My life in books

Azar Nafisi, scholar, professor of literature and writer, was born in Iran, educated in England, Switzerland and the U.S., taught literature in post-revolutionary Iran and now lives in the U.S., where she is a fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Her first memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, published a few years after she left Iran in 1997 to live in the U.S., focused on her experiences teaching Western literature, both in Iranian universities, and later to a small group of women who met secretly in her apartment. Azar Nafisi's latest memoir, Things I've Been Silent About, is a far more intimate and personal document which has at its centre the complex and often difficult relationships within her family, particularly those involving her mother.

The idea of story as influence and inheritance is a key part of Nafisi's memoir. Her mother told stories about her life that reshaped actual occurrence into fictions that fed a desire for high drama and romance. Her father was a diarist who published his own memoirs - and introduced his young daughter to the power of story in books.

All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.

And yet, because of the cultural and political prominence of Nafisi's extended family, and the involvement of her parents and their friends in politics, this deeply personal memoir also provides insight into a century of political and cultural change in Iran.

I want to tell the story of a family that unfolds against the backdrop of a turbulent era in Iran’s political and cultural history. There are many stories about these times, between the birth of my grandmother at the start of the twentieth century and my daughter’s birth at its end, marked by the two revolutions that shaped Iran, causing so many divisions and contradictions that transient turbulence became the only thing of permanence.

I found the memoir fascinating both for its portrayal of a family struggling with deep divisions between its individual members, and for its insights into Iranian culture and history.

In her first book of memoirs, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi spends much time discussing the works of Western authors such as Nabokov and Jane Austen. For this she has sometimes been criticised as being not a true Iranian, and hence someone who should not speak to the political and social changes in that country. (A perspective most firmly advanced by Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi, who said "Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.")

In Things I've Been Silent About, Nafisi's narrative is full of references to the Iranian authors, poets, works of literature and tales of heroes past that her father introduced her to, that influenced her in her youth, and that informed her understanding of the events of her own life, from Rumi and Ferdowsi to her "favourite female poet Forough Farrokhzad," devoting most of one chapter to the impact of the Shahnameh, and particularly the story of the key female character Rubadeh, on her in childhood. She talks about private classes and discussion groups that she and other academics took part in after the closing of the universities, groups that focused on studying Iranian literature and were often frequented by writers and poets.

Speaking of her involvement with the study of classical Persian and modern Iranian literature during her time living in Iran under the revolutionary Islamic regime, she says:

For almost two decades, from the early eighties until we left, in the summer of 1997, I had studied and written about Persian literature. Since childhood I had seen how Father moved in and out of fiction, turning to stories from the Shahnameh and classical literature to teach us about Iran, and now this had become almost a second nature to me. I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to reveal ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events.

Whether this focus on her native literature is a response to criticism, or simply one of many things about which she had been silent, it enriches the memoir and provides valuable cultural context.

All on all, Things I've Been Silent About is a brave and fascinating account of one woman's life seen against the complex web of family and the powerful shifts of history.