'Things I've Been Silent About'

‘Things I've Been Silent About' is the second memoir by Azar Nafisi, author of the international bestseller 'Reading Lolita In Tehran'. It's much more intimate than the first. Here she tells us the story of her growing up in Iran, of her family and her powerful and complex mother, against the background of the intense political turmoil in her country which leads to an Islamic revolution in 1978-79. These are the stories untold or half-told in her earlier memoir. She displays here the same masterly ability to link the personal with the social and the political. 

Her grandmother died when her own mother, Nezhat, was quite young, leaving her at the mercy of the 'capricious will' of her stepmother and the attentions of a father who confused 'discipline with affection.' The only way she could cope with her deep resentment and bitterness against her family was to develop an inordinate sense of pride. Her pride was at times indistinguishable from her bitterness. She had a previous marriage to the son of a wealthy landowner who rose to be the prime minister for a few months. The son, Saifi, had nephritis of the kidney and the doctors had recommended that he should be given all the fun he desired, because he had little time to enjoy life. When the marriage proposal was sent, Nezhat was not told that he was ill. She discovered it on her wedding night. She, however, never admitted this and was never tired of telling her children how glamorous her life had been with Saifi. He was the prince who had rescued her. She 'flung the past at them as an accusation of the present'. She was a 'commanding and demanding' mother and in her fits of anger she would tell them, 'you are made of the same rotten genes as your father.' However, what frightened Nafisi, 'was not her rages but the frozen place in her' that she could never penetrate. 

Her mother, who admired the British because they never revealed what was really in their minds, escaped into mesmerizing fictions about herself while her father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting her with classic tales like 'Shahnameh'. Her father, she says, 'lured and seduced much like Tom Sawyer enticing his playmates to paint his fence,' 'when I think of my father, the first thing that comes to mind is his voice...I can still experience the calm that came over me whenever he would tell a story.' She loved and trusted him as she loved and trusted no one else. But 'later my father broke my heart,...I also hurt him and broke his heart.' 

She writes this book to erase the fictions her parents have told them - 'fictions about themselves as well as others.' It is a response to her 'own inner censor and inquisitor.' The revolution that destroyed her family life has made remembrance even more critical. 'If the present was fragile and fickle, the past could become a surrogate home,' she writes.

In an interview given to James Mustich, Editor-in-Chief, Barnes & Noble Review, Nafisi points out that there is something common between memoir and fiction. Even in a memoir one creates a narrative structure since a conscious selection has to be made to narrate the past. This subjective selectivity creates an imaginative world and therefore one has to deal with imagination as well as with the reality of what has happened. Again, since memoir depends much of the time on memory, it can be deceptive, it enlightens as well as distorts. There is, however, a key difference between memoir and fiction. In fiction the novelist may deal with her own very deep personal feelings, yet she can attribute these to imaginary characters, but in memoir 'you are dealing with you, and you are exposing that you to the world, which makes you very vulnerable.' 

One incident she had been silent about all these years was her encounter with a 'holy man' whom her mother used to adore and who told her that her daughter 'should wear more modest clothes, to cover herself.' He molested her when her parents had gone to a party. She never talked about it to anyone, but the shame would remain. Later she learned that it was not 'unusual for a victim to feel guilty, mainly because she becomes complicit through her silence. And then there is the added guilt of feeling some vague sense of sexual pleasure out of an act that is imposed and feels reprehensible.' It was ironical that those who in fact harmed her were the ones her mother trusted the most. As she grew older she learned to distance herself from such experience by placing them within larger contexts. Analysing these as social malaise rather than personal experience had some therapeutic effect: 'it made me feel as if I had some power over the reality I could not control.' 

The fictional character she admired most was Rudabeh in Ferdowsi's 'Shahnameh' who represented to her those fictional women who displayed 'a different kind of courage, asserting themselves against all odds and choosing the men they love.' Her role models were not the passive heroines of fairy tales, but rather 'the erotic and sensual women' of Ferdowsi. Best Iranian poetry, she points out, has always been 'rulebreaking and subversive, always redefining and reshaping reality and our perception of it.'

When in the eighth standard, she was sent to a school in England and later, to Switzerland. When she returned to Tehran during vacations she was a witness to the rehearsals of a revolution that would lead to the Islamic revolution which turned Iran into a religious dictatorship. Meanwhile, her father who rose to be mayor of Tehran was sent to jail on trumped up charges even while her mother won a historic term in the Parliament. Later she went to the USA for further studies where she briefly took part in radical student politics. 

Nafisi's student years in America coincided with a short unhappy first marriage and the beginning of a happier second one to an Iranian with whom she returned to Iran in 1979. She began her teaching career under clerical rule. In 1981 she was expelled from the University of Tehran after refusing to wear the veil, and in 1997 she and her family left Iran for America. Currently she is a visiting professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has written of Azar Nafisi as a "pestiferous" example of "native informers turned comprador intellectuals" who are to be reprimanded for "discrediting their own native culture of resistance". He has gone further in linking her to the neocon project via that well-known orientalist Bernard Lewis.