Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  DON’T LET STRANGERS TOUCH YOU.” And yet it is seldom strangers, I learned long before I was a teenager, who do you harm. It is always the ones closest to us: the suave chauffeur, the skillful photographer, the kind music teacher, the good friend’s sober and dignified husband, the pious man of God. They are the ones your parents trust, whom they don’t want to believe anything against.

  My father describes in his memoirs the prevalence of a certain form of pedophilia in Iranian society, one that arises from the fact that, as he sees it, “contact between men and women is banned and the adolescent male cannot be close to any women other than his mother, sister, or aunts.” His view is that “most lunacies are rooted in sexual deprivations.” He goes on to explain that such deviancies are not limited to Iran or to Muslim societies but occur wherever sexual repression exists—for example, in strict Catholic communities.

  I cannot be quite so forgiving. Intellectually I can understand the complexities—I know that at one time marrying nine-year-old girls was the norm and not a taboo, that hypocrisy within such confines was not a vice but a way of survival. But none of this is a consolation. It does not erase the shame. I am thankful that societies, people, laws, traditions, can be changed, that we can stop burning women as witches, keeping slaves, stoning people to death; that we are attentive now to protecting children against predators. My parents’ generation lived in the twilight of this transition, but my generation grew up in a world different from the one Haji Agha Ghassem represented. His way of life had become taboo in the same way that incest, once the accepted norm among ancient societies, became a crime.

  Haji Agha was my first experience and the most painful; the others were more casual and fleeting, although they each added to my sense of shame, anger, and helplessness. I could not talk about any of them to my parents, who were, after all, adults, like my molesters. Would they believe me, or believe Haji Agha, a man whom my mother listened to and respected? As I grew older I learned to distance myself from the experience by placing it within a larger context. Analyzing it as a social malaise rather than a personal experience had some therapeutic effect: it made me feel as if I had some power over the reality I could not control. It was both soothing and disturbing to know that what happened to you was common, not just in your own country but the world over; that you shared the same secrets with a young girl or boy living in places called New York or Baghdad. But it did not modify the pain and the bewilderment of the experience. I did not talk about it to anyone for a long time. I never wrote about Haji Agha in my diary, although I have reviewed the experience so many times in my mind that all its details are vivid even now.

  Many years later I did finally talk about my experience to one of my cousins. He told me Haji Agha was notorious for fondling children, although, in his defense, there were many others like him. It was worse with boys, he told me, because he could handle them far more easily. He would make you sit on his lap behind a desk, with a book in front of him, and as he pretended to go through the lesson he would fondle you and keep you rooted to his lap. That was two decades after the incident in my parents’ bedroom.

  In his memoir, my father wrote about how this conduct was particularly prevalent in Iran among those who catered professionally to youth, especially bicycle-shop owners who rented out bikes to young boys. He mentions a certain Hussein Khan, who owned a bicycle store next to his father’s shop in the bazaar. Until the mid-seventies, he says, Hussein Khan was still a pedophile, still managing his shop.

  It took me some time to accept the fact that my father’s family had its own secrets and untruths. They were at once intellectually adventurous and extremely puritanical. When I told my brother that it seemed wrong to suppress one’s feelings to such a degree, he said, “Maybe that’s how we grow up.” “What do you mean?” “We define ourselves not through what we reveal, but what we hide.” He did have a point, but then it has always seemed to me that what is not articulated does not really exist. And yet at some point the unarticu-lated, that which is silenced and stifled, becomes as important as what is said, if not more so.

  The terrible thing was not merely that such things happened. I am aware that sexual abuse and hypocrisy, like love and jealousy, are universal. What made it more intolerable—what still makes it intolerable—was that it was not talked about and acknowledged publicly. Airing the dirty laundry, this was called. In private, in their coffee sessions, my mother’s friends swapped stories about girls who, before marriage, had their virginities restored by being sewn back up. Scandals were constantly alluded to, but on the surface there was a smooth veneer, glossed over with rosy phrases. Protective fictions were more important than the truth.

  Decades later I found it easier to stand up to the militia patrolling the streets of Tehran than to sleep alone at nights. If Haji Agha Ghas-sem were alive today, would I be able to confront him? Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that it exists. Political injustice I could talk about and resist, but not what happened that afternoon in my parents’ garden. For decades, after I came of age myself, sex was an act of compliance, a form of disembodied appeasement. And for decades I felt an inarticulate feeling of anger at my parents, especially my mother, for not protecting me. My anger was not without some sense of irony: she tried to protect me by preventing me from seeing boys my own age and yet she trusted all those men she admired for their strength of character, who did in fact harm me.

  CHAPTER 7

  a death in the family

  FOR YEARS AFTER my mother’s father died, my parents—each from a different perspective—brooded over how different things might have been had he lived longer. Mother had performed certain perceived duties to her father, whom she loved and at the same time resented: to meet him once a week, to call him every other day, to be polite to his second wife, and to demonstrate her bitterness with a show of pregnant silences. Suddenly, he was gone.

