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Summary
Summary
I started making a list in my diary entitled "Things I Have Been Silent About." Under it I wrote: "Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran." I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had never imagined.
--From Things I Have Been Silent About
Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran , now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution. A girl's pain over family secrets; a young woman's discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval--these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir, as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and "reminds us of why we read in the first place" ( Newsday ).
Nafisi's intelligent and complicated mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerizing fictions about herself, her family, and her past. But her daughter soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed. Nafisi's father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting his children with the classic tales like the Shahnamah, the Persian Book of Kings. When her father started seeing other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother. Nafisi's complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal, as well as political, cultural, and social, injustices.
Reaching back in time to reflect on other generations in the Nafisi family, Things I've Been Silent About is also a powerful historical portrait of a family that spans many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which turned Azar Nafisi's beloved Iran into a religious dictatorship. Writing of her mother's historic term in Parliament, even while her father, once mayor of Tehran, was in jail, Nafisi explores the remarkable "coffee hours" her mother presided over, where at first women came together to gossip, to tell fortunes, and to give silent acknowledgment of things never spoken about, and which then evolved into gatherings where men and women would meet to openly discuss the unfolding revolution.
Things I've Been Silent About is, finally, a deeply personal reflection on women's choices, and on how Azar Nafisi found the inspiration for a different kind of life. This unforgettable portrait of a woman, a family, and a troubled homeland is a stunning book that readers will embrace, a new triumph from an author who is a modern master of the memoir.
Author Notes
AZAR NAFISI is a visiting professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University. She has taught Western literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and the University of Allameh Tabatabai in Iran.
In 1994 she won a teaching fellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her family left Iran for America. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic and has appeared on radio and television programs.
Azar's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, was published in 2003 to wide acclaim.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nafisi's book about clandestine gatherings with other Iranian women to discuss works of Western literature, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), became an unlikely best-seller. In her new, equally compelling memoir, she affirms her belief in the power of literature and the need to speak the truth. Things I've Been Silent About was the heading for a list Nafisi kept in her diary of painful subjects, primary among them her contentious relationship with her bitterly unhappy mother. Recognizing that her mother's story, and her own, are inextricably meshed with the history of Iran, Nafisi, with diligence and candor, breaks her silence about family traumas and offers a unique and clarifying perspective on Iranian life. Nafisi's tenacious mother was one of the first women elected to Iran's Parliament. Nafisi's valiant father, whose passion for Persian literature ignited Nafisi's own literary ardor, was mayor of Tehran under the Shah until he was wrongfully imprisoned in an infamous case of revenge politics. Nafisi's dramatic and cathartic account of her difficult childhood, doomed first marriage, and political awakening glimmer with vivid and telling memories of Tehran fragrant and flourishing in her youth, grim and treacherous during the war with Iraq and under Khomeini. With high praise for insubordinate women and inspiring testimony to the liberation and wisdom found in literature, Nafisi celebrates individual expression and the polyphony of a democratic society. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Examining one's family history, as Azar Nafisi does here, is positively un-Iranian. WHEN Azar Nafisi was a professor of Western literature in Tehran in the 1980s and '90s, she told her best stories anonymously, sometimes to visiting foreign journalists seeking guidance about Iran's Islamic Republic. In 1997 she settled for good in the United States and discovered her public voice, turning the volume up high in her 2003 memoir, "Reading Lolita in Tehran." That memoir wove her personal stories with those of her former students, using as a touchstone their two years of shared experiences in a reading group at her home focused on banned authors like Nabokov and Fitzgerald. "Reading Lolita" became an international best seller; Nafisi, who is a visiting fellow and lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, became famous. Now she has written a second memoir, much more intimate than the first, a dissection of her often difficult family life, recounted against the dramatic sweep and turbulence of recent Iranian history. The idea for the book sprang from a list that she began compiling in her diary sometime after the 1979 Islamic revolution, entitled "Things I Have Been Silent About." It draws on other sources as well, including diaries her father, a former mayor of Tehran, started when she was 4, and addressed to her; his sanitized published memoirs and his unvarnished unpublished version; and family photographs, some of which she said she took from her mother and which appear in the book. Much of the time she relies