MEMOIR: Things I've Been Silent About: Memories By Azar NafisiHeinemann, 336pp. £17.99
AZAR NAFISI'S FIRST political memoir, with the unlikely title of Reading Lolita in Tehran, catapulted her into instant literary fame. The stories of young Iranian women (and men) reading and discussing Nabokov, James and Jane Austen, as they struggled with daunting personal and political difficulties, was a welcome antidote to the prevailing images of fanatical "evil-doers" railing against all things western and modern.
In her new book, Nafisi, who left Iran in 1994 and is currently a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University in the US, once again blends the autobiographical and the political to write about the Iran of the past 80 years. This time, however, her focus is firmly on the personal. For readers raised in a confessional, tell-all literary culture, and barraged by a constant stream of reality TV, it may be difficult to imagine the personal courage in writing this book. As Nafisi’s formidable and yet tragically vulnerable mother reminds her, Iranians “don’t air their dirty linen in public”. Nafisi, who has proven her political mettle by standing against both the Shah’s and the Ayatollah’s regimes, confronts her “inner censors” in this account of the life of a dysfunctional family in revolutionary times. She uses the story of her intellectually and politically prominent family as the “backdrop” to the turbulent history of 20th-century Iran, a country trying to come to terms with modernity while remaining true to both its Islamic and imperial histories.
Her beloved father, who regaled her with stories of mythical Persian heroes, was a popular mayor of Tehran in the 1960s and was jailed on trumped-up charges for a number of years. During the same period, shortly after the Shah granted voting rights to women in the teeth of opposition from the mullahs, her mother, Nezhat, was elected as one of the first female members of the Iranian parliament, an achievement that proves scant compensation for her thwarted ambitions to become a medical doctor.
Her great-uncle, Said Nafisi, a prominent writer and public intellectual, gives Azar a parting gift of 11th-century love poems on the eve of her departure to study in England at the age of 13 and with it passes the mantle of a literary witness to changing times.
Nafisi’s vivid snapshots of life in pre- revolutionary Iran among the intellectual and political elite, with constant streams of social gatherings and endless political chatter and gossip, brings back to life a cultural milieu that largely disappeared with the 1979 Islamic revolution. Her nostalgic descriptions of the Tehran of her childhood, where French perfume stores, Armenian chocolate shops and western-style outdoor cafes existed in harmony with more traditional Persian cuisine and entertainment, give the reader a sense of the paradox that is Iran. Through it all, the personal is skilfully interwoven with the social and political.
Azar's account of her father's trial and eventual acquittal, tells us of the Shah's almost pathological mistrust of his own people, particularly anyone with vision and independence and of the crucial role the Western media, in this case the Washington Post, could play in shaping political decisions. Her recollections of a return to Tehran in June of 1963 also chronicles Khomeini's early rise to political prominence, and a crucial historic moment when "the events of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 were playing themselves out in advance on a miniature scale".
The most illuminating parts of the book, however, are the accounts of Nafisi's life in post-revolutionary Iran, a territory already made familiar in Reading Lolita in Tehran.With her husband and young children, Nafisi endures eight years of the brutal war with Iraq, ignored and then forgotten by the world. In between nightly blackouts, she learns to feel secure by a "strange sense of intimacy that urgent conditions create''; through watching movies – and drinking bootleg vodka and home-made wine with friends and neighbours. She finds refuge in her "portable home" of literary imagination, a gift from her father. And over the years, with every small act of political defiance, she comes to realise the subversive powers of a love poem, a film, a lipstick or an exposed strand of hair.
Above all, this is a book about Iranian women. Nafisi’s grandmother, who may or who may not have taken her own life; her stern headmistress, who became the first female minister in Iran in the 1970s and was executed by the Islamic regime in 1979 for “sowing the seeds of corruption on earth”; literary and mythological figures, sometimes sensuous, some times heroic; young girls facing torture and ultimately sacrificing their lives for Marxist or Islamic ideals; ordinary working women eking out a living; all take their turn to give testament to the complex roles women play in Iranian society.
Nafisi’s personal landscape is dominated by her mother, Nezhat. Aloof, hard and vindictive yet capable of great warmth and affection, she weaves an alternate reality out of a partly imagined past that ensnares her family well beyond her death. Mother and daughter engage in continuous battles (or is it just war-games?) of loyalty and alienation, scorn and admiration, played out against the backdrop of a changing social and political landscape. The book also tells universal stories of pain and betrayal. The chapter describing Azar’s abuse by a pious older relative, the shame, guilt and conviction that no adult, parents in particular, would believe her is, no doubt, painfully familiar to many in Ireland.
Her deep and unquestioning love for her father and the sense of betrayal she experiences when he leaves the family for another woman does not require the empty label of Freudian to show its universal currency. By talking about these “fragile intersections” of a private life with the political, Nafisi gives voice not only to the women of Iran but to all of us.
In the end, this is a story of redemption. For over 600 years the Nafisi family had produced physicians to kings and commoners. The book ends with the story of Azar’s daughter, Negar, studying medicine and consciously fulfilling her grandmother’s dream of “being the first woman doctor in the family”. One circle in the story of Iranian women is closed but their long journey to speak with a voice of their own continues.
Maria Baghramian is associate professor of philosophy in UCD and the editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies. She was born and grew up in Iran