“Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe,” wrote the Iranian critic Azar Nafisi in her bestselling account of teaching western literature under the ayatollahs. Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) described how her English-language library – in particular, the novels of Jane Austen, F Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Nabokov – helped her survive an enforced intimacy with a regime that sought to control every aspect of her behaviour. It also established Nafisi, who now lives in Washington, DC, as one of the literary stars of the Iranian diaspora.
Things I’ve Been Silent About, Nafisi’s memoir of her life up to the death of her parents, transforms the simile into an extended (and unconvincing) parallel. The ravages of the regime are compared explicitly to the “totalitarian mindset” of Nafisi’s mother Nezhat, a formidable narcissist who dominated her charming, evasive husband and two children. “Long before I understood what it meant for a victim to become complicit in crimes of the state,” Nafisi writes, “I had discovered, in far more personal terms, the shame of complicity.”
Nafisi’s family may have been wealthy, cultured and influential – in 1961 her father became mayor of Tehran; her mother was one of the first female members of the Iranian parliament – but it was also unhappy. The book’s list of mundane hurts – Nezhat throwing tantrums, hiding her children’s toys and berating her husband – is raw with undigested pain and resentment. In minute detail, it catalogues the endlessly inventive ways in which family members inflict damage on each other – when a relative refers to Azar as “a cultured young woman”, for example, Nezhat responds only with “an almost imperceptible grunt”.
Faced with this domestic turmoil, Nafisi and her father escape into their shared passion for Persian literature. “We made up stories to communicate our feelings and demands, and built our own world,” she writes. As a child, she treasures this body of ancient literature because it both tells the story of Iran and offers her inspiration for her own life (she tells a literary uncle that her role model is Rudabeh, a heroine of the Shahnameh epic, sending her mother into a slighted sulk). The young Nafisi and her father also become prolific and emotional diarists, constantly at work on the tense, unhappy accounts that underpin this book.
There are occasional light moments: glimpses of a freewheeling, pre-revolutionary Tehran in which the family would shop for French pastries, visit the cinema, or, most incongruously of all, “pick up sausages and sometimes ham or mortadella for our special Friday morning breakfast”. When the teenage Nafisi is sent to Lancaster to study English, her mother accompanies her, encourages her and painstakingly writes out lists of vocabulary for her to learn. “I wanted to become the woman she claimed she had wanted to be,” remembers Nafisi.
But soon enough, politics intrudes on their domestic dystopia. In 1963, Nafisi’s father is imprisoned on a trumped-up corruption charge – though his wife dominates the family imagination to the extent that even this becomes a marital bargaining chip. “From the day of my arrest,” her father reflects in the prison diary he later gives to Nafisi, “I was happy with the thought that Nezhat would be chastised and that she would finally dispense with the illusion that the world should be at her service.”
As time goes on, the Nafisi family dramas – her father’s eventual release and subsequent infidelities, her parents’ eventual separation, her own marriage, divorce and remarriage – are played out in an increasingly grim setting. The once-longed-for revolution comes at a bloody price: the imprisonment and execution of many family members and friends from the pre-revolutionary elite.
These are the real tragedies of Things I’ve Been Silent About: the deaths of the courageous newspaper editor who championed Nafisi’s father; her cousins Majid and Said, revolutionaries who fell foul of the system; the female principal of her high school, Dr Parsay, who is put to death in a sack because her executioners refuse to touch a woman. On these counts, at least, Nafisi proves a compelling, and moving, witness.
