Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  CHAPTER 18

  women like that!

  AROUND THIS TIME I STARTED spending hours lying in bed, reading. I underlined passages, rewrote them in my diary, and took to repeating lines from my favorite female poet, Forough Farrokhzad: “All my being is a dark chant that will carry you to the dawn of eternal growths.” On Friday mornings I would enter the living room during Mother’s coffee sessions with a book that often elicited a comment or an inquiry. This Mother perceived as an intangible affront. She could not put her finger on what was wrong with my love of books. Her excuse was that I was too obsessive, but she never could articulate why my particular brand of bookishness seemed to her to imply mutiny, to be a declaration of some dubious form of independence. When I announced that I would not marry Behzad Sari because I did not love him, she blamed it on reading too much poetry and consorting with Father’s family, who conspired to prevent me from marrying him. In one sense she was right. Forough Farrokhzad’s poems were embodiments of the potential I had detected in the fictional heroines I loved. She lived what she wrote and paid a high price for it. An invisible thread linked Rudabeh to Forough Farrokhzad. A certain boldness and openness in a culture that denied both.

  Farrokhzad was born in 1935 and married in her teens. It was not a forced marriage—she fell in love with Parviz Shahpur, a man well known within the intellectual community and about sixteen years her senior. Soon after her son Kami was born she left her family, some claim because of a love affair. She devoted what was left of her life to poetry and later to filmmaking. She died in a car crash in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Her most shocking poems—those for which she was notorious—were celebrations of her love affairs, but she also wrote passionately about politics and society, especially near the end of her life. She had the audacity to acknowledge her love affairs without shame in her poetry, to which she owed her status as a much admired and hated icon. She turned the idea of personal “sin” (“I sinned a sin full of pleasure, / In an embrace which was warm and fiery”) into a defiance against authority, especially that of God.

  Weary of divine asceticism,

  At midnight in Satan’s bed

  I would seek refuge in the downward slopes

  Of a fresh sin.

  Forough Farrokhzad.

  “Only the Voice Endures.” This was the title of a poem by Forough Farrokhzad that I jotted down on the top of a page in my diary and underlined twice. Underneath it I wrote that I had a huge fight with my mother about Forough (she was always referred to by her first name, a liberty seldom if ever taken with the male poets). Mother kept saying she did not educate me to follow in the footsteps of a “woman like that.” I wrote in my diary that I suspected if my mother were more like “women like that” we would all be having much better times.

  A few days later, on return from my afternoon class at the British Council, I was summoned to the library. Mother was sitting upright on a soft leather chair. Rahman was slumped on a seat nearby and Aunt Mina, clearly uncomfortable, sat opposite him. The culprit, my diary, with its dull black plastic cover, was on the side table for all to see. Mr. Rahman leered at me with a benevolent and knowing smile. Usually he would rise to my defense, but this time he remained silent, at times clicking reproachfully, his bulging eyes merry with mischief.

  Mother wanted to know how I could say that I preferred that woman to my own mother, as I had, in fact, in my diary. Aunt Mina was trying to be conciliatory. I wanted to know why my mother had read my private diary; what gave her that right? Rahman offered piously that a mother had the right to prevent a sin from happening. In Islam even strangers had that right. The more helpless I felt, the more insolent I became. In defense, I offered up a brief consideration of Forough’s importance as a poet.

  At this point Mother took on that terrible, impersonal, mocking tone of hers. “You are of course right,” she said sarcastically. “You are a treasure trove of knowledge. How could an ignorant woman such as myself ever hope to reach such heights!” When she was cross with us, her expression was glacial and she deliberately chose formal words. She would call me Madam, as she did when she wrote me admonishing notes. She would write letters which she would leave about the house. Other families talked, we wrote: what we felt or hoped for, our complaints—we wrote all this, as if we could not bear to look into one another’s eyes and just talk.

  Sometimes Mother’s notes would be short and straightforward, congratulating us on our birthdays, on the New Year, or some accomplishment. But mainly she wrote when she was angry. Then she would address us in generic terms: My Model Husband, My Grateful Children, My Dutiful Daughter. It was not uncommon for her to enumerate all the different sacrifices she had made for us. “A mother’s task in life is to nurture upright children …” she wrote in one. “I am happy that I have raised two individuals,” she began, before turning to our misdeeds. She never denied our “accomplishments,” as she called them, which she implicitly took credit for. Often she would end with: “I am sorry I was not a worthy mother. I am not wanted in this family, I am an outsider. I wish the best for the three of you.” Later she would add the names of her grandchildren to her list of culprits.

  I should have seen that there was something essential missing. “It is doubtless that Azar is a brilliant student,” she would write, deliberately depleting her writing of any feeling or emotion. Or, “A mother’s main task in life is devotion to her children.” Now I am saddened by this painfully distant love. At the time, we were too accustomed to these notes to recognize the luminous pain that caused them.

