Things I’ve been silent about, Book Review

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Author: Azar Nafisi

The storyteller knows the best stories are those we are silent about. 

When we talk about childhood, we talk about summer holidays, visit to grandparents, holiday in the hills, fun in school and neighborhood friends. The playