“Maybe I should have written this one first and 'Reading Lolita’ second,” Azar Nafisi recalls thinking. “Because so many of the keys to that one are in this one.”
On its face, this does not seem like a good idea.
Yet it’s certainly true that Nafisi’s second memoir, out this week from Random House, illuminates her first.
“Reading Lolita” told the story of the subversive two-year class that Nafisi conducted for a group of Iranian women, beginning in 1995, after she resigned a university position made untenable by Iran’s theocratic regime. For two years, before she immigrated to the United States, Nafisi and her students created a sphere of private freedom, peopling it with the fictions of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen and Henry James.
So how did she come up with her unusual survival strategy, combating the tyranny of the Islamic Republic through the secret sharing of stories she loved?
One key, as “Things I’ve Been Silent About” makes clear, is that she had been using shared stories to fight tyranny - of a more private kind - since she was 4 years old.
Azar Nafisi with her mother, Nezhat. The universe of literature and imagination became the sole part of Nafisi’s life into which her mother could not intrude. She writes about the relationship in her new memoir, “Things I’ve Been Silent About.”
Nafisi sits for an interview in her comfortably cluttered office at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, her academic home for the past decade. Two hours into an animated conversation, it’s hard to imagine her being silent about anything. Her thoughts pour forth in a nonstop rush of talk, though she’ll self-consciously urge you to interrupt if she goes on too long. An Iranian friend once described her as a shy person so passionate about literature that she “teaches with every cell in her body.” Introducing her at a panel discussion last year, a Johns Hopkins colleague called her “grandly charismatic through the surprising mixture of resolve and self-doubt, intimacy and reserve.”
Shyness. Self-doubt. Reserve. It’s true that you can see these things in Nafisi today.
Still, it’s not easy to connect this handsome woman in her late 50s with the tense girl in the photograph on Page 34 of “Things I’ve Been Silent About.”
The caption reads, “Mother and me, at a relative’s wedding.” The girl, who looks maybe 5, wears a half smile and gazes sideways at something beyond the picture frame. The mother, standing behind her, stares fixedly at the camera and grips her daughter’s arms.
“Her eyes have a glow to them that looks almost surreal,” Nafisi says. “Physically she is weighing down on me. And I’m keeping - my space.”
It wasn’t easy.
Nafisi’s mother, Nezhat, was a deeply unhappy woman from a well-connected Iranian family. Her own mother died when she was very young, and she was treated by her stepmother as a poor relation. Most crushingly, Nezhat’s adored first husband turned out to have a fatal disease - something he concealed from her until their wedding night.
Nafisi’s father, Ahmad, was drawn to the young widow because she was beautiful, intelligent and sad, Nafisi says, “and sadness is a great source of attraction.” But he was also “an ambitious young man” who believed that the connections she brought could help him rise.
The price was steep. His wife would spend their marriage denying herself pleasure and irrationally blaming those around her for her losses.
Much later, after Nafisi left her finally divorced parents and Iran, she found herself obsessively staring at family pictures through a magnifying glass, “trying to figure something out” about what went wrong. By then she could empathize with her mother, whose “dim capacity for wings” - a phrase borrowed from an Emily Dickinson poem that Nafisi loves - never developed enough for flight.
As a child, however, Nafisi’s focus was on resistance.
By the time she was 4, she and her mother already were locked in conflict. Anything could be a battleground, but an especially bitter one involved the arrangement of furniture in Nafisi’s bedroom.
She wanted her bed by the window.
Her mother refused.
Her father came up with a plan to console her.
“Why don’t we make up a story about a little girl and her bed?” he suggested. “Have you ever heard of a talking bed?” From then on, “my father and I developed a secret language. We made up stories to communicate our feelings and demands, and built our own world.”
Their shared world expanded to embrace stories from the “Shahnameh” - the mythic “Book of Kings,” by the 11th-century poet Ferdowsi, that is Iran’s national epic. The universe of literature and imagination became the sole part of Nafisi’s life into which her mother could not intrude.