on memory, a powerful tool that can distort as well as enlighten. Nafisi uses the new memoir to flesh out stories left untold or half-told in her earlier work: her upbringing in a prominent family; her education in Switzerland, England and the United States; her impulsive first marriage to a man she didn't love (for reasons she never fully explains) ; her return to Iran in the late 1970s, as the Islamic revolution was unfolding; her teaching career under clerical rule; and her second marriage and her two children. Writing the book was a very un-Iranian thing to do. Most of my Iranian friends were raised never to reveal family secrets to outsiders, certainly not strangers. We don't air our dirty linen in public, Nafisi's mother would tell her. But after her parents' deaths, she found herself determined to erase "the fictions my parents told us - fictions about themselves as well as others." The memoir, she writes, is "a response to my own inner censor and inquisitor." The revolution, which destroyed the certainties of her family's lives, made remembrance more critical. "If the present was fragile and fickle, the past could become a surrogate home," she writes. Azar Nafisi's mother, Nezhat. A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature, Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and to seduce. Her family secrets pour forth in a flood of revelations of anger, humiliation and deceit. "Most men cheat on their wives to have mistresses," she writes in the opening line of the book, with a nod to Tolstoy. "My father cheated on my mother to have a happy life." The main target of Nafisi's literary revenge is her mother, who spun fictions about herself as intricate as any Persian miniature. Nezhat Nafisi had wanted to be a doctor and felt cheated because she had not been allowed to finish her education. She clung to the memory of her dead first husband, enveloping him in a web of beautiful lies. Even when she became one of the first women members of the Iranian Parliament in 1953, it was not enough. She decided that her marriage to Ahmad Nafisi had been a mistake, and pushed him away and into the arms of other women and, eventually, a divorce. Mother and daughter waged a battle of wills from the time Azar was 4. "She did not want rivals," Nafisi writes. She told Azar how "unnatural" it was for a young girl to spend her time reading. When Nafisi halfheartedly mimicked a suicide she had heard about by trying to slash her wrists, her mother, "unimpressed," banished her to her room for the rest of the day. Her mother read her diaries and letters and listened in to her phone conversations. Even as Nafisi was heading into exile in the United States and said goodbye to her mother for what would be the last time, her mother turned away from her kiss. "You share the same rotten genes" as your father, her mother would tell Nafisi and her younger brother, a line that recurs throughout the narrative. To protect herself, Nafisi took her father's side, developing a "secret language" to communicate their feelings and deceive her mother. He introduced her to Persian classics like Ferdowsi's epic "Shahnameh," the Book of Kings, and, later, the Western classics. Thrown into jail as mayor of Tehran in 1963 on trumpedup charges, he used the time to learn new languages, to paint, and to write three children's books and 1,500 pages of diaries. This was not one of the shah's torture chambers. There was always a vase of fresh flowers in the room. So on another level, Nafisi's memoir is an attempt to pay homage to her father, by bringing his own life story into the open. Unintentionally, perhaps, the most painful facet of the memoir is Nafisi's self-revelations. She describes being groped at the age of 6 by a family friend, a man who was considered holy, and the shame she felt afterward. Victims can feel guilty, she writes, both because they keep silent and because they feel "some vague sense of sexual pleasure out of an act that is imposed and feels reprehensible." Nafisi deeply missed her father when she and her family moved to the United States, hut did not initiate contact with him and at first did nut even send him a copy of "Reading Lolita." At the book's end, Nafisi remains restless, relentlessly hard on herself for not being a better daughter, for not returning to Iran before her parents died, even though it would have been dangerous for her. In the end, she is grateful to them, not for bringing her happiness, but for arming her for the battle of life. "It was only after their deaths," she writes, "that I came to realize that they each in their own way had given me a portable home that safeguards memory arid is a constant resistance against the tyranny of time and of man." I cannot say that I came away from "Things I Have Been Silent About" with a fuller understanding of Iran. But it gave me a fuller understanding of Nafisi. Shortly after she came to the United States, we met over breakfast in a shopping mall outside Washington. We were brought together by a mutual friend and her distant relation, Haleh Esfandiari, a Washington-based scholar who spent nearly four months in prison after she was arrested in Iran in 2007 during a visit to her elderly mother. Nafisi and I disagreed about the shape of Iranian politics. A fierce opponent of the Islamic Republic, she was scathing in her criticism of President Mohammad Khatami and his efforts to open up the political system. I was surprised more by her intellectual absolutism and unedited fury than by the substance of her political views. Esfandiari tried in vain to bridge the divide. I now understand why she failed. Perhaps because of who she is and what she experienced, Nafisi cannot imagine compromise. "To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime," she writes, describing the enduring effects of her mother's rages. There seems to be little joy or laughter in the story she has told so far. Perhaps that will be the subject of her next book. Elaine Sciolino, a correspondent in the Paris bureau of The Times, is the author of "Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran."
