by Azar Nafisi
Haideh never joined Golshiri’s group; she was too involved in the political struggle to devote her enormous talent to literature. But I did. I was in desperate need of conversations that did not end in ideological polemics. I had come to be preoccupied with the relationship between democracy and the novel, inspired by the fact that the rise of the novel in Iran was simultaneous with demands for democracy and freedom. I felt there must be a relationship between the celebration of individual voices in the novel and the polyphony of a democratic society. As I prepared for my class, I was also avidly reading and taking notes on modern Persian literature. Sometimes I drove Bijan crazy. I would get excited, kiss him affectionately, and then go on maniacally about my latest find (“The Constitutional Revolution wasn’t just a political upheaval,” I would say breathlessly. “Do you realize what immense quarrels were fought over language, starting with Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, who insisted that we had to find a new democratic language—and he wasn’t alone. Look at Dehkhoda and Hedayat, they helped create this new democratic language. This was the time novels, plays, and journalism came into being, so the Islamic regime’s targeting of culture isn’t altogether arbitrary… They’re going back to the source, don’t you see?”) That evening I told him that I had met Houshang Golshiri. Yes, the very Golshiri who had written Shazdeh Ehtejab (The Prince).
Bijan with the writer Houshang Golshiri.
WHEN I FIRST MENTIONED The Prince to my father, he came close to rolling his eyes. “Oh no,” he said, “as if Buf-e Kur [The Blind Owl] was not enough.” He wanted to know why I was making such a fuss over two thin books. “The whole country is going to the dogs and my daughter is excited about these two treasures, these ‘novels’ as if they were going to solve our problems.” “You have only yourself to blame,” I said.
He was right: the country did seem to be going to the dogs. There was no end in sight to the war, and to the rampages of the regime. Ever more relatives and friends were in hiding, escaping the country, or in jail. Nor did I have many illusions about my own situation. Not long after that, Haideh and I were expelled, along with other colleagues, squelching my dream of teaching. My passport was confiscated and I could not leave the country. I was having frequent anxiety attacks.
From the moment I could communicate with him as a human being my father had been telling me stories. When he taught me to search for an understanding of my country, its history and culture, in the tales of Ferdowsi, he gave me literature not as a pastime but as a way of perceiving and interpreting the world—in short, as a way of being in the world. And now that the world had become so puzzling, so hostile, where else could I go? For Father, Ferdowsi was the key to the past. The Shahnameh was the only evidence of that magnificent Persian Empire that haunted our dreams and nightmares. What was it in Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (written in 1936) and in Golshiri’s The Prince (written in 1969) that could unravel for us something of the Iran we lived in? These novels were too barren (“Nowadays, barren and modern seem to go hand in hand,” he offered), too convoluted for his taste. “If you call War and Peace or A Tale of Two Cities a novel,” he said kindly, “then you cannot call these books novels as well, without a plot, with such vague characters …”
Both novels were banned by the Islamic Republic for their sexually explicit scenes and their authors’ critical outlook on orthodox religion. At the start of the twentieth century the struggle for modernism in many ways had been accompanied by an aversion to religion and in some cases, as in Hedayat’s, by an infatuation with pre-Islamic Iran. Hedayat’s anti-Islamic sentiments were at times as extreme and virulent as his views of ancient Iran were romantic and nostalgic.
I had read The Blind Owl at an early age, maybe when I was fifteen, around the time I went about quoting Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea or Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Like other young people of my age in my father’s family, I felt an affinity for these angst-ridden, alienated texts. The Blind Owl was the kind of book parents forbade their children to read. Hedayat himself had committed suicide in Paris in 1951, and many associated the book with the suicide. It was said that it incited young people to kill themselves, or to smoke opium, and all sorts of terrible things. All this had turned the book, as well as its writer, into a cult object. The Blind Owl was well known for its similarities to European Expressionism. Critics had discussed the influence of Novalis, Nerval, and Hedayat’s beloved Kafka. But on rereading it I was struck not by its famous pessimism or links to modernist Western thought, but by its affinities to classical texts. I had the same feeling about The Prince. A thread linked these two very modern works: they seemed like nightmarish replicas of classical tales of star-crossed lovers, like Vis and Ramin or Layla and Majnun, nightmarish because they combined and restructured mutilated images of a robust past experience.
While in Gorgani, Ferdowsi, and other classical poets we dealt with an earthly world, openly celebrating the pleasures of life and of flesh, in later mystical poetry this world was replaced by a heavenly one. But in The Blind Owl and The Prince, both Earth and heaven are in ruins, the spiritual world has crumbled, and reality is bereft of pleasure and full of menace. Hedayat and Golshiri were deeply influenced by both modern Western thought and classical Persian literature, and were unique in their ability to mix and mingle the two.
The plot in both novellas is centered around the relationship or nonrelationship of the male protagonist—a displaced and frustrated weakling—with two women, one representing the ideal inaccessible woman (called “ethereal” in The Blind Owl) and the other symbolizing the earthy erotic woman (called “slut”). In both stories this relationship and the protagonist’s frustrated desire to possess the women lead to their and his own destruction. There is a sense of hopelessness and desperation in these two books, a sense that they have lost the past while the present is incomprehensible and therefore dangerous and hostile, a far cry from Ferdowsi’s poignant homage to the past.
