by Azar Nafisi
Bijan was reluctant to go. He preferred listening to good music in the comfort and privacy of our home to subjecting himself to these mediocre live performances with their long lines and the inevitable harassment that ensued. But in the end, he gave in to the children’s enthusiasm, and to me. After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public—seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends—shifted to private homes. It was refreshing to go out once in a while, even to such a desultory event.
We met them at the entrance. Nassrin looked nervous and Ramin was shy. He was tall and lanky, in his early thirties but with an air about him of an eternal graduate student, attractive in a bookish way. I had remembered him as confident and talkative, but now that he was introduced to us in his new role, he seemed to have lost his usual articulateness and his desire to talk. I thanked Ramin for the invitation and we all proceeded towards a long line filled with mainly young men and women. Nassrin busied herself with the children and I, who had suddenly become tongue-tied, tried to ask Ramin about his classes. Only Bijan seemed unconcerned by the awkwardness of the moment. He had made a sacrifice by leaving his comfortable home on a weeknight and felt no obligation to socialize as well.
When we finally entered the auditorium, we found people stuffed into the concert hall, sitting in the aisles, on the floor and standing clustered against the wall. We were among the guests of honor, so our place was in the second row, and we actually got seats. The program began late. We were greeted by a gentleman who insulted the audience for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, telling us that the management did not wish to entertain audiences of “rich imperialists” contaminated by decadent Western culture. This brought smiles to many of those who had come that evening to hear the music of the Gipsy Kings. The gentleman also admonished that if anyone acted in an un-Islamic manner, he or she would be kicked out. He went on to instruct women to observe the proper rules and regulations regarding the use of the veil.
It is hard to conjure an accurate image of what went on that night. The group consisted of four young Iranian men, all amateurs, who entertained us with their rendition of the Gipsy Kings. Only they weren’t allowed to sing; they could only play their instruments. Nor could they demonstrate any enthusiasm for what they were doing: to show emotion would be un-Islamic. As I sat there in that packed house, I decided that the only way the night could possibly be turned into an entertainment was if I pretended to be an outside observer who had come not to have fun but to report on a night out in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Yet despite these restrictions and the quality of the performance, our young musicians could not have found anywhere in the world an audience so receptive, so forgiving of their flaws, so grateful to hear their music. Every time the audience, mostly young and not necessarily rich, started to move or clap, two men in suits appeared from either side of the stage and gesticulated for them to stop clapping or humming or moving to the music. Even when we tried to listen, to forget these acrobats, they managed to impose themselves on our field of vision, always present, always ready to jump out and intervene. Always, we were guilty.
The players were solemn. Since it was almost impossible to play with no expression at all, their expressions had become morose. The lead guitarist seemed to be angry with the audience; he frowned, trying to prevent his body from moving—a difficult task, since he was playing the Gipsy Kings.
At Bijan’s suggestion, we tried to get out early—before, as he said, we were trampled by the mob, which, not being able to emote during the show, might choose to exercise its vengeance by trampling fellow concertgoers. Outside, we stood for some minutes by the entrance. Bijan, who seldom talked, was moved by the occasion.
“I feel sorry for these kids,” he said. “They’re not entirely without talent, but they’ll never be judged by the quality of their music. The regime criticizes them for being Western and decadent, and the audience gives them uncritical praise—not because they’re first-rate but because they play forbidden music. So,” he added, addressing us in general, “how will they ever learn to play?”
“It’s true,” I said, feeling an obligation to fill the silence that followed. “No one is judged on the merit of their work. People without the least knowledge of music are running around calling themselves musicians.” Nassrin was sullen, and Ramin quiet and mortified. I was astounded by his metamorphosis and decided not to add to his discomfort by forcing him to talk.
Suddenly Nassrin became animated. “Nabokov would’ve had nothing to do with this,” she said excitedly. “Look at us—it’s pathetic, running to this for entertainment.” She moved her arms and spoke breathlessly, eager to hide her embarrassment behind a volley of nervous talk. “He would have had a field day if he’d been here—talk about poshlust!”
“What?” said Negar, who’d enjoyed not so much the music as the excitement of a night out.
“Poshlust,” Nassrin repeated and, uncharacteristically, left it at that.
13
I was grumbling to myself as I put the plates on the table absentmindedly for dinner. Bijan turned to me and said, What are you mumbling about? You wouldn’t be interested, I said unnecessarily sharply. Try me, he said. Okay, I was thinking about menopause. He turned back to the BBC. You’re right—I’m not interested, he said. Why shouldn’t he be interested? Shouldn’t he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress? I knew I was being unfair to him. He was not insensitive to the hardships of life in the Islamic Republic, but he was on the defensive these days whenever I complained. I protested as if he were responsible for all the woes brought upon us by the regime, and this in turn made him withdraw into himself and act as if he were indifferent about things he actually felt very strongly about.
