by Azar Nafisi
The fall of 1977 was memorable for two events: my marriage in September and the Shah’s last official and most dramatic visit to the United States in November. I had met Bijan Naderi two years earlier, at a meeting at Berkeley. He was the leader of the group I most sympathized with. I fell in love with him for all the wrong reasons: not because of his revolutionary rhetoric but because he possessed a sense of confidence in himself and his beliefs that went beyond the hysterics of the movement. He was loyal, passionately committed to whatever he undertook, be it his family, his job or the movement, but his loyalty never made him blind to what the movement would become. I admired him as much for this as for his refusal, later, to follow the revolutionary mandates.
In the many demonstrations in which I participated, shouting slogans against U.S. involvement in Iran, in the protest meetings during which we argued into the night, thinking we were talking about Iran but in reality more concerned with what had happened in China, the picture of home loomed large. It was mine and I could constantly conjure it, and relate to the world through its hazy image.
There were discrepancies, or essential paradoxes, in my idea of “home.” There was the familiar Iran I felt nostalgic about, the place of parents and friends and summer nights by the Caspian Sea. Yet just as real was this other, reconstructed, Iran about which we talked in meeting after meeting, quarreling about what the masses in Iran wanted. Apparently, as the movement grew more radical in the seventies, the masses wanted us to serve no alcohol in our celebrations and not to dance or play “decadent” music: only folk and revolutionary music were allowed. They wanted the girls to cut their hair short or wear it in pigtails. They wanted us to avoid the bourgeois habits of studying.
3
Just over a month after we landed at the Tehran airport, I found myself standing in the English Department at the University of Tehran. As I arrived, I almost ran into a young man in a gray suit, curly-haired and friendly-looking. I later discovered he was another recent recruit, just back from the United States and, like me, filled with new and exciting ideas. The secretary, who radiated a certain saintliness despite her corpulent beauty, smiled at me and shuffled in through a door to the department head’s office. She came back a moment later and nodded me into the room. Walking in, I tripped over a small wooden wedge between the two doors and lost my balance, nearly landing on the department head’s desk.
I was greeted with a bemused smile and offered a seat. I had last been in this office two weeks before, when I had been interviewed by a different department head, a tall and friendly man who had asked me about various relatives, prominent writers and academicians. I was grateful to him for trying to put me at ease, but also worried that for the rest of my life I would live in competition with prominent family shadows.
This new man, Dr. A, was different. His smile was friendly but not intimate; it was more appraising. He invited me to a party at his house, that very night, yet his manner was distant. We talked about literature and not relatives. I tried to explain to him why I had changed my mind about my dissertation. You see, I told him, I wanted to do a comparative study of the literature of the twenties and thirties, the proletarians and the non-proletarians. The best person was Fitzgerald—for the twenties, I mean. This seemed obvious to him. But then I had difficulty choosing his counterpoint—should I choose Steinbeck, Farrell or Dos Passos? You didn’t think any of them would measure up to Fitzgerald, did you? Well, not in a literary sense. What other sense is there? So, anyway, then I came across the real proletarians, whose spirit was best captured by Mike Gold. Who? Mike Gold: he was the editor of the radical popular literary journal New Masses. You may not believe it, but he was a big shot in his day. He was the first person to formulate the concept of proletarian art in the United States. Even writers like Hemingway took note of what he said—calling Hemingway a white-collar writer and Thornton Wilder “the Emily Post of culture.”
Well, in the end I decided to leave Fitzgerald out of it. I was curious about Gold, and why he took over—for he did take over. In the thirties people like Fitzgerald were pushed out by this new breed, and I wanted to know why. Plus I was a revolutionary myself; I wanted to understand the passion that drove the likes of Mike Gold. You wanted passion, he asked, and you went from Fitzgerald to this other fellow? Our discussion was interesting, and I did accept his invitation to his party that evening.
The other one, the tall, friendly department head I had met on my first visit, I was informed, was now in jail. No one knew when he would be released, or even if he would be released at all. Many professors had been expelled by now, and others would soon follow suit. This is how things were in those first days of the revolution, when I innocently and with feelings utterly inappropriate to the circumstances started my teaching career as the youngest and newest member of the English Department at the Faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Tehran. Had I been offered a similar position at Oxford or Harvard, I would not have felt more honored or intimidated.
The look in Dr. A’s face as I tripped on the edge of his door was one with which many others, very different from him, would greet me over the years. It was a look of surprise tinged with leniency. A funny child, it seemed to say, who needs to be guided and sometimes put in her place. Later on, a different look would emerge, a look of frustration, as if I had not acted according to our initial contract: I had become a wayward and unruly child and could not be controlled.
