Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  As far as domestic and practical matters were concerned, now that Father was gone, Mother was dependent on us, which really meant on Bijan. Father had settled the financial aspects of her government case but then she was summoned to the court again for a second interrogation—more of a formality. How would she do this without him? I offered to accompany her, as did friends. But she adamantly refused our offers. “I hope,” she said, “the day that I have to depend on anyone for anything will never come.” When I insisted, she said, “Please do not trouble yourself, I am quite capable of taking care of myself. It is how I have lived all my life. That is my lot,” she concluded coldly, and haughtily.

  And as it turned out, she was right, she did not need me. She returned pg=>triumphantly, and revealed how she had defiantly told them that she had nothing to be ashamed of. She spoke with pride of her record in Parliament. They could not find fault with her record, as she had voted against the American capitulation law and the family protection law, both of which the new regime repudiated. She said, “I told them that if they had any sense, they would build a statue of me in gold, but we know better than to imagine that will ever happen! I told my interrogator—he was not a cleric, by the way—that I was a Muslim before he was born, I could be his mother. ‘So,’ I said, ‘Please save your breath, don’t preach to me about my religion. And don’t think for a moment I believe in this garb you’ve forced on us, as if covering myself would make me more of a Muslim.’”

  “What did he say, Mom?” I asked. “Oh, he wasn’t like the others, maybe in his heart he is against the system. He laughed and said, ‘I know you are a good Muslim and I know you don’t mean what you say’ I said, ‘Oh, I mean it all right, and if you come to my house for coffee I will explain it all to you.’” Before she left she told her examiner that her father gambled and drank but was far more of a Muslim than many of our present leaders because he practiced the basic tenet of Islam, charity toward others, which is more than she could say for them.

  That day she was so excited, as if she had discovered some hidden potential. Yes, she did not need an intermediary between herself and the world. She had come to this realization a little too late, though, because by the time she told the story to Bijan she had already started spicing it up with accusations against my father, whom she blamed for maliciously reporting her to the officials he had become so chummy with. “Fancy that this man who claimed he would not bow to the Shah now toadies to these people, all because he needs to provide for that slut he calls his wife.”

  I FIRST TRAVELED TO THE United States and Europe for a conference a few days before New Year of 1990. We had our home and children, my husband had a job he loved, and I was by now an established critic in Iran. For almost two decades, from the early eighties until we left, in the summer of 1997, I had studied and written about Persian literature. Since childhood I had seen how Father moved in and out of fiction, turning to stories from the Shahnameh and classical literature to teach us about Iran, and now this had become almost a second nature to me. I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to reveal ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events.

  But then, suddenly, I felt it was not enough to be a literary critic. It was easier, given the political climate, to write academically correct essays and articles—and this was also how you gained respect among the intellectual elite. But more and more I was becoming mischievous in my writing. I remember how excited I would get with my little nuggets of perceived truth, which I would gather up gingerly and take home to my nest. But the form was wrong: there seemed to be something artificial, something contrived about these eager ideas tamed and made to adhere to a sober language. I started writing about Vladimir Nabokov partly because of my students’ enthusiasm for his works. I seemed to share some of the same obsessions he had: a preoccupation with exile, a firm belief in the portable world of the imagination, and the subversive power of literature, a belief that it is possible, through fiction, to turn anguish into a thing of enduring beauty.

  Many of the things that are dangerous to a totalitarian mind-set can be found in Nabokov’s novels: respect for the individual, erotic love, an appreciation for the complicated relationship between victim and oppressor. Nabokov understood that one could take control of reality through imagination.

  My book Anti-Terra was published in 1994, and I resigned from my academic post a few months later. I enjoyed teaching, but the more popular my classes became, the more difficult the university officials made it for me to teach. For one thing, I had created a special speakers’ program, inviting well-known writers, filmmakers, and artists to speak and engage with the students. The first speaker had been the famous director Abbas Kiarostami, who was giving his first public talk since the revolution. One of my students, Mr. Forsati, the head of the Islamic Students’ Association and an avid fan of films, had worked on my behalf to make the series possible. Hundreds of people came to the large auditorium to hear him speak. The last event featured another prominent but controversial director, Bahram Beyzaii, who was outrageously frank in his criticism of the regime. At the start of the revolution he had written a hugely popular and critically acclaimed play about the death of the last king of the Persian Empire, Yazdegerd, who was killed by a miller right before the invasion of the Arabs. After the Beyzaii event, as Mr. Forsati and I were walking down the steps, he said, “You should know that these meetings will have to come to an end. Beyzaii was the last straw. The administration feels they have become too politically subversive.”