Choice Review
Nafisi's earlier memoir, Reading "Lolita" in Tehran (CH, Oct'03, 41-1101), covers the period just before and after Iran's revolution in 1978-79 and the formation of the Islamic Republic. In this new memoir, Nafisi does not repeat the story she told in her previous book, but instead examines the history of her family and its complicated interrelationships, with particular focus on her mother (who was one of the first women in Iran's parliament) and her father (who was mayor of Tehran until he was jailed). The book's title refers to the family's secrets and how they have affected Nafisi's life. She also details her early education in England and her college experiences in the US. She and her husband and children left Iran in 1997; she had found it difficult to continue to cope with the political and social restrictions of the Islamic Republic. (Nafisi is currently a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University.) The volume contains many family photographs, a helpful glossary, and a chronology of 20th-century Iran. Nafisi tells a gripping, intimate tale, and readers will gain a better understanding of Iran and its recent, tumultuous history. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. L. Beck Washington University, Saint Louis
Guardian Review
I'm made nervous by people who "devour" books, let alone "inhale" them, as Azar Nafisi (below) claims to. It's also difficult to trust teachers of literature who tell you that "we discussed" books or "we agreed" about them when they usually mean that they talked uninterruptedly for two hours and no one in the class demurred. Nafisi's earlier memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran , involved discussion and agreement with a "handpicked" group of young Iranian women, and was a bestseller. Margaret Atwood said that "All readers should read it", which is a bit steep. Susan Sontag was "enthralled" by it and Anita Desai thinks it "greatly loved". Yet it is not greatly loved by Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University. He has written of Nafisi, intemperately perhaps, as a "pestiferous" example of "native informers turned comprador intellectuals" who are to be reprimanded for "discrediting their own native culture of resistance"; he has gone further in linking her to the neocon project via that well-known orientalist Bernard Lewis. Nafisi's new memoir, Things I've Been Silent About, covers a lot of the same ground as Reading Lolita, but begins and ends with the author's difficulties with her mother. She does seem to have been a trying and unhappy woman, permanently in thrall to a first husband who married her knowing he was terminally ill, didn't tell her and died a year later. She remembered this marriage as rosy, excitingly lived on the fringes of political power, and nothing thereafter could match it. She appears to have disliked the author's father, her second husband, who was the mayor of Tehran for nearly five years, was then imprisoned by the Shah for almost as long, and emerged to pursue a fairly successful career in business and adultery: this in the interest, his loving daughter says, of leading "a happy family life". Nafisi went to school for a time in Lancaster, then went to university in America, where she briefly took part in radical student politics in the 70s, and swiftly recanted. Her mother was an Iranian member of parliament for a bit, and her father was implicated in the Shah's regime, as well as in those that followed. However, as Nafisi puts it, "My family had always looked down on politics, with a certain rebellious condescension." A patrician contempt for what politics may be about for "the masses" sits comfortably enough with her assurances that the great thing about literature is that it is "useless", and that though she and her group of students "skipped back and forth between our lives and novels", literature and the reading of it have very little to do with real life, let alone politics, and everything to do with individual empathy and imagination. Nafisi's student years in America coincided with a short unhappy first marriage and the beginning of a happier second one to an Iranian with whom she returned to Iran in 1979. During the Iran-Iraq war, she taught English and American literature in various universities and colleges in Tehran (it is not clear whether this was in English or in translation, and if in English how copies were found) and quarrelled with her mother. She is anxious to suggest that the principal difficulties of these years for her family were internal ones, their effects ultimately harder to bear than the violence and repression suffered by the country as a whole. She also admits that families such as hers had less to complain about than others, though we hear rather little about those other families. For her, there was always someone "to help with the housework", and her father and husband had interesting and well-paid work. Nafisi had two children, eventually gave up teaching at the university (frustrated by the rules and regulations, particularly the dress code for women) and settled down to reading her favourite American