4
All my memories of those first years revolve around the University of Tehran. It was the navel, the immovable center to which all political and social activities were tied. When in the U.S. we read or heard about the turmoil in Iran, the University of Tehran seemed to be the scene of the most important battles. All groups used the university to make their statements.
It was thus not surprising that the new Islamic government took over the university as the site of its weekly Friday prayers. This act gained added significance, because at all times, even after the revolution, the Muslim students, especially the more fanatical ones, were a minority overshadowed by the leftist and secular student groups. It seemed as if with this act, the Islamic faction asserted its victory over other political groups: like a victorious army it positioned itself on the most cherished site of the occupied land, at the heart of the vanquished territory. Every week, one of the most prominent clergymen would stand on the podium to address the thousands who occupied the university grounds, men on one side, women on the other. He would stand with a gun in one hand and offer the sermon of the week, preaching on the most important political issues of the day. Yet it seemed as if the grounds themselves rebelled against this occupation.
I felt in those days that there was a turf war going on between different political groups and that this struggle was being fought out mainly at the university. I did not know then that I would also have my own battle to fight. Looking back, I am glad I was unaware of my special vulnerability: with my small collection of books, I was like an emissary from a land that did not exist, with a stock of dreams, coming to reclaim this land as my home. Amid the talk of treason and changes in government, events that now in my mind have become confused and timeless, I sat whenever I had a chance with books and notes scattered around me, trying to shape my classes. I taught a very large seminar in that first semester, called Research, in which we focused on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a survey of twentieth-century fiction.
I tried to be somewhat fair politically. Side by side with The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, I would teach works by Maxim Gorky and Mike Gold. I spent most days browsing the bookstores lining the street opposite the university. That street, newly renamed Avenue of the Revolution, was the center for the most important bookstores and publishers in Tehran. It was such a pleasure to go from one store to another and to find an occasional seller or customer who would introduce you to a sudden gem, or startle you by knowing about an obscure English writer by the name of Henry Green.
One memory curls itself wantonly and imperceptibly around me, teasing me seductively. With coffee in one hand and a pen and notebook in the other, I was preparing to go to the balcony to work on my class syllabus. The phone rang. It was the agitated and urgent voice of a friend. She wanted to know if I had heard: Ayatollah Taleghani, a very popular, controversial clergyman, one of the most important figures of the revolution, had died. He was relatively young and radical, and there were already rumors he had been killed. A procession had been scheduled for him beginning at the University of Tehran.
I cannot remember the distance between the phone call and my presence, almost an hour later, at the entrance of the university. There was a traffic jam. Bijan and I got out of the taxi in the vicinity of the university and started to walk. For some reason, after a while, as if pushed by some invisible source of energy, our pace quickened into a run. A huge crowd of mourners had gathered, blocking the streets that led to the university. There were reports of a fight having broken out between members of the Mujahideen, a radical religious organization that claimed to be Taleghani’s spiritual and political heir, and those belonging to what was loosely called the Hizbollah, Party of Allah, mainly composed of fanatics and vigilantes determined to implement the laws of God on earth. The fight was over who should have the honor of carrying Taleghani’s body. Many were crying, beating their chests and their heads, calling out: “Today is the day of mourning! Taleghani has gone to heaven today.”
Over the next two decades, this particular chant would be used for many others, a symptom of the symbiosis between the revolution’s founders and death. That was the first time I experienced the desperate, orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth.
I met many people that day who appeared and disappeared like characters in a cartoon. Was it there that I saw Farideh? She belonged to an extremely radical leftist group—my brother, who knew some of her comrades, had introduced her to me, thinking she could help me settle in. I saw her for a vague second, busy as always, on the verge of attacking someone or something: I saw her and lost her.
I stood in the middle of the whirlpool, struggling to find a familiar face. Always in these demonstrations I would lose sight of those who’d come with me. Now I had lost my husband, and for a while I kept looking for him. The crowd pushed towards me. Voices appeared to be echoing out of different loudspeakers. Posters of Taleghani had mushroomed everywhere: on the walls, on the doors and windows of the bookshops, even on trees. The wide street in front of the university contracted and expanded to accommodate our movements and for a long time I moved senselessly, swaying to the beat of the crowd. Then I found myself beating my fists against a tree and crying, crying, as if the person closest to me had died and I was now all alone in the whole wide world.