  He died unexpectedly, near dawn, of a heart attack. He was sixty-two and I was about twelve. Father was away in Germany on some official business. I had been pouting all through breakfast because the night before, Mother and I had had a big fight over a sweater she had knit for me. She’d forced me to try it on, despite the fact that the sweater did not fit properly and I hated the color. Halfway through breakfast Mother was called to the phone. Who could be ringing at this hour?

  She didn’t return to the table but the servant came back, her face tinged with excitement. “Be good now, children,” she said. “The missus is busy right now.” We looked up, fidgeted, threw a few pieces of bread at one another, drank our orange juice, and went upstairs, looking for our mother. I was astounded to see her tear-drenched face. She said, without releasing the phone, “Go wait for Aunt Mina.” Which we did without the usual questioning, stunned by her tears.

  How do you tell a child of a close relative’s death? I am grateful to Aunt Mina for being honest and straightforward. She told us gently that our grandfather had died, that our mother was very upset. We needed to think of her and to be considerate, especially since Father was not here to help. Could we see her? we wanted to know. “Not just now, you have to go to school.” “But we’re late for school already,” we complained. “You needn’t worry about that,” she said, “there will be a letter for the principal.”

  The excitement of unusual circumstances, the sense of some tragedy not yet digested, fuses in my mind with a shameless feeling of self-importance: pride at showing off your wounds. I am late this morning because my grandfather died, I can tell the teacher and my classmates, drawing sympathy and curiosity. Later I wrote an essay about it (“The Event That Most Changed My Life”) and to this day I am somewhat ashamed of the high praise I received for that essay. Did I love him? Did his death make me sad? Did I learn from it? In my essay the answer to all three questions was in the affi
rmative. My teacher had me read my essay to the class. Mother kept the notebook in which I had written it for a long time. She would sometimes dig it up and read it to her guests, tears gathering in her eyes as she enunciated my carefully chosen words.

  That day we did not go home. After school we were taken to Aunt Mina’s house, where we were entertained by her daughters, Mali and Layla, who did their best to divert us. I was always a little in awe of them. Mother often reproached me for not being more like them. They were everything I was not: they played the piano and were educated but also very correct and conventional. They were well-read but not excessively bookish, independent but at the same time gifted cooks and immaculate housekeepers.

  We ate a lot of ice cream. We told silly jokes. We put makeup on my sweet and compliant brother, placed a straw hat decorated with flowers and a pink ribbon on his head, and made him parade around the house with a handbag. When Aunt Mina returned, a little before dinner, we all sobered up. She said, “Nezhat is still there, trying to help.” “She’s just doing her duty,” said her husband. “Nezhat never shirks her duties,” Aunt Mina said. “If anything, she overdoes it…” She interrupted herself and turned to her daughter: “Layla,” she said, “take this child to the bathroom and wash that muck off his face.” Looking at my brother, her voice softened. “You don’t have to take this, you know? You are not their toy.”

  When a few days later I saw the picture of my grandfather in the newspaper that was lying on the table in Aunt Mina’s house, I burst into tears. Layla said, “A bit late for crying, isn’t it?” In a clumsy way I tried to explain how his death had not hit me until I had seen it there, alongside his picture, in the papers. That was as true as my sentimental essay had been questionable, but her doubt aborted my display of grief.

  Two days after his death, we all went to Grandfather’s house. It was early in the morning and the house was relatively quiet. My step-grandmother’s younger sister, a kindly lady whom my mother liked a great deal, was there along with her daughter and an elderly gentleman, a distant relative of my step-grandmother’s. For a while we sat in the cool, darkened living room. I kept smoothing my skirt. My brother sat politely next to me and, when offered, we each took one small pastry which we left on our plates, untouched. Mohammad softly banged his legs against the chair. I stared at the pictures on the mantelpiece. There was my grandfather in a dark suit and bow tie; my handsome uncle Ali smiling at the camera; Aunt Nafiseh with her hair down to her shoulders, in a black dress with a diamond brooch. There she was again with my cousin in her arms, and again with her husband. My eyes fell on an old photo of my step-grandmother taken years earlier, when her hair was still light brown, showing off her bare shoulders, her head thrown back, not just smiling but laughing. Nowhere was there a single picture of my mother or of us, her family.

  After a few desultory attempts at conversation my step-grandmother, who had been telling the elderly gentleman about “how it had happened,” got up and led us upstairs to the room where my grandfather had died. She walked ahead and we followed in a procession, as if we were being given a tour of the house. Apparently he had felt uncomfortable around dawn. He left the bedroom and came to the small room adjacent to theirs—or was it his bedroom and they slept in different rooms? In this room, filled with sunshine, there was a small bed next to the wall. She said he called her, saying he did not feel well. My step-grandmother insisted on telling us how he had come to her room, waking her up, how she had called the doctor, and how in this room, on this narrow bed, with the blood-pressure equipment still connected to him, he had died.

  My mother’s stepmother. Her own mother died when Nezhat was very young.