novels with students in her own home. In 1997 she moved with her reluctant husband and her children to America, leaving her parents in Tehran. The success of her earlier book may ensure the success of this one. It is marketed as full of secrets, and though these are not extraordinary ones, she describes her parents' impossible marriage and their attempts to escape one another with vigorous candour. She may also be covertly answering Dabashi, by making a good deal of her father's reading to her of Persian folk tales and classical literature as a child, and by her announcement that she has studied and written widely on contemporary Iranian literature. The wonderful novel Savushun , by Simin Daneshvar, appears (misspelled) in a booklist at the back, though not in the text itself. I would be sorry to hear that book discussed as having nothing to do with politics. Jane Miller's books include Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture. Caption: article-nsafisi.1 I'm made nervous by people who "devour" books, let alone "inhale" them, as Azar Nafisi (below) claims to. It's also difficult to trust teachers of literature who tell you that "we discussed" books or "we agreed" about them when they usually mean that they talked uninterruptedly for two hours and no one in the class demurred. Nafisi's earlier memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran , involved discussion and agreement with a "handpicked" group of young Iranian women, and was a bestseller. Margaret Atwood said that "All readers should read it", which is a bit steep. Susan Sontag was "enthralled" by it and Anita Desai thinks it "greatly loved". Nafisi went to school for a time in Lancaster, then went to university in America, where she briefly took part in radical student politics in the 70s, and swiftly recanted. Her mother was an Iranian member of parliament for a bit, and her father was implicated in the [Shah]'s regime, as well as in those that followed. However, as Nafisi puts it, "My family had always looked down on politics, with a certain rebellious condescension." A patrician contempt for what politics may be about for "the masses" sits comfortably enough with her assurances that the great thing about literature is that it is "useless", and that though she and her group of students "skipped back and forth between our lives and novels", literature and the reading of it have very little to do with real life, let alone politics, and everything to do with individual empathy and imagination. - Jane Miller.
Kirkus Review
An account of growing up under a chilly, tyrannical parent in a changing Iran, by the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). An adversarial relationship with her mother defined the choices she made in her life, writes Nafisi, who now lives in Washington, D.C. Raised amid privilege and wealth in Tehran in the 1950s and '60s, the author became aware early on that her parents' marriage, which united two prominent families, was not happy. Both her father and her mother told their children "fictions," she declares, official versions of the family history rather than the truth. She took the side of her literary-minded father, who became mayor of Tehran, and had scant sympathy for her dictatorial, paranoid mother, who lamented the untimely death of her first husband and her inability to go to medical school because of her gender. Nafisi grew up enjoying education abroad and freedoms her mother had never known. During the five years in the '60s that her father spent in jail for "consorting with the opposition," the then-teenaged author agreed to an ill-starred marriage pushed by her mother, simply to get out of the house. While an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma, Nafisi divorced her first husband and got involved in the nascent Iranian student movement. "In the seventies it was easy for a young Iranian abroad to be antigovernment," she writes. "Inside Iran, of course, it was a different story." She returned to Tehran shortly after the Revolution in 1979 with her new husband, also an Iranian activist. The young revolutionaries had few illusions about the new Islamic regime, however, and Nafisi and her friends were harassed and imprisoned for their subversive activities. She and her husband finally decided to leave in 1997. She sees her writings as part of the same decision to reject the "complicity and silent acquiescence," whether to a tyrannical regime or a domineering parent, that have plagued her life both personally and professionally. An immensely rewarding and beautifully written act of courage, by turns amusing, tender and obsessively dogged. