter for a few days.

  Shahran (my good friend and Mohammad’s first wife), me, Bijan, and Mohammad, 1983.

  We saw much more of her than we ever had of Shahin, because she was a family friend (and a close one at that) and because she was my mother’s “find.” While I was away, Mother and Aunt Mina had had a falling-out for reasons that were never quite clear. In response to my inquiries, my mother would make vague references to lies and being made a fool of, and how she could not take it anymore. Mother had been impressed with Ziba’s “ladylike demeanor,” her proper sense of respect and deference, and she began to take Aunt Mina’s place. It irritated me, the innocent and persistent way my mother had of being attentive toward this woman and her family. It made us all uncomfortable, since we all knew what was going on—Bijan, Mohammad, and later Mohammad’s new wife, Shahran, who quickly became a good friend.

  CHAPTER 24

  when home is not home anymore

  I CAN CITE THE DATES WHEN the war with Iraq started (September 22, 1980) and ended (August 20, 1988), and I can tell you the casualties were high, but I feel helpless when it comes to describing the subtle changes that transformed the fabric of our lives, so that I could walk down the familiar streets of my childhood and feel like an utter stranger. In a diary I started in the fall of 1980, somewhere in between my teaching notes for classes on Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and Gorky’s Mother, I wrote, “Home is not Home anymore.” Our lives altered, not just by catastrophe and carnage, but also by a different kind of violence, almost imperceptible, that wormed its way into our normal everyday lives.

  Like my cousin Majid, who roamed the streets of Tehran in the hope of bringing about a revolution, I had dreamed of change in the political system, but at the core of everything I did was the idea of returning home, to those mountains, to the night sky under which I had slept throughout my childhood, to Naderi Street and the scents of fish, leather, coffee, and chocolate, to the movie houses and restaurants and cafés with their lively music, to my father who, holding onto my hand as we walked along the wide, tree-lined avenue toward the mountains, would say, “One reason we should believe in God is that poetry like Rumi’s or Ferdowsi’s exists.” Nothing is more deadly than crushed expectations: the revolution was supposed to change the political system, to bring more freedom, to make us more at home in our own home. Now I had returned and nothing was the same. Or, more disturbing yet, everything seemed the same but was in fact different: the streets had new names, Iran had become the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even the language sounded oddly unfamiliar, a language in which citizens were either emissaries of God or Satan, and women like myself were “prostitutes” and “Western agents.” The face of religion was changing from the gentle teachings of my father to the ideological rants of a group of people, staunch followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, who called themselves Hezbollah—the Party of God. Their slogan was “Only one party: Hezbollah.”

  Religion was no longer just a part of Iranian culture, shaping it and being shaped by it; time and again Ayatollah Khomeini reminded us that not Iran but Islam was our real home and that Islam’s borders stretched from Iran
out into the wide world.

  I CANNOT THINK OF the Iran-Iraq war without remembering that this was a war between two governments who were simultaneously carrying out a brutal campaign against their own people. Ayatollah Khomeini had called the war a blessing; for him it was a great diversion from the mounting domestic problems and opposition. In his mind, now the whole nation would gather against the foreign invader while at the same time the state could suppress any voice of dissent in the name of national security. During the eight years that the war lasted, Tehran was bombed several times, never as heavily as some of the border cities in the province of Khuzistan, but in the intervals between the bombings the fear remained. Every time there was a victory march on the radio announcing the bombing of another Iraqi “nest of spies” in Baghdad, we knew all too well that those spies were ordinary people like ourselves, as we knew that soon Tehran would be targeted and Saddam would announce the destruction of “nests of spies” in Tehran. I felt a great deal of empathy for those ordinary Iraqis, forced to be our foes, but in reality our kin in distress. About a month after my return to Iran, I started teaching at the University of Tehran and a girl’s college whose changing name was symbolic of the constantly changing times: during the Shah’s time it was known as Farah Pahlavi, after the Shah’s wife; then it became Mottahedin, after a female member of the militant Islamic Moja-hedeen Organization who had been killed during the Shah’s time. When the divisions between the Mojahedeen and the new regime deepened, the college’s name was changed again to Al Zahra, to commemorate the prophet Mohammad’s daughter. The first day I entered the cavernous hall of the faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Tehran, I was struck by the buzz of different voices rising and falling. Several tables were laid out with pamphlets, books, and leaflets, each table representing a different political grouping. I soon got used to the noise, the crowds that swelled and receded at the tables, the constant motion.