5
Before the new term began in September 1979, I spent most of my time hunting for the books on my syllabus. In one bookstore, as I was rummaging through a few copies of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, the owner approached me. “If you’re interested in those, you’d better buy them now,” he said, shaking his head sadly. I looked at him sympathetically and said smugly, “There’s too much demand for them. They can’t do anything about that—can they?”
He was right. In a few months’ time, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were very difficult to find. The government could not remove all of the books from the stores, but gradually it closed down some of the most important foreign-language bookstores and blocked the distribution of foreign books in Iran.
The night before my first class I was very nervous, like a child on her first day of school. I had chosen my clothes with unusual care, and also went over my meager stock of books. I had left most of them in the U.S. with my sister-in-law, along with an antique mirror: my father’s present. I thought I would bring them back later, not knowing that I would not return for another eleven years, by which time my sister-in-law had given away most of my books.
That first day, I went to the university armed with my trusty Gatsby. It was showing signs of wear: the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became. Huckleberry Finn was still available in bookstores, and I bought a new copy in anticipation. After some hesitation, I also picked up Ada, which wasn’t on the syllabus, and threw it in as a security blanket.
The university was built during the reign of Reza Shah, in the thirties. The main buildings on campus had very high ceilings, propped up by thick cement columns. They were always a little cold in winter and dank in summer. Memory has given them gargantuan proportions they probably didn’t have in reality, but those expansive buildings of the thirties had a strange feel about them. They were made for crowds: you never felt quite at home.
On my way to the English Department, I absentmindedly registered the different stands set out in the big hall at the foot of the over-wide staircase. There were long tables—more than ten of them—filled with literature belonging to various revolutionary groups. Students were standing in clusters, talking and sometimes quarreling, ready to defend their territory at a moment’s notice. There were no visible enemies, but a sense of menace lingered over the room.
Those were crucial days in Iranian history. A battle was being fought on all levels over the shape of the constitution and the soul of the new regime. The majority of people, among them important clerics, were in favor of a secular constitution. Powerful opposition groups—both secular and religious—were forming to protest the autocratic tendencies within the ruling elite. The strongest of the opposition groups were Ayatollah Shariatmadari’s Muslim People’s Republican Party and the National Democratic Front, made up of secular progressives who were at the forefront of the struggle to preserve democratic rights, including women’s rights and freedom of the press. They were very popular at the time and drew about a million people on the twelfth anniversary of the death of the late nationalist hero Mossadegh to the village of Ahamad Abad, where Mossadegh was buried. They campaigned vigorously for a constituent assembly. The closing down of the most popular and progressive paper, Ayandegan, had led to a series of large violent demonstrations, in which the demonstrators were attacked by the government-backed vigilantes. In those days it was normal to see these goons on their motorbikes carrying black flags and banners, at times led by a cleric riding in front of them in a bulletproof Mercedes-Benz. Despite these ominous signs, the Communist Tudeh Party and the Marxist Fedayin Organization supported the radical reactionaries against what they called the liberals, and continued to put pressure on Prime Minister Bazargan, whom they suspected of having American sympathies.
The opposition was greeted with brutal violence. “The clog-wearers and the turbaned have given you a chance,” Khomeini warned. “After each revolution several thousands of the corrupt elements are executed in public and burned and the story is over. They are not allowed to publish newspapers.” Citing the example of the October Revolution and the fact that the state still controlled the press, he went on to say, “We will close all parties except the one, or a few which will act in a proper manner . . . we all made mistakes. We thought we were dealing with human beings. It is evident we are not. We are dealing with wild animals. We will not tolerate them anymore.”
It now seems amazing to me, as I relate the events of those years, how focused I was on my work. For I was as anxious about how my class would receive me as I was about the political upheavals.
My first class was in a long
room with windows down one side. The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me. The students were unusually quiet. My hands were loaded with all the books and Xeroxes I had brought for the class, an eclectic mix of revolutionary writers whose works had been translated into Persian and “elitists” such as Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Woolf.
That class went all right, and the ones after it became easier. I was enthusiastic, naÏve and idealistic, and I was in love with my books. The students were curious about me and Dr. K, the curly-haired young man I had bumped into at Dr. A’s office, strange new recruits at a time when most students were doing their best to expel their professors: they were all “anti-revolutionary,” a term that covered a vast range—anything from working with the previous regime to using obscene language in class.
That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was an odd way to start, but I did succeed in getting their attention. I explained that we would in the course of the semester read and discuss many different authors, but that one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness. Some, like Gorky or Gold, were overtly subversive in their political aims; others, like Fitzgerald and Mark Twain, were in my opinion more subversive, if less obviously so. I told them we would come back to this term, because my understanding of it was somewhat different from its usual definition. I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