  Students from other universities started coming to listen in on my classes. I let them participate because I felt there were so few spaces in Tehran for open debate on literature. How could I refuse anyone who wanted to spend his or her free time discussing Tom Jones or Wuthering Heights? The dean of the faculty was less magnanimous. He decided to ban outsiders and instituted a new rule that whoever wanted to visit me had to get permission through his office. Every day there were new rules and restrictions. They would woo me and then restrict my activities. I felt at some point that I was spending more time fighting than doing my job. I resigned, but my resignation was not accepted for two years. They would have had no problem expelling me; but who did I think I was to resign? At least that is how I interpreted it. For the next two years I taught a private class to seven of my favorite female students and one man who would not be denied his rights.

  It took my husband and me a long time to decide to leave Iran. For months we argued back and forth about our future, our children’s future, and how we could best serve our country—such arguments were routine among our friends, family, and acquaintances. All our time in America, he reminded me, we had dreamed of return.

  I wanted our children to have the same choices we had, to see the world and make their own decisions. I also wanted to be a writer and a teacher, something that seemed almost imperative to my own survival. Bijan’s job was not directly involved with the regime. He was partner in an architectural firm with a group of colleagues he very much respected and liked, and the firm had been assigned exciting projects that made him feel wanted and appreciated. In addition, I reminded him, it made a difference that he was a man. He tried to make light of that by telling me how we bypassed the regime’s laws, citing his own experience.

  It is not that Bijan disagreed with me. Since my return to Tehran, I had, partly because of my sex and vocation, felt somewhat displaced, never wholly at home. He, on the other hand, felt very much at home, and with the same focus he put into every project, he set out to actualize his dream of a permanent home—a dream he had been living with ever since he left Iran at the age of seventeen. Eighteen years after our return, he had created a home, almost an island, populated with his family, friends, and colleagues. Leaving this home was very painful for him.


  One night, past midnight, Bijan was stopped by the revolutionary militia as he was driving home from a party. They accused him of drinking, which he had been although he denied it. He was taken to the revolutionary committee headquarters, where he spent the night in a cell with addicts and other young men arrested for partying and other such offenses. In the morning he was taken to the committee head with some of his cellmates. The committee’s catch was usually taken to the court in a minibus, but the officer in charge discreetly informed Bijan that he could go by bus or take a cab, in which case he ’d have to pay for the cab, but he could also call home—a veiled hint that with the appropriate bribe Bijan could be let off. In the cab the officer reminded him that he would be required to take a blood test, and would he like to call someone, a family member or a friend, who might come and pick him up later? Bijan took the hint. The officer received his bribe, and a driver from Bijan’s office took the blood test and Bijan got off. Of course not everyone was so lucky. We had friends who had been forced to clean toilets in jails, or were beaten and fined. We knew of two separate incidents of young men who had tried to escape the armed raids on their parties and been killed falling from the windows or from fire escapes.

  When I complained about our complicity and silent acquiescence in all of this, Bijan would point out that many Iranians did not give in to the dictates of the regime. People agreed on the surface to the rules and went on breaking them, including the officials and government functionaries. It was a defiance that the government could do nothing about. There was a mischievousness to these acts of insubordination that I appreciated although with some misgivings: I was troubled by this particular form of disobedience because it implied a silent agreement between the regime and the people. It seemed to me dangerous to give in to that sort of complicity. It is important not just to disobey the rules but to acknowledge that it is one’s right to do so, and to do so openly. “My mother did not allow us to do a lot of things,” I told him, “but we did them anyway; we felt we were right to lie to her and did not feel bad about it” (although we did) “because she was being dictatorial. You think that made lying okay? It is an illness in our society, the way victims become complicit in the acts perpetrated against them. Because no matter what justifications we may give, you and I are liars and cheaters as long as we play their game, and, what is worse, we feel it is okay.”

  This habit of pretending to give in to the regime created a certain moral laxity, a spiritual laziness in all of us. You could see it in our male acquaintances who would say with a mocking expression, “Why make such a fuss over a piece of cloth?” Not understanding that first of all the veil was not just a piece of cloth; it had been invested with spiritual significance for many men and women, and besides, this was not about how I felt about the piece of cloth in question, although I should have been free to express my feelings. This was about the freedom of choice. No regime, no figure of authority, had the right to tell a woman how to relate or not relate to God.

  Shahrnoosh Parsipur wrote about how when she was in jail she was instructed by her warden to pray. She told him she would pray without a veil because she believed that God had no specific gender, but if God were to have one it would be female, and so she had no need to veil herself from her God. Parsipur had no political affiliations and yet she was kept in jail and underwent terrible punishments because she refused to buckle under to authority. I think she must have believed, with John Locke, that all authority is error. But now secular, enlightened men chided us for making nuisances of ourselves by objecting to the mandatory veil. And they were perfectly happy to use the laws of the land to marry younger second wives or divorce their wives without their consent. One problem with a regime like this was that it offered so many temptations against your better judgment.