In Golshiri’s book, as in The Blind Owl, there are no lines of communication between the male narrator and the female protagonists: all dialogue has broken down, turning to fear, resentment, and the kind of cruelty only the very weak are capable of. What has happened to the women of Shahnameh or Vis and Ramin, with their pomegranate breasts and ruby lips, who confirm their existence by announcing their names and boldly naming the object of their desire? I could not help but detect some similarity between the impotent torturers and the tortured murderers of the two novellas and those vigilantes who flogged teenage girls for showing a bit of hair. Did they not yearn to muffle these strong and unpredictable women in order to mask their own impotence?
It seemed to me, in my more lucid interludes, that the psychology of our particular political moment could be clarified by the mischievous light of these stories. Where would we go from here? Something new needed to be said. And this was an urgent matter, just as it had been urgent a thousand years ago for Ferdowsi to respond to the conquest of Persia, and for Hedayat and a whole host of other writers and poets to respond to the Constitutional Revolution and the radical changes in its wake. We needed a cultural revolution—not the fake one imposed on us by the regime, but a real one.
WHEN I WAS EXPELLED from the University of Tehran in the early eighties, Golshiri suggested that I teach a short course on The Blind Owl to a small group of interested young people. Not too long ago, out of the blue, a student from that class sent me a copy of his notes, bound in dark blue, thirty-seven handwritten pages. On the cover he had written with a flourish: “About Buf-e Kur, A Novel of Consciousness, Dr. Azar Nafisi.” Leafing through those pages, I can retrieve the almost naïve excitement we felt jumping from Ferdowsi and Zoroastrianism and the myth of the first man and woman who were bound together as a single plant to the modernism of Hedayat, the influences of Nerval and Novalis.
After that class I wrote several articles on modern Persian fiction and joined Golshiri in his literary group, composed mainly of his disciples. Each week an author was invited whose work would be d
iscussed by the group. Sometimes the writers he invited were insulted by the harsh way he treated them, and there were often verbal sparring matches, mainly between Golshiri and his guest, offering some insights into the rivalries and animosities that were so very strong among us despite the fact that we had all been forced to unite in the face of the regime’s constant threats and harassments.
At the same time, I participated in a different reading group made up of friends, most of them from academia, including Mohammad and Shahran and Farzaneh Taheri, Golshiri’s wife, a prominent translator who had studied English literature at the University of Tehran. Some left the group to migrate abroad, and new members were admitted, but, amazingly, over those years of perpetual flux, these meetings were one of the constants in our lives. Living in revolutionary times, when everything was so malleable, when facts were immaterial and all old certainties questioned, we drew a certain comfort from the exigencies of fiction.
We read the classics—Hafez, Saadi, Ferdowsi—but invariably other matters intruded and our study group often stretched long into the night. Golshiri insisted that we take turns reading line by line the passages and poems he had assigned. This often bored me: I was the wayward student, the one who did not do her homework properly, who would make jokes when we were supposed to be reading. Later I was grateful for his method: reading the poems aloud brought out their enticing tempo, and I came to appreciate the way words flirted or sparred with one another, transforming their meanings. Now when I read Hafez or Ferdowsi, almost instinctively I read them aloud, to savor the music. It was not just the beauty of the language, or the artfulness of concept and structure, all of which I had noticed before. What I discovered was the playfulness of these canonical texts, their irreverence. The literary critic Terry Eagleton wrote that great fiction always pushes against the boundaries of existing reality. Reading the classics of Persian literature we caught a glimpse, through the cracks they made in the walls of our existing reality, of the brilliant world of our poets’ imaginations.
AT TIMES I FELT AS IF MY whole life had become a series of variations on my parents’ coffee sessions. Since almost all aspects of public life had been either restricted or banned, our private domains took on the functions of public forums. Our houses became our restaurants, bars, movie houses and theaters, concert halls, public forums on literature, the arts, and politics. True, these free zones were threatened constantly by a state that could at any time of day or night raid our houses and confiscate the alcohol, gambling cards, makeup, forbidden books, and videos. They could arrest us on charges of immorality. And yet in those days there was a suppressed excitement that belied the anxiety and fear—or, now that I think of it, perhaps the two fed off and strengthened each other. While the country was torn apart by war and besieged by repressive laws, daily arrests, and executions, beneath the surface, just underground, there were mutinous acts and shows of resistance that constantly frustrated and subverted the power of the state. An act as normal and mundane as having a party with men and women where drinks were served, music was played, and perhaps a movie was watched—A Night at the Opera or Fanny and Alexander—had to be undertaken with caution, curtains drawn, so that it became something very special, like a stolen éclair. We were like exile communities in a country whose language and culture we did not fully grasp, creating our own home away from home with its own lifestyle, norms, and mores—and of course with nostalgia for what, until the revolution, we would have called the bad old days.
