I picked up Azar Nafisi's book, Things I've Been Silent About on a whim when I was at the bookstore contemplating looking for another copy of her previous book Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I had read, loved, and then lost when I lent it to a friend. In the end I bought this book and promptly let it sit on the shelf for a few years. I am glad that I finally read it.
I picked it up in November but did not get very far before I had to set it aside. The book seemed to intense and difficult for me at that time, filled as it was with strife and very personal memories. It required more energy than I had available.
I started reading it again last week, finishing it on New Years Day. This time around I was able to engage with the book more fully, though I still found it to be a difficult read in that I would need to walk away and clear my head after certain sections before resuming. It is a story that is profoundly private and yet vividly public, about a turbulent life which was also wrapped up in a turbulent place and time, it is a story about Nafisi's family and how their story is also her story and how the woman she became is shaped not only by the private drama of her family and her childhood struggle but also by the public drama of the culture, both social and political which surrounds them.
Nafisi tells the reader in the very beginning that this will be a very personal journey:
I do not mean this book to be a political or social commentary, or a useful life story. 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.
and later:
Perhaps the most common of all narratives is one about absent parents and the urgent need to fill in the void created by their deaths. The process does not lead to closure -- at least not for me -- but to understanding. It is an understanding that does not necessarily bring with it peace but perhaps a sense that this narrative might be the only way through which we can acknowledge our parents and in some form bring them back to life, now that we are free, at last, to shape the boundaries of our own story.
As usual in my pseudo reviews of books, I am not interested in going into the details of the story as it unfolds. It is enough to know that Nafisi was a fighter from childhood and that her parents were difficult. The children were caught between an angry controlling mother and a charming dreamer of a father, both parents completely entangled in their own personal fictions. It is no wonder that Nafisi became a student of literature, nor that she would be drawn to Nabokov, just as it is also no surprise that she would be a rebel. These skills help her to analyze her own story and the story of her parents as if she is analyzing a literary text and her storytelling skills help her balance the touchingly personal with the analytic.
She is not completely successful in maintaining this difficult balancing act, and there are times when the book becomes shrill and querelous. Although Nafisi has told us upfront that this is a personal journey, she also tells us she is interested in those fragile intersections -- the places where moments in an individual's private life and personality resonate with and reflect a larger, more universal story. To some extent she is successful in accessing those intersections, but perhaps not completely so.
At the end of the book I was left with the nagging sense of something unfinished, of a story that was yet to begin, although I do think this was intentional, that Nafisi had indeed found an understanding that had been elusive before, and understanding that allowed her to move forward.
I will leave you with her closing words:
It was only after their deaths that I came to realize that they each in their own way had given me a portable home that safeguards memory and is a constant resistance against the tyranny of man and time.