  In the end both Bijan and I had our points. But the decision to leave or stay in Iran was very personal, and either way there would be a price to pay. I was lucky to have a portable profession. I could teach and write no matter where I lived. My guilt was in regard to my parents. I did not want to leave them. So many of their generation had been left behind, with no one to look after them. Father had remarried, but what about my mother?

  Me with Negar, Father, and Dara, in the early 1990s.

  I had discussed the possibility of our departure with my father many times. He said it might be in our best interest to leave, at least for a few years. I told him I would miss him. He said, “I left my father when I was eighteen, this is the way of the world. You need to think of yourself.” He told me that for a while now he had been thinking of maybe leaving Iran himself.

  One morning, when it had become almost certain that we would go, I went to my mother’s apartment. She was in the kitchen. I walked around the room, looking at the photos: Negar in her red dress standing by a tree; Dara, his cheeks still full and baby-fattish, a rakish expression on his face; Mohammad and me in black and white when I was about seven and he two. She came in with two coffees and biscuits. I started telling her about my last trip to the U.S. I said that I had been offered a fellowship for two years at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. A pause. She said, “Well, this is good news.” She reminded me of the time she had taken me to England. “Why shouldn’t your children have the same opportunity?” She said, “It’s not as if you’ll be leaving forever.” I said, “I don’t want you to be alone, why don’t you come with us?” She smiled sarcastically. “This is my home,” she said. “And anyway, I cannot leave. That gentleman, your father, has made sure of that.”

  The question of her leaving the country had come up before. Mohammad and Shahran had left almost a decade earlier and they begged her to come visit them in England. No matter what excuse she used, Mother always remembered to mention my father’s responsibilities, telling us that because they never had a real divorce, she could not leave the country without his notarized consent. “I would never ask him for anything, even if I were at death’s door,” she said. “It is tragic that I, who voted against the family protection law because of this very stricture about wives needing their husbands’ consent, should be subjected to this humiliation.” She spoke with such conviction that we believed her. But later we discovered that the divorce had been registered on her birth certificate: she was in fact free.

  At other times she would say, “Anyway, I promised myself I would never ask anything from this regime, so I will not now beg for a passport, even if it means never seeing my beloved children and grandchildren again.” “But Mom,” I would say, trying to reason with her, “having a passport is your right. You wouldn’t be begging, you’d be asking for what is rightfully yours.” Such arguments always ended either in a positive refusal or in some vague allusion to having things to do, perhaps she would go when they were done. This time I was desperate. I thought, if we can get her to come and visit us or my brother it would be good for all of us. Finally she agreed to rethink her position, after she “had taken care of some important affairs first.” “This is my country,” she told us seriously—leading us to believe that highly sensitive political commitments prevented her from leaving Iran. “In a sense,” she said, “this country is as important to me as my own children. I have my patriotic duties.”

  For a while Mother was excited about our departure. She talked about it to others. She would turn to me and ask, “At which university were you accepted?” “Johns Hopkins, Mom.” On the phone I would hear her say, “Yes, that’s the one. No, not the hospital, a university, a very good one; she has a fellowship.” When she put the receiver down, she would turn to me. “What did you say this fellowship was?” She said, cryptically, “You will be back soon, perhaps in two years. Mark my word, Ahmad Agha was here yesterday and he told me people in the bazaar are very, very unhappy with this regime. Yes, you’ll be back. This regime will be gone in two years.” (As if one day the clerics would all pack their bags and say, “Well, we ’re off now. Maybe we’ll see you later, maybe we won’t.”) “You can come
back in two years, can’t you?” “Yes, Mom,” I would say with desperation.

  Once I burst into tears. She said, “Why are you crying? Poor Azi, always moving from one place to another, never enjoying your life, never having a real home.” She told me to tell the world about what was happening in Iran. “Do your patriotic duty. I will send you information,” she said, in a confidential manner. “Of course we cannot talk on the phone freely. But we will devise a language. If I say, Agha is ill,’ you will know I am talking about the regime.”

  As time went by and we started packing and preparing, she became more concerned, less buoyant. Without reason she would stop talking to me, or she would complain about being abandoned one more time, a woman all alone in this large apartment. I reminded her that Mohammad’s mother-in-law lived upstairs in Mohammad’s flat and that, out of consideration for my mother, we had rented our apartment to a colleague of Bijan’s. “What will I do when you leave and I am at the mercy of this gentleman, your father?” “Mom, Pari is my lawyer and friend, you won’t be needing anything.” “Will you,” she would then say, “bring me the deeds to the lands before you leave? Can I ask you to do this one simple thing?” “Of course,” I would say, knowing full well that I would not have the courage to ask my father to give me the deeds. She said, “Well, what I remember is all those years ago when you were so young”—her voice would break—“and we lived in that big damp house in Lancaster, how scared you were. I spent hours finding the words for you in the dictionary. Now …” she trailed off.