Stories, she had learned, could help her deal with “a reality that I can’t control.”
“Things I’ve Been Silent About” braids together numerous strands of Nafisi’s childhood. One was her continued love for the “Shahnameh” and in particular the story of Rudabeh, who defied her family’s wishes and chose for herself the man she would love. Another was her continued closeness to her father, who rose in the civil service under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until he became mayor of Tehran.
But a constant strand was the mother-daughter war.
It was “unnatural” for a girl to spend so much time reading, her mother told her. Once, when Nafisi attempted a good-night kiss, “my mother turned away, saying, 'Go and kiss your imaginary role model, Rudabeh.’ ” To see friends, she had to beg or become hysterical. Her mother read her letters and diaries, then, unshamed by her intrusions, berated Nafisi for what they contained.
At one point, Nafisi’s father initiated a discreet family psychiatric consultation. It didn’t help.
The one extended truce with her mother, Nafisi recalls, came when they traveled together to England, where she was to attend school. During this trip, her mother told her, among other things, how badly she had wanted to be a doctor (her father had refused her the chance), planting a seed of empathy that Nafisi would nourish decades later.
Two other strands from Nafisi’s childhood stand out, because they brought that childhood to a crashing end:
Her father went to jail.
And she married a man she did not love.
The politics behind her father’s arrest in 1963 remain murky. Few gave credence to the charges of bribery, but even years later, after his exoneration, it was hard to say what lay behind his fall. Was it simply the machinations of political rivals? Or was it his insufficient zeal in countering protests by the followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who, 16 years later, would succeed in overthrowing the shah’s regime?
Whatever the reason, his jailing placed enormous stress on the family. After his release, with his public ambitions at an end, Nafisi’s father finally gave up on his marriage.
In hindsight, there were positive consequences, too. Those charges of sympathy with the clerical faction saved Nafisi’s father’s life after the shah fell. Her mother, meanwhile, served in Parliament for much of the time her husband was in jail. And though a few years in the limelight scarcely made up for a lost medical career, they were, Nafisi believes, “among the best years of her life.”
But there were no positive consequences for Nafisi.
At 16, when her father was imprisoned and her mother was impossible as ever, she impulsively accepted a marriage proposal. Her suitor was a decisive man who had strong ideas about a wife’s role, while she was filled with doubts. “I convinced myself,” she writes, “that for these very reasons he was good for me.”
She regrets that so much that she sees a painful childhood molestation by a distant relative as trivial by comparison.
“I finally had to come face to face with what I am most ashamed of in myself,” she says. “My marriage, I felt really dirty. And it wasn’t because of him. It was because I made a choice that went against my own principles.” The fact that her mother had urged the match only made things worse.
At least she avoided her parents’ mistake. She ended the marriage early, with no children.
She had followed her husband to the United States, enrolling at the University of Oklahoma while he finished a degree there, and after the divorce she continued her studies. She became “a full-fledged - what do you call it? - hippie,” wearing long, funky dresses and immersing herself in music: the Doors, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell.
Eventually, through anti-shah activism in this country, she met an Iranian student leader named Bijan Naderi. They married and, shortly after the shah’s fall, returned home. Like so many who had opposed Pahlavi’s brutal regime, they had not foreseen the theocratic extremism that would replace it.
Eighteen difficult years later, they and their two children left Iran for good. Nafisi carried with her the germ of what would become “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” She would structure the book around four authors whose work sheds light on tyranny in its many forms.
Nabokov’s “Lolita” features a narrator whose obsession blinds him to the humanity of his victim, just as the obsessions of totalitarians obscure the humanity of theirs. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” warns of the consequences when dreams, whether personal or political, are kept alive by denying reality. James’ work centers on ambiguity, which totalitarians cannot tolerate.
Then there’s Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” often seen as a book about getting married and living happily ever after.
“Austen is never about that,” Nafisi says heatedly. “People who say it’s about agreeing to marriage, they’re insane!”
No. It’s about a woman who resists social pressure - much of it from a tyrannical mother - and insists on making her own choice.
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