Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  The last two months before the peace treaty, Iraq escalated its bombing of the cities, especially Tehran. Sometimes as many as six rockets would simultaneously fall on Tehran. What did those who had not left the city do? Some tried to create shelters out of their basements, others pretended that nothing extraordinary was happening and everything was normal: the blackouts, the huddled gatherings in one room with friends and family who had come to visit but now had to stay the night, the blankets hung against the windows, taped with surgical tape to prevent a barrage of breaking glass, the sound of warning sirens, which usually came only after the attack had happened.

  In a strange way, life took on an almost festive mood. Neighbors and friends all gathered together. In between blackouts we watched movies and drank bootleg vodka and homemade wine, trying to feel secure by the strange sense of intimacy that urgent conditions create. I slept either in the children’s room or in the small hall that separated our bedroom from theirs. The hall had no windows and I could read by candlelight during the blackouts. I wanted to be there with them whatever happened—that was my main anxiety, that I might not share their fate. Almost every time after the bombings, no matter what the hour of night or day, my mother would knock on the hall door and come in, saying, “Are you all right? Don’t be afraid.”

  And then one day the bombs stopped. The sleepovers were over and we put the candles back in the drawers. No more blackouts, the sirens were not bomb alerts but simply ambulances—but the fear lingered; there seemed to be something deceptive in our newfound sense of security. The silence that peace brought with it had the same heavy impact as a bomb. Iran had signed a peace treaty out of desperation, knowing it could not win. Ayatollah Khomeini, who had promised his faithful troops that they would soon triumphantly march into Iraq and capture the holy city of Karballa, announced that the signing of the treaty was like drinking a cup of poison. It was a visible blow to his dream of exporting his brand of Islam to the rest of the world. Almost a million casualties, eight years of war. What does it mean to say: The war ended on August 20, 1988, and a year later, on June 3, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini died, a quarter of a century after the June 5th uprising that propelled him into the center of Iranian politics?

  What now? The discussions at our dinner table and the conversations at our coffee sessions were colored by talk of transformations within the regime. This was the time to articulate our disillusionment with a revolution that had not delivered, with corrupt leaders who had failed to bring freedom and prosperity to the country, and with a war that had not been won. The peace treaty with Iraq had dashed the hopes of those who had sincerely believed that this war would end in the victory of the Islamic regime. Those who felt cheated were not the secularists, but the former revolutionaries, the ones who had guarded the streets with guns, tried to purge the universities of undesirable elements, gone to war and returned mutilated and without hope. Who was to blame? No longer the imperialists and their modernizing agents.

  It may be ironic but it is also true that disillusionment can breed hope. Some of the former young revolutionaries began to turn to new ideas and espouse heretical views, quoting Karl Popper and Spinoza, criticizing regressive religious ideas and reaching out to secular intellectuals. They were part of the movement that was later called the religious reformist movement. What they had shunned at the start of the revolution—secularism and Western ideas—was now what they increasingly turned to. Once they started to feel like aliens in their formerly secure world, they sought out new kinships. Some among the secular intellectuals also questioned their own ideological inflexibilities and welcomed new dialogue and exchanges. Some among the intellectuals who were disciples of the Islamic thinker Abdol Karim Soroush published articles by secular intellectuals, among them my articles on modernism, formalism, and Vladimir Nabokov. They also published translations of works by Western liberal thinkers.

  The truth was that Iranian society was far ahead of its leaders, and those targeted by the regime, especially the women, instead of retreating had become even more prominent on the social and cultural scene. I had started in jest to draw up a list of things we should be thankful to the Islamic Republic for: making us appreciate the feel of the wind and the sun on our hair and skin, the freedom to read Virginia Woolf or Forough Farrokhzad, the joy of walking down the street in a flowery summer dress, listening to music. Never again could we take these for granted. But the list went beyond that. We had to be thankful to the Islamic Republic for making us question our past, and therefore to learn about it. Even those the regime targeted, like women, minorities, intellectuals, and writers, had something to be thankful for: the realization of their own hitherto untapped powers: if a woman’s hair, or a film by Fellini or Beyzaii, a book by Farrokhzad, could destabilize the political system to such an extent that they had to be eliminated, then was this not indicative of how strong these targets were and how fragile and insecure their oppressors?

  Ironically, we had to thank the system for the disillusionment of the country’s youth and former revolutionaries with the system itself. The ideological barriers that divided people into East and West, outsiders and insiders, were falling. My father believed that, as in the case of the Constitutional Revolution, change would come to Iran through an alliance of the progressive religious and secular forces, and that there would be no real political transformation without participation of both these forces now.