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) captures her memories of her mother and father in this story about growing up in the turbulent and politically charged atmosphere in Iran. Central to the book is Nafisi's mother, who adds details and eliminates facts to her life story as it suits her. This element of mistrust is the basis for Nafisi's dysfunctional relationship with this melodramatic woman, who is known for her local coffee sessions that eventually enable her to be elected to Parliament. By contrast, Nafisi's father, who was jailed for his political actions as deputy mayor of Tehran, loves to entertain Nafisi with his tales of the goodness of people even with all the injustice in the world. Her father also gives her the diaries he wrote for her since she was a four-year-old. Fantasy, in various forms, is the mechanism Nafisi's family employs to understand life. Watching Nafisi grow from a child to a mother and a writer shows how her family's story is really her own. Recommended for all public libraries where Nafisi is popular and for all academic collections.-Joyce Sparrow, JWB Children's Svcs. Council, Clearwater, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Saifi I have often asked myself how much of my mother's account of her meeting with her first husband was a figment of her imagination. If not for the photographs, I would have doubted that he had ever existed. A friend once talked of my mother's "admirable resistance to the unwanted," and since, for her, so much in life was unwanted, she invented stories about herself that she came to believe with such conviction that we started doubting our own certainties. In her mind their courtship began with a dance. It seemed more likely to me that his parents would have asked her father for her hand, a marriage of convenience between two prominent families, as had been the convention in Tehran in the 1940s. But over the years she never changed this story, the way she did so many of her other accounts. She had met him at her uncle's wedding. She was careful to mention that in the morning she wore a flowery crêpe-de-chine dress and in the evening one made of duchess satin, and they danced all evening ("After my father had left," she would say, and then immediately add, "because no one dared dance with me in my father's presence"). The next day he asked for her hand in marriage. Saifi! I cannot remember ever hearing his last name spoken in our house. We should have called him--with the echo of proper distance-- Mother's first husband, or perhaps by his full title, Saif ol Molk Bayat, but to me he was always Saifi, good-naturedly part of our routine. He insinuated himself into our lives with the same ease with which he stood behind her in their wedding pictures, appearing unexpectedly and slyly whirling her away from us. I have two photos from that day--more than we ever had of my own parents' wedding. Saifi appears relaxed and affable, with his light hair and hazel eyes, while my mother, who is in the middle of the group, stands frozen like a solitary centerpiece. He seems nonchalantly, confidently happy. But perhaps I am wrong and what I see on his face is not hope but utter hopelessness. Because he too has his secrets. There was something about her story that always bothered me, even as a child. It seemed not so much untrue as wrong. Most people have a way of radiating their potential, not just what they are but what they could become. I wouldn't say my mother didn't have the potential to dance. It is worse than that. She wouldn't dance, even though, by all accounts, she was a good dancer. Dancing would have implied pleasure, and she took great pride in denying herself pleasure or any such indulgences. All through my childhood and youth, and even now in this city so far removed from the Tehran that I remember, the shadow of that other ghostly woman who danced and smiled and loved disturbs the memories of the one I knew as my mother. I have a feeling that if somehow I could understand just when she stopped dancing--when she stopped wanting to dance--I would find the key to my mother's riddle and finally make my peace with her. For I resisted my mother--if you believe her stories--almost from the start. I have three photographs of my mother and Saifi. Two are of their wedding, but I am interested in the third, a much smaller picture of them out on a picnic, sitting on a rock. They are both looking into the camera, smiling. She is holding onto him in the casual manner of people who are intimate and do not need to hold onto one another too tightly. Their bodies seem to naturally gravitate together. Looking at the photograph, I can see the possibility of this young, perhaps not yet frigid, woman letting go. I find in the photograph the sensuality that we always missed in my mother in real life. When? I would say, when did you graduate from high school? How many years later did you marry Saifi? What did he do? When did you meet Father? Simple questions that she never really answered. She was too immersed in her own inner world to be bothered by such details. No matter what I asked her, she would tell me the same stock stories, which I knew almost by heart. Later, when I left Iran, I asked one of my students to interview her and I gave specific questions to ask, but I got back the same stories. No dates, no concrete facts, nothing that went outside my mother's set script. A few years ago, at a family gathering, I ran into a lovely Austrian lady, the wife of a distant relative, who had been present at my mother's wedding to Saifi. One reason she remembered the wedding so clearly was the panic and confusion