  That day I was reprimanded and, after a reluctant and teary apology, exiled to my room. A vivid day in my memory: I spent the whole day in my room, refusing to eat or answer the telephone. She sent the servants, my brother, and my uncle at different times to summon me to dinner but I did not go. I reviewed everything through tear stained eyes, and soon drifted into a narcotic state of self-pity. Not even Mehran could keep my interest. Nor did I waste time thinking about Behzad Sari, whom I had refused to marry anyway. What if I could inhabit a world that was completely different from the one in which I lived? What if I could live a more normal life? I have no idea how I reached the conclusion that I did, but by the end of the evening I had said to myself, Okay then, I’ll marry him!

  YESTERDAY NEZHAT AND AZAR came to visit,” my father wrote in his diary. “There is a new suitor. Azar has rejected a few suitors. This one is Mehdi Mazhari, Colonel Mazhari’s son. I know General Mazhari, his uncle, who is a good man. Their family is prominent in Azerbaijan. But what worries me is her mother’s manner and my own predicament and Azar’s naïveté and lack of experience on the one hand, and her hurt and anguish because of conditions at home. She may be forced into accepting because of this situation… Her mother is in a hurry to get this done as soon as possible. Perhaps she wants to have the wedding while she is still in Parliament. Azar is constantly tearful and unhappy. She doesn’t want to get married until I get out but I don’t know when I will be released and cannot keep her dangling.”

  Mehdi Mazhari came from a military family that was in many respects the exact opposite of ours. He was many years younger than his youngest sister and the only boy in the family, the apple of his mother’s eye. When I met him he was a senior in electrical engineering at the University of Oklahoma. His favorite star was Frank Sinatra, whom he appreciated mainly because of what he thought Sinatra represented: opulence, charm, worldly success, gloved servants at the dining table. His family was unabashedly materialistic, while mine was careless about such matters.

  At first I did not take his offer at all seriously. I did not love him. I was not even physically attracted to him. My only persistent suitor had been Behzad, whom I had never seriously considered marrying. I hadn’t paid much attention to Mehdi until at some point he started paying attention to me. The only boy close to my own age that Mother allowed me to hang around with was her friend Alangoo’s son, Bahman. She considered him trustworthy, while she felt that Uncle Hussein�
�s brother-in-law or anyone from my father’s side of the family was not good for me. Bahman and his friends were thought to be a much “safer” course. Mehdi was one of Bahman’s friends.

  IT WAS AFTER DINNER and Mehdi called me into the dining room. I was standing and he was sitting on a chair. He held my hands and said, “I want to marry you.”

  I said nothing. He said, “Hadn’t you guessed?” I said, “Well, I haven’t really thought about it.” He told me he had always wanted to marry young; he wanted to have fun with his wife—a legitimate enough point—but then he went on to say that his parents were old and he was their youngest child and only son—they wanted to see him married with children before they died. He thought I came from a good family, with excellent connections, although he did not approve of my parents’ relationship. (Only one person, he said, should wear the pants in a family and in your house that person is certainly not your father.) He said he liked the look of me the first time he saw me. “But,” I said, “there must be many girls whose looks you like.” “Yes,” he said, “but you are so innocent.” “Innocent?” “You’ve been to England but you still don’t know what a French kiss is.” He informed me that he was a very jealous person. “I will sleep with a pistol under my pillow,” he said. Then he returned to the question of my family. “Despite what has happened to your father, it is a good family,” he said, “a prominent family with a good name.” I let him kiss me, mainly to be spared from having to give him an answer then. Later, it occurred to me that his proposal should have been a warning of things to come. It vaguely reminded me of Mr. Collins’s proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Unfortunately, I cannot claim that my own behavior resembled that of Elizabeth Bennet’s.

  That night I came home late, but Mother was still awake. As I tiptoed toward my room, she called me from her bedroom. The room was dark and she was in bed. “So,” she said, “what happened?” “He asked me,” I said. “He asked you what?” “To marry him.” “What did you say?” “Nothing.” “What?” “Well,” I said curtly, “I need to think.”

  Later I would blame my mother for my decision to marry Mehdi Mazhari. I would remind anyone who would listen of how she would send me to their house and stay up at night to hear how it went; how without my consent she visited my father and nagged him to give permission for a hasty marriage; how she slyly evaded Father’s request that she seek guidance from his elder brother in Esfahan.

  I would also privately blame Mehran. His evasiveness, at first so attractive, was becoming tedious. He had broken with the girlfriend he had talked to me about, but was coy, constantly testing me, casually telling me about this or that girl he had met at a party—none of whom, he would say, meant anything to him. Later it occurred to me that my silence, in fact, my whole lopsided attitude, must have been a factor in making him act that way. As soon as I informed Mehran, casually, of my new suitor he became—too late, as it turned out—adamant that I should not marry this man, that he was and always had been “there for me,” absolutely and unquestionably.