  I had come to agree with him. In this manner the past intruded and now colluded with the present. Shirin Ebadi, the first woman to be named to the circuit court of Tehran, when defrocked by the new laws that barred women from becoming judges, would become a human-rights lawyer. Another woman, Mehrangiz Kar, who had been a successful journalist and lawyer, would not only fight in courts but collaborate with a young cleric, Mohsen Saeedzadeh, in writing a series of inflammatory articles regarding women’s rights which led to endless harassment of Kar and her family and to the defrocking and the jailing of the cleric. A religious intellectual named Akbar Ganji, who in the first years of the revolution fought for the Islamization of universities, the suppression of dissent, and celebrating the implementation of religious law, now, over a decade later, found more affinities with a Jewish woman of German descent named Hannah Arendt, to whose work he would turn to describe the Islamic Republic. Or a filmmaker named Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who at the start of the revolution showed his films to political prisoners, hoping to convert them, and claimed in an interview that the older filmmakers who had been prominent during the Shah’s time deserved to be executed, would now tell me of the change in his attitude and say, “Perhaps art can give us the possibility of living several times. Every individual can live only once, and only from one perspective. Art can create other and different perspectives.” Every time I think of this statement I thank the Islamic Republic of Iran: by depriving us of the pleasures of imagination, of love, and of culture it had directed us toward them. No power, no amount of force, could make this genie go back into the bottle.

  Two days after the last cease-fire, we went with my father for a three-day trip to the Caspian. In the opposite lane we saw streams of cars, Tehranis who had taken refuge by the sea returning home. All through the four-and-a-half-hour journey Father would stop, as he had when I was a child, to point out the unique wildflowers he spotted. I sat in the back with the children.

  It was both a joyous and a sad trip for us, joyous because the war had really ended this time, and sad because it reminded us of the festive times we had spent there before the revolution. Now this exceptionally beautiful place looked as if it had been pillaged. Both nature and the revolution had taken their toll. The tide had advanced and overtaken many of the seaside villas. The walls to gardens were demolished and sometimes the houses were destroyed. On the beach we found scattered pieces of masonry, discarded shoes and clothing. The flourishing restaurants and resorts had been closed down. I remember one in particular, Motel Ghoo, the first of its kind in Iran, a large resort with dancing on the
pier and bingo games at night and parties on the beach. It had been cordoned off by a clumsy wall and fence and was used as headquarters for the revolutionary guard. The small square that had been the center of the busy town during the tourist season with its movie theater, small shops, and coffeehouses now swarmed with morality patrols. Instead of popular music, military marches or religious incantations emanated from the loudspeakers in the corners of the square. The women and men, in their dark, somber clothes, looked incongruous against the backdrop of the sea.

  My father had sold his beloved villa by the Caspian just before the revolution. At my insistence we paid it a visit. We parked the car at the corner and walked toward the house. The large garden had been divided and walled off. My best memories of my adolescence were of our trips to the Caspian. I loved the lush green, so close to the sea, the air, moist and seductive, soaking your body, the calm, the way the flowers looked bigger and brighter, as if illuminated from within. But after the revolution I hated going there. The Caspian region had been the target of the regime’s anger and neglect. I did not want to see the beloved refuge of my imagination turned into such a shabby place.

  CHAPTER 28

  the goddess of bad news

  I WENT TO AUSTIN, TEXAS, AND THEN to Los Angeles in early 1990 for conferences. Two days after my return, Father came over for dinner. He came early, and seemed distracted and a little agitated. Negar ran into the living room, with the presents I had brought them, followed by Dara waving his Zorro costume like a flag. My father kissed them and said, “Now I need to talk to your mother for a few minutes. I have good news for her.” We went to the library. I sat on the couch, he pulled up a chair, leaned toward me, and told me he had married Shahin.

  I was flabbergasted. I knew they had vaguely talked of marriage, and we saw her every once in a while. She even gave me a few tips on decorating my house. But he never mentioned impending plans. He ’d waited for me to leave the country to marry her—at least that is how I saw it. I said, “You hid it from me, you must have known before I left.” He said he did it for me, that I’d told him I didn’t want to have to lie to my mother anymore about his relationships with other women. Then he said, “I wouldn’t have married her, I wouldn’t have married anyone if I’d known you didn’t like her. I had counted on your being friends.” I think that is what made me doubt his sincerity. But how could I be blind for so many years and not see how my complicity in making up fictions to tell Mother might lead one day to his making up stories to appease me?

  I believe Father was happier with Shahin than he had been with my mother, although their relationship followed a familiar pattern: he became her friend, her father, her accountant, and her caretaker. He did the shopping and helped around the house. He wrote letters to her addict brother, admonishing him on her behalf. He promised her that before he died he would provide her with the kind of life she deserved, which meant using his power of attorney to sell everything we had. In a desperate frenzy to get our confiscated lands back he would make deals with shady characters he had shunned all his life. And Shahin treated him in some ways much as my mother had. She never warmed up to his family and she snubbed my uncles and cousins. Whenever we went over, for Norooz (Persian New Year) or some other formal occasion, he was anxious that our children might spill something. We always felt ill at ease, sitting on the edge of our chairs, ready to take flight. She was both mean and absurdly conscious of titles and labels. Once a friend told me to look at a blouse Shahin had given me for my birthday; the label had been cut out and she had pinned a designer logo to the cuff. Father tried to defend her, reminding me of how much I had liked her, insisting he never would have married her without my approval. Sometimes he had tears in his eyes; he could not believe that I would not believe him. I had been his most trusted confidante, so it was natural that it would hurt when he lied to me.