Our last class meeting had ended on a strange note: we were discussing my girls’ mothers—their trials and tribulations and the fact that they really knew nothing about menopause. The discussion had begun with Manna. The night before, she and Nima had seen for the third time Vincente Minnelli’s Designing Woman, which they’d picked up on their satellite dish. Watching the film had made Manna very sad. It occurred to her that she had never imaginatively experienced love in a Persian context. Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it. When she read Madame Bovary, or saw Casablanca, she could experience the sensual texture of the work; she could hear, touch, smell, see. She had never heard a love song, read a novel or seen a film that made her think that this could be her experience. Even in Persian films, when two people are supposed to be in love, you didn’t really feel it in their looks and gestures. Love was forbidden, banished from the public sphere. How could it be experienced if its expression was illegal?
That discussion had been an eye-opener. I had discovered that almost all of my girls separated what they described as intellectual or spiritual love (good) from sex (not good). What mattered, apparently, was the more exalted realm of spiritual affinity. Even Mitra had dimpled her way through the argument that sex was not important in a relationship, that sexual satisfaction had never mattered to her. The worst blow, I felt, came from Azin. With a flirtatious tone that implied she was back to normal—this was a period of semi-truce with her husband—Azin had said that the most important thing in life was the mystical union one felt with the universe. She added, philosophically, that men were just vessels for that higher spiritual love. Vessels? There went all her claims to sexual pleasure and physical compatibility. Even Mahshid, who exchanged a quick glance with Manna, was surprised.
“So,” said Nassrin, who had been quiet until then, “when your husband beats you, you can pretend it’s all in your mind, since he’s just an empty vessel to fill up your fantasies. And it’s not just Azin,” she said. “The rest of you are basically saying the same thing.”
“What about you and Nima?” Mitra asked Manna.
“You seem to have a balanced relationship.”
“I like him because there is no one in the world I can talk to like Nima,” Manna said with a shrug.
“Poor Nima,” said Yassi.
“He’s not so poor.” Manna was feeling savage that day. “He too has no one else to talk to. Misery loves company—and can be as strong a force as love.”
“You all disappoint me,” Yassi said. “I was hoping you’d tell me how physical attraction does matter, how love isn’t just spiritual and intellectual. I was hoping you’d tell me that I’d learn to love physically and see that I was wrong. I’m utterly flabbergasted,” she said, sinking deeper into the couch. “In fact, I’m discombobulated,” she concluded with a triumphant smile.
Ouch! I shouted. Bijan glanced up from the TV and said, “Nothing wrong, is there?” No, I just cut myself. I was slicing cucumbers to go with Bijan’s famous chicken kebab. He went to the bathroom and returned with a Band-Aid, which he carefully put on my finger. Without saying a word, smiling indulgently, he then went to the cabinet, poured a measure of homemade vodka into the small glass, put it on the side table beside a dish of pistachio nuts and settled back in front of the BBC. I went in and out of the kitchen, grumbling to myself. No wonder he enjoys life; this is what he’d do if we lived in the States. It’s hard on me, I grumbled, pleading with some unknown interlocutor, who always questioned and mocked my every complaint. It’s really hard on me, I repeated one more time, ignoring the guilty knowledge that Bijan bore his hardships without much complaint and should not be begrudged his vodka and his BBC.
By the time I had chopped the cucumbers and the herbs, adding them to the yogurt, I had come to a conclusion: our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it. It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key. We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin’s uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality. These girls, my girls, knew a great deal about Jane Austen, they could discuss Joyce and Woolf intelligently, but they knew next to nothing about their own bodies, about what they should expect of these bodies which, they had been told, were the source of all temptation.
How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love? By the time I added the salt and pepper to my dish, I had come up with an answer to this question. I went to the next session armed with a copy of Pride and Prejudice in one hand and Our Bodies, Ourselves—the only book I had available on sexuality—in the other.
14
Charlotte Brontë did not like Jane Austen. “The Passions are perfectly unknown to her,” she complained to a friend, “ . . . even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would but ruffle the elegance of her progress.” Knowing Charlotte Brontë and her proclivities, one can understand how one perfectly good novelist could dislike another as much as Brontë disliked Austen. She was fierce and insistent in her dismissal, and had written to G. H. Lewes in 1848: “Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. . . . I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”
There is something to this perhaps, yet Brontë’s indictment is not entirely fair. One cannot say that Austen’s novels lack passion. They lack a certain kind of overripe sensuousness, an appetite for the more unfiltered romantic abandon of Jane Eyre and Rochester. Theirs is a more muted sensuality, desire by indirection.