In some ways these gatherings were vaguely reminiscent of those meetings in the late eighteen- and early nineteen-hundreds that I had read or heard about, when plays were performed in private houses, and women were banned from public appearances. Like revolutionaries, people thrived through secret gatherings. Amoo Said writes in his memoirs of the excitement and anxiety he felt when he first came across such a group in the house of one of the prominent women’s rights’ activists, Mastoureh Afshar. He describes how dangerous it was for a man, a young man at that, to join a meeting with women. He mentions that at the time the sidewalks were still segregated and women were forced to cover themselves in public in black robes. “I kept plotting in my mind, how to confront the impeding danger and threat. Was I going to rob anyone? Was I endangering anyone’s life and wealth?” he wrote in his memoirs. “I was not doing any of these, but what I was going to do was not less of a crime.”
Amoo Said shared in the exhilaration of what had not existed before. In our case we were trying to preserve what had been taken away from us, and there was a sense of jaded desperation to this. Our revolution had closed a door when it attacked the individual rights that had been so desperately fought for. We had reached a stage where we wanted to preserve what we had, not strive for what we might dare to imagine.
CHAPTER 26
broken dreams
FOR MY FATHER’S FAMILY THE revolution should have been the herald of a new era, their era. They had been highly critical of the Shah and were staunchly religious; now the Shah was gone and the government was Islamic. But already on our first visit to Esfahan, I could detect divisions and hostilities among cousins and uncles who had for decades lived in such intimate proximity. Harsh words were passed between my cousin Said, who supported the militant Moja-hedeen organization, and my cousin Jaafar and Uncle Hussein, who favored the more extremist elements among the emerging ruling clerics. Amoo Hussein’s daughter, whom I had seen in Berkeley, California, a few years earlier in short sleeves and jeans, had donned the chador, changed her name from Shadi to Zahra, after the prophet Mohammad’s daughter, and married a member of the revolutionary militia. The rifts that had seemed mendable a few years back had grown insurmountable.
Said had not talked to me for about seven years, since he had followed his brother Majid, Mohammad, and me to a restaurant (he was about thirteen at the time), and had fulminated at us for drinking and singing along with the orchestra. He refused to speak to us after that. Instead, he wrote long pages denouncing the decadent intellectuals, and left them around the house for us to see. In the meantime he had been jailed for two years because of his activities in the Organization of the People’s Mojahedeen. When I saw him after the revolution, in the fall of 1979, he was friendlier. He had married a distant relative, Fariba, whom I remember as a fragile girl, shy and reserved, in long shirts and baggy pants. They lived in a small studio at the end of my uncle’s garden and kept mainly to themselves.
It did not take long for many Muslims, including Said, to feel betrayed. This was supposed to be their revolution. We, the decadent seculars, had been defeated, and yet here was Said, as much of an outsider as ever. The revolution hurt many of the believers in a more fundamental way than it did the nonbelievers—not just militants like Said and his organization, but devout Muslims with no political agendas, people like his parents. The Mojahedeen organization had been banned after confrontations with the Islamic regime that culminated in a bloody demonstration during which many of their group’s supporters were arrested and summarily executed. The Mojahedeen were armed and they retaliated, in part by bombing the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, leading to the deaths of more than eighty people, including some of the high officials and leaders of the regime. Soon after this, the leaders of the Mojahedeen fled the country, as did Iran’s first president, Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr.
Just over a year after the revolution, Said and Fariba went underground. They left Esfahan and moved to Tehran. Suddenly they had become fugitives, spending their days and nights at different safe houses. Said held a high position in the organization. He was more flexible, more accepting, but very firm in regard to his group, which soon became as violent as the Islamic regime itself, responsible for many bombings and the assassinations of government officials and their collaborators. What cousinly love had not resolved, the revolution did: we found ourselves if not on the same side, at least against the same enemy. Some of Said’s religious relatives, including cousins and uncles he had lived with, now considered him
an infidel, worthy of the terrible punishment planned for his ilk. Ironically, it was now their godless, decadent relatives and friends who walked in the same marches as them, feared the same guns, and gave them shelter in their homes.
In Tehran Said and Fariba were taken in for a few months by a couple, who were also our close friends. These friends, like us, were secular, and she opposed the ideology and tactics of the Mojahedeen organization. But such were the times, when everyone’s mettle was being put to the test, so that you could find kindness and solidarity in unexpected places, and discover a sudden intimacy with relative strangers and with those who opposed what you stood for but would give you shelter at great risk to their own lives.
They spent two nights at our house. I found Said more tolerant of criticism and also perhaps more melancholy than I remembered. All his life he had avoided what he thought of as upper-class clothing and now, because of the need for disguise, he always appeared in suits, to distinguish himself from the Mojahedeen cadre, who wore long shirts over their trousers. I remember a light-brown suit that brought out the honey color of his eyes, which even his thick glasses could not hide. And next to him sat Fariba, prim and proper like a recent high school graduate, still awkward, not yet having found her style, in her pleated light-green skirt, long-sleeved white shirt, and bright scarf with a bit of hair showing. She wore a light shade of pink lipstick and sometimes bit her lips, as if to wipe the color out without seeming to.