  Decades later this scene rushed back to my mind. It was the day after my father’s death and I had called Tehran to convey my condolences to his second wife. She accepted my words of consolation but never said how sorry she was that my father was dead, how sorry for me and my brother. Instead she went into a long and detailed description of how he had held her hand and told her that she should not worry and how grateful he was for her care and support. She described his look, and her own grief. Her tone was filled with something besides grief, perhaps greed. She was taking possession not just of his worldly belongings but of him. She had been there. That room, his last words, his helplessness, were all hers. We others were strangers, left out in the cold.

  Father returned after a few days, but even then he and Mother were so busy with the funeral arrangements that we were left more or less to Aunt Mina. I would walk from room to room accumulating fragments of conversation. “He was a good man, but naïve and impressionable, like Nezhat,” I heard my father tell Aunt Mina. “He was influenced by his wife, but lately he had come to regret his treatment of Nezhat and was making amends for it.”

  “Your mother is throwing herself into this with such fervor,” Aunt Mina said. “She has always been too proud to admit it, but she never had a real home. They treated her like a poor relation, but those days are behind her now, she doesn’t need them anymore. Maybe if she had openly expressed her anger, her father would have paid more attention. Eat your apple,” she said a minute later with a sly smile. “Just because your mother isn’t here doesn’t mean you can get away with misbehaving!”

  Later, I understood the wisdom of Aunt Mina’s point of view. At every turning point in her life my mother squandered opportunities to transform or transcend her relationship with her stepfamily, not so much because they refused to alter their attitudes toward her but mainly because she could not change hers. To the end she deliberately perpetuated their ability to hurt her. The resentment and pride inside her had become a malicious and malignant entity.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER my grandfather’s death, we were driving toward his house when Mother said something about how she had lost her only protector in the world, and Aunt Mina lost her patience. My grandfather had been supporting a few poor families in secret, a fact he hid from his own family. The discovery further confirmed my mother’s esteem and persuaded her of his innate unselfishness. Later she would claim (with a wrathful sideways glance at us) that “people” took advantage of her trusting nature, much as they had taken advantage of her father’s generosity. “What did your father do for you after Saifi’s death?” Aunt Mina said sternly. “He was a good man, but he was not a good father to you. Let it go.” “I can’t let it go,” my mother shot back. “I owe him everything. He was the one who protected me when I was young. Now I have no one in the world.” Aunt Mina rolled her eyes.

  “I hope you will live your own life,” Aunt Mina told me, after we had dropped my mother off and were making our way home. “Nezhat seems to have forgotten everything. This good father sent her to school with a chauffeur but forgot to buy her decent clothes. I remember once we were taking a school photograph and your mother was the only one in the class with no jacket. She had to borrow someone else’s jacket for the photo. She made the best of it, but I remember how humiliated she felt.”

  Later, Father told me that in his final year, Grandfather had felt increasingly guilty about his treatment of my mother. A delayed sense of responsibility had compelled him to try to make amends. He had offered to transfer yearly stipends to my parents’ account and had even financed the building of a new house, as they had never owned one. “Nezhat has no luck,” Father said. “Had he lived longer, things might have been different.”

  So long as her father was alive, my mother’s resentment had a live target, and her favorite tale was the romance of Saifi. He was the prince who had rescued her. She loved her father but there were barriers of mistrust and of hurt. She was the virtuous and neglected daughter who never demanded anything. So long as he was alive there was a room for her in her father’s house, but what would happen now that he had died? “That house,” she would tell Aunt Mina, “is no longer mine.” “Nezhat, get your share and get out,” Aunt Mina told her. “They won’t ever give you what you believe is yours.” After his death, Mother’s father gained a sacred st
atus for her and she could no longer blame him for past injustices, so she blamed her husband instead.

  On the Friday after my grandfather’s death, a crowd gathered in our living room to pay tribute. His philanthropy was praised and his failed political ventures cited as examples of his integrity. His hot temper was a sign of a frank nature, an inability to tolerate any form of hypocrisy. My mother held forth on how good a father he had been, how he had paid more attention to her upbringing than that of her siblings. I will never forget the touching way she cited, as proof of his love, the punishments he meted out to her alone, and how he had, just last year, called her in private to tell her he would pay for the house she wanted to build. Don’t spare any expenses, he had said. I want you to have the house you deserve. “Now,” she said tearfully, “I will never live in that house; I can’t bear it!”

  The house had become a metaphor for my mother’s relations to those closest to her. The whole family put long hours into its creation.

  Every corner was discussed, every space negotiated time and again between my parents and with the young architect. It became a habit for us to visit the unfinished structure, as if we were calling on an old friend. I even wore a special shirt to show the painter the exact color I wanted for my room. I remember sitting by the newly painted swimming pool, mesmerized by a white mouse in a corner intoxicated by the paint fumes. Once the house was finished my mother made up any excuse she could think of not to move in. When she said she could not live there because it reminded her of her father, my father suggested that she had more memories in our current house. She countered that the new house was too far from the center of the city and therefore inconvenient. In the end they first rented out and finally sold the house and we never moved into it.