  “It was only in the last two years of his life,” my best friend, Pari, told me, “that Mr. Nafisi was unhappy. Otherwise,” she said—I surmise in order to calm me—“he had a good life with her.” The last two years Shahin pressured him to sell one of the islands that had been in Mohammad and my names, which had been semiofficially confiscated by the government. She was worried that, should he die, the money would go either to the government or to us, and not to her. Even at that age, with his heart trouble, my father would travel to the Caspian sometimes twice a week to cajole and bribe the people who had occupied the island, the local Islamic revolutionary committees and clerics. I kept telling him to let that island be. “We don’t need the money,” I said, “and you don’t need the headache.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that for someone who had boasted he would never bend to the Shah or any other power, it was demeaning to now try to appease these people for a piece of land.

  Father loved Shahin, of that I am as certain as I can be of anything about him. She might have loved him in her own way. Unlike Mother she did acknowledge his devotion. But he never found the peace he had searched for. He would have dinner with us once a week. Always he arrived nervous and worried. He wanted me to love his wife, not just respect her but love her. (“Azi wants to talk to you,” he would say, calling me from their home and giving her the receiver. I’d hear him say, “She misses talking to you.”) And he worried about money.

  All his life, until a few days before he died, he went to work almost every morning. He had enough money to live comfortably but that was insufficient for Shahin. “I told her I would take care of her,” he said, “I made a promise.” She had given up on the idea of fashion design and he helped her open a business as an interior decorator. He took me to the notary to renew his power of attorney, so that he could sell another piece of land. For some reason he and Shahin would try to convince us that she was the real breadwinner, that her decorating business had flourished to that extent.

  He tried to decipher Shahin the way he had tried to understand my mother. In his last diary, written a few months before his death, there is a note: “For Shani: If you view reality the way it really is you will make fewer mistakes. Your problem is that you mistake your own dreams and desires for reality and then you become disillusioned.” He might as well have written that note to himself.

  Shahin appeared to share my mother’s gift for fantasy, but she lacked Mother’s vulnerabilities. She used her misfortunes for specific goals. The protection she sought was not a vague demand for love and acknowledgment, it was far more pointed and material. Her greed had little mystery about it, which may be why she got what she wanted and my mother never did.

  A while ago a close relative told me, “There was really nothing wrong with what your father did. It isn’t that other men don’t have affairs. In fact, they tend to have them far more often than Ahmad did. But they keep them separate from their family and friends. They know how to be discreet. Ahmad’s marriage made no sense. Men marry younger women either for sexual pleasures or to be taken care of in their old age. In that house, Ahmad did everything. He did the shopping, helped with the washing up, carried his wife’s bag, and constantly sent her on vacations on her own so that she could rest.” This man wanted to know why my father couldn’t act more like a normal man. Why did his affairs have to turn into such messy dramas? In my more sober moments I wondered this myself. Would I have loved him more? I don’t think so. I loved him because his faults were not ordinary, because he felt guilty and he wanted not to have affairs but to be in love. His last diary is filled with his worries about his “promise” to Shahin, which, after his death, we discovered he more than fulfilled, even at the expense of his own good name.

  In personal life as in politics you either accept the rules or you openly and on principle rebel against them. In both cases there is a price to be paid. Fortunately, no one goes free. But what price? Not belonging to either camp, my father paid a double price. He had neither the comforts of convention nor the satisfaction that comes from breaking with what is expected of you. All through his diaries two opposite tendencies come up: the
desire to break away, to embark on the life he wanted, coupled with a fear of what would happen to him if he did.

  With tireless energy my mother pursued him, calling his place of business, asking friends and acquaintances about his activities, and accusing me of not protecting her, of selling her out to “that man and his floozy.” She had started to call my friend Pari behind my back, in part to complain, and she commissioned her to get the deeds to the property. Once she discovered my father had married, she made life hell for all of us for many weeks. I told her I had nothing to do with it, that I sympathized with her and had made a pact, out of respect for her, not to see his new wife at our home. I was trying to be honest with her. But it did not work. Too many things had happened, too much mistrust had built up over the years. What amazed me was why a woman with her sense of pride and strict morality had not initiated a divorce a long time before. Was it because she was afraid that being divorced would be more humiliating than tolerating a bad marriage? Or could it be that despite what she claimed she really loved him?

  She would say that she had known from the start he’d had “some other woman” in mind or he would not have broken up with Ziba Khanoom. At other times she would contradict herself and claim that, after extracting all the money she could from him, it was Ziba Khanoom who had left him. On calmer days she would try to make me part of her network of eyes and ears. She wanted me to give her their phone number. “I don’t have it,” I’d say, “I call him at his office.” She asked Bijan, the children, friends; finally she found their number and would call them day and night, threatening them and leaving messages on their voice mail. Let it go, everyone advised her. Be happy with your children and grandchildren, be grateful they are healthy and loving. “Loving?” she would retort with a sour smile.