Please turn to page 148, and try to visualize the scene as you read the passage. Darcy and Elizabeth are alone in Mr. Collins’s house. Darcy is gradually coming to the realization that he cannot live without Elizabeth. They are talking about the significance of the distance between a woman’s married home and her parents’ home.
Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, “You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn.”
Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and, glancing over it, said, in a colder voice,—
“Are you pleased with Kent?”
Let us return to the aforementioned scene. The insistence in Darcy’s voice is a symptom of his passion for Elizabeth; it emerges even in their most mundane interactions. We can trace the development of Darcy’s feelings for Elizabeth in the tone of his voice. This reaches its climax in the scene in which he proposes to her. His negative persistence, beginning his speech with “In vain have I struggled. It will not do,” becomes almost violent, in part because the novel itself is so restrained and Darcy is the most restrained of all the characters.
Now, please listen carefully to that “you.” Darcy seldom if ever addresses Elizabeth by her name, but he has a special way of saying “you” when he addresses her a few times that makes the impersonal pronoun a term of ultimate intimacy. One should appreciate such nuances in a culture such as ours, where everyone is encouraged to demonstrate in the most exaggerated manner his love for the Imam and yet forbidden from any public articulation of private feelings, especially love.
There is seldom a physical description of a character or scene in Pride and Prejudice and yet we feel that we have seen each of these characters and their intimate worlds; we feel we know them, and sense their surroundings. We can see Elizabeth’s reaction to Darcy’s denunciation of her beauty, Mrs. Bennet chattering at the dinner table or Elizabeth and Darcy walking in and out of the shadows of the Pemberley estate. The amazing thing is that all of this is created mainly through tone—different tones of voice, words that become haughty and naughty, soft, harsh, coaxing, insinuating, insensible, vain.
The sense of touch that is missing from Austen’s novels is replaced by a tension, an erotic texture of sounds and silences. She manages to create a feeling of longing by setting characters who want each other at odds. Elizabeth and Darcy are placed near each other in several scenes, but in public places where they cannot communicate privately. Austen creates a great deal of frustrated tension by putting them in the same room yet out of reach. The tension is deepened by the fact that while everyone expects Jane and Bingley to be in love, the exact reverse is expected of Elizabeth and Darcy.
Take, for instance, the party scene at Elizabeth’s house towards the end of the novel, when she is desperate to find private time to talk with him. The whole event is spent in a state of anxiety. She stands by her sister, helping her pour the tea and coffee, and she tells herself, “If he does not come to me, then, I shall give him up for ever.” He does approach her, but one of the girls attaches herself to Elizabeth and says in a whisper, “The men shan’t come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them; do we?” Darcy moves away, forcing her to follow him with her eyes. She “envied every one to whom he spoke, had scarcely patience enough to help anybody to coffee, and then was enraged against herself for being so silly!” This game continues all night. Darcy approaches her table again, bringing back his cup, lingers for a while, they exchange a few pleasantries and again he has to leave.
Austen manages to make us aware of the most intriguing aspect of a relationship: the urge, the longing for the object of desire that is so near and so far. It is a longing that will be gratified, a suspense that will end in unity and happiness. The scenes of actual lovemaking are almost nonexistent in Austen’s novels, but her tales are all one long and complicated process of courtship. It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the in
stitution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony. This is apparent from all of the mismatched marriages in her novels—Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Mary and Charles Musgrove. Like Scheherazade in her tales, one finds an infinite variety of good and bad marriages, good and bad men and women.
Nor is Brontë’s claim about boundaries completely true. Boundaries are constantly threatened by the women in Austen’s novels, who feel more at home in the private than the public domain, the domain of heart and of intricate individual relations. The nineteenth-century novel placed the individual, her happiness, her ordeals and her rights at the center of the story. Thus, marriage was its most important theme. From Richardson’s hapless Clarissa to Fielding’s shy and obedient Sophia to Elizabeth Bennet, women created the complications and tensions that moved the plots forward. They put at the center of our attention what Austen’s novels formulate: not the importance of marriage but the importance of heart and understanding in marriage; not the primacy of conventions but the breaking of conventions. These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen’s novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose.
15
Imagine a summer night. We are at a party, sitting outdoors in a fragrant garden. On a large terrace overlooking the swimming pool, our tasteful host has set up small tables with fragile candles. In one corner, against the wall, colorful cushions have been spread out over a Persian carpet. Some of us are sitting propped up against the cushions. The wine and vodka are homemade, but you can’t tell by the color. The sound of laughter and small talk wafts among the tables. The company is as good as any you might find anywhere in the world—cultured, witty, sophisticated, full of stories.