  It can be something of a relief to give yourself over to someone more decisive than yourself. Mehdi knew what he wanted and I felt a foolish pleasure in yielding to the new life he might offer me in marriage. I had always been attracted to men like my father, intellectuals with a vision and a mission, gentlemen who (in theory if not always in deed) were flexible and tender. Mehdi was the opposite. I chose to marry Mehdi not because I expected anything from him but because I wanted to fit into the role he had assigned me. I had graduated from high school and applied to the University of California at Santa Barbara to study literature. He was studying electrical engineering in Oklahoma, and felt, like my mother, that I spent too much time buried in my books. I was filled with doubts about marriage. He had very fixed ideas about it, and had his own strict rules about the different roles a husband and wife should play I convinced myself that for these very reasons he was good for me, although at times I felt that I was on my way to becoming “another woman gone to waste.”

  The irony was that both my mother and I chose him for the same reasons: he knew what he wanted and he passed my mother’s litmus test regarding suitable suitors. “My daughter is not made to be a housewife, she has to finish her education,” she told him when they first met. An educated wife, he assured her, would be a feather in his cap, so long as her parents were prepared to pay for her education. I have now become something of an expert in the ways of “decisive” men. They are not firm, they just seem to be. Because they have a formula for everything, which they forcibly impose, they seem confident. But they cannot face the unexpected. They can be far less capable in a crisis than the seemingly fragile women they bully and are secretly afraid of.

  And yet, Mehdi had something that I did not: a stable, happy family. It was so different from mine—there seemed to be no angst, no self-consciousness. They could all gather at home around a big table and laugh or get angry. They spent their holidays together, traveling in huge numbers. Next to them our family seemed so forlorn. In our own way we cared about one another—sometimes we cared too much—but always this caring was anxious and fraught.

  I did exactly what my mother wanted me to do. Later she denied it and claimed that from the very start she had been against the marriage, but in my father’s diary there are several references to her insistence and her desire for haste. Father tried to delay the wedding, he asked her to wait for my uncle to consult with the Koran, but she would not be deterred. I went around in a haze as she made the arrangements with dizzying speed. Less than two months after I had decided to marry Mehdi, I was in a short white wedding dress, teary-eyed, carrying a small cake, en route to my father’s jail. I had decided to go see him a few hours before the real wedding ceremony, which was held at our house. I cried the night before the wedding, on the way to see Father, and up until the last hour before the ceremony.

  On the wedding day my mother kept saying how similar our fates were: her father had been absent at her wedding as well. Father wrote in his diary that our fates seemed to be “intertwined,” because I had made the same mistake he had. In a strange passage in which he writes in the third person he says, “Finally Azar’s fate has become identical to her father’s. She has forced herself into marriage. Because of her unhappiness at home and her father’s absence she preferred to escape her own home. The one person who constantly thought of me has now transferred her affections to another.” My brother spent part of his summer vacation in Esfahan. He was now summoned to Tehran and spent the last few days before the wedding walking around the yard, trying to dissuade me from going through with it. I let Mehran’s calls go unanswered. He, like the rest of my father’s family, felt that Mehdi and I had very little in common and was bewildered by my choice.

  Over a decade earlier Father told me you cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be stubborn for something as well. Rudabeh did not insist on marrying Zal to resist her parents’ wish, or because she was desperate, or to spite anyone, but because she loved Zal. That, my father had said, is what makes her hardheadedness okay, something to be admired. The relevance of what he said came to me too late.

  EVERYTHING ABOUT THE WEDDING was melodramatic. Mehran called me up to the end imploring me to change my mind; my brother pleaded with me to call it off. A few days before the event, Uncle Abu Torab called my mother from Esfahan to say that he had consulted the Koran and the result was negative. Layla, Aunt Mina’s younger daughter, a stern mentor, sat me down and tried to make me understand that I was now what my mother kept wanting me to be: a lady. I had responsibilities and would have to act accordingly. I nodded in agreement just as I had when she lectured me about my duties as a woman. Perhaps I should have asked Layla what she would recommend for a rather frightened and bewildered teenager masquerading as a confident and decisive adult?

  We went for our honeymoon to our family villa on the Caspian Sea with my husband’s family. His three sisters, their husbands and children stayed at a po
pular resort close by. Father had bought the place years earlier, when the whole stretch of land was undeveloped. He loved it and had retreated there whenever he could. If a place can encompass a person’s soul, I would say that he put his soul into it.

  The beaches on the Caspian Sea are unique in all the world, though to be honest I am merely repeating what my father used to tell me. He explained that few places were blessed with the sea on one side, mountains and forest on the other. He would spend hours deep in the forest, foraging for exotic plants and flowers for his garden. That garden occupied him more than any lover ever would. During my youth, on harsh winter days and in the heat of the summer, even if he had only two days he would travel four and a half hours from Tehran to work in his garden. Gradually the land nearby had been bought by prominent families and our simple house came to be surrounded by sumptuous gardens and villas. My mother always objected to being there. She was a city person, and carried with her its restlessness. Flowers for her were decorative advertisements. From the moment we arrived, she would galvanize the poor gardener and his whole family into scrubbing the place. My father was a social person; he wanted to invite our neighbors and friends over, but Mother would make socializing almost impossible. She worried about what food to serve, whom to invite. She didn’t like to swim. She didn’t know how to relax.