caused by the mysterious disappearance of the bride's birth certificate. (In Iran, marriages and children are recorded on birth certificates.) She told me, with the twinkle of a smile, that it was later discovered that the bride was a few years older than the groom. Mother's most recent birth certificate makes no mention of her first marriage. According to this document, which replaced the one she claimed to have lost, she was born in 1920. But she maintained that she was really born in 1924 and that her father had added four years to her age because he wanted to send her to school early. My father told us that my mother had actually subtracted four years from her real age when she picked up the new birth certificate, which she needed so that she could apply for a driver's license. When the facts did not suit her, my mother would go to great lengths to refashion them altogether. Some facts are on record. Her father-in-law, Saham Soltan Bayat, was a wealthy landowner who had seen one royal dynasty, the Qajars (1794-1925), replaced by another, the Pahlavis (1925-79). He managed to survive, even thrive, through the change in power. Mother sometimes boasted that she was related to Saifi on her mother's side and that they were both descendants of Qajar kings. During the fifties and sixties when I was growing up, being related to the Qajars, who, according to the official history books, represented the old absolutist system, was no feather in anyone's cap. My father would remind us mischievously that all Iranians were in one way or another related to the Qajars. In fact, he would say, those who could not find any connections to the Qajars were the truly privileged. The Qajars had reigned over the country for 131 years, and had numerous wives and offspring. Like the kings that came before them, they seemed to have picked their wives from all ranks and classes, possessing whoever caught their fancy: princesses, gardeners' daughters, poor village girls, all were part of their collection. One Qajar king, Fath Ali Shah (1771-1834), is said to have had 160 wives. Being of a judicious mind-?set, Father would usually add that of course that was only part of the story, and since history is written by the victors, especially in our country, we should take all that is said about the Qajars with a grain of salt--after all, it was during their reign that Iran started to modernize. They had lost, so anything could be said of them. Even as a child I sensed that Mother brought up this connection to the Qajars more to slight her present life with Father than to boast about the past. Her snobbism was arbitrary, and her prejudices were restricted to the rules and laws of her own personal kingdom. Saham Soltan, mother's father-in-law, appears in various history books and political memoirs--one line here, a paragraph there--once as deputy and vice president of Parliament, twice as minister of finance in the early 1940s, and as prime minister for a few months, from November 1944 to April 1945--during the time my mother claims to have been married to Saifi. Despite the fact that Iran had declared neutrality in World War II, Reza Shah Pahlavi had made the mistake of sympathizing with the Germans. The Allies, the British and the Soviets in particular, who had an eye on the geopolitical gains, occupied Iran in 1941, forced Reza Shah to abdicate, exiled him to Johannesburg, and replaced him with his young and more malleable son, Mohammad Reza. The Second World War triggered such upheaval in Iran that between 1943 and 1944 four prime ministers and seven ministers of finance were elected. Mother knew little and seemed to care less about what kind of prime minister her father-?in-?law had been. What was important was that he played the fairy godfather to her degraded present. This is how so many public figures entered my life, not through history books but through my parents' stories. How glamorous mother's life with Saifi really was is open to debate. They lived at Saham Soltan's house, in the chink of time between the death of his first wife and his marriage to a much younger and, according to my mother, quite detestable woman. In the absence of a lady of the house, my mother did the honors. "Everybody's eyes were on me that first night," she would tell us, describing in elaborate detail the dress she had worn and the impact of her flawless French. As a child I would picture her coming down the stairs in her red chiffon dress, her black eyes shining, her hair immaculately done. "The first night Doctor Millspaugh came...you should have been there!" Dr. Millspaugh, the head of the American Mission in the 1940s, had been assigned by both the Roosevelt and the Truman administrations to help Tehran set up modern financial institutions. Mother never saw any reason to tell us who this man was, and for a long time, for some reason I was convinced that he was Belgian. Later, when I reviewed my mother's accounts of these dinners, I was struck by the fact that Saifi was never present. His father would always be there, and Dr. Millspaugh or some other publicly important and personally insignificant character. But where was Saifi? That was the tragedy of her life: the man at her side was never the one she wanted. My father, to bribe my brother and me into silence against her impositions, and perhaps to compensate for his own compliance, would tell us over and over again how our mother was imprisoned in her father-in-law's house, where Khoji, the domineering housekeeper, was the real woman in charge. Even the key to the larder was in the hands of the indomitable Khoji, whom mother had to flatter and cajole to get as much as a length of fabric to make herself a nice dress. Father would remind us that she was treated more like an unwanted guest than as mistress of her father-in-law's house. Mother presented herself as a happy young bride, the proud heroine wooed by Prince Charming, and Father painted her as a victim of other people's petty cruelties. They both wanted us to confirm their own version. Mother flung the past at us as an accusation of the pres- ent, and Father needed to justify her tyrannies on all of us, by provoking our compassion. It was difficult to compete with Saifi, a dead man, and a handsome one at that--the son of the prime minister, with the potential to become whatever she could imagine him to be. My father's intelligence and goodwill, his future prospects and ambitions as a promising director at the Ministry of Finance, even the fact that he and my mother came from different branches of the same family, appeared poor seconds to what Mother believed Saifi had to offer her. Later she seemed to begrudge Father's successes in public life, as if they were fierce rivals rather than partners. The problem was not what she said but what she left out. My father filled in the gaps: Saifi, the favorite first son, had an incurable disease--nephritis of the kidney, they called it--and the doctors had given up on him. Let him do whatever he wants in these last years of his life, one had recommended. Indulge him, let him have his way. Provide him with all the fun he desires, because he has so little time to enjoy life. When his family proposed to my mother, they conveniently neglected to tell her that he was ill. She discovered it on her wedding night. According to my father their marriage was never consummated. Instead, for two years she nursed a sick husband, watching him die every day. And this was the romance of her life, the man whom she brandished to remind us of our own inadequacies! Sometimes, when she went on and on about Saifi with that absent look of hers, I wanted to shake her and say, No, that's not the way it was! But of course I never did. Did he care what would happen to her when she discovered his condition, or what would become of her after he died? She was too proud and too stubborn to have much interest in the truth. And so she transformed a real place and history into a fantasy of her own creation. Ever since I can remember, my brother, my father, and I tried to figure out what it was exactly that she wanted from us. We tried to travel with her to that other place that seemed to beckon, to which her eyes were constantly diverted as she gazed beyond the walls of her real home. What frightened me was not her rages but that frozen place in her that we could never penetrate. While she was alive I was too busy evading her and resenting her to understand how disappointed and alone she must have felt, how she was like so many other women about whom her best friend, Mina, used to say, with an ironic smile: "Another intelligent woman gone to waste." Excerpted from Things I've Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | p. xi |
| Prologue | p. xv |
| Part 1 Family Fictions | |
| Chapter 1 Saifi | p. 3 |
| Chapter 2 Rotten Genes | p. 11 |
| Chapter 3 Learning to Lie | p. 22 |
| Chapter 4 Coffee Hour | p. 33 |
| Chapter 5 Family Ties | p. 43 |
| Chapter 6 The Holy Man | p. 49 |
| Chapter 7 A Death in the Family | p. 58 |
| Part 2 Lessons and Learning | |
| Chapter 8 Leaving Home | p. 67 |
| Chapter 9 Rudabeh's Story | p. 76 |
| Chapter 10 At Scotforth House | p. 87 |
| Chapter 11 Politics and Intrigue | p. 95 |
| Chapter 12 Mayor of Tehran | p. 104 |
| Chapter 13 Rehearsal for a Revolution | p. 115 |
| Part 3 My Father's Jail | |
| Chapter 14 A Common Criminal | p. 131 |
| Chapter 15 The Prison Diaries | p. 138 |
| Chapter 16 A Career Woman | p. 146 |
| Chapter 17 A Suitable Match | p. 157 |
| Chapter 18 Women Like That! | p. 168 |
| Chapter 19 Married Life | p. 179 |
| Part 4 Revolts and Revolution | |
| Chapter 20 A Happy Family | p. 197 |
| Chapter 21 Demonstrations | p. 201 |
| Chapter 22 Revolution | p. 209 |
| Chapter 23 The Other Other Woman | p. 223 |
| Chapter 24 When Home Is Not Home Anymore | p. 227 |
| Chapter 25 Reading and Resistance | p. 238 |
| Chapter 26 Broken Dreams | p. 246 |
| Chapter 27 Father's Departure | p. 254 |
| Chapter 28 The Goddess of Bad News | p. 273 |
| Chapter 29 Facing the World | p. 287 |
| Chapter 30 The Last Dance | p. 304 |
| Chapter 31 The Perils of Love | p. 309 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 315 |
| Suggested Reading List | p. 319 |
| Moments in Twentieth-Century Iranian History | p. 321 |
| Glossary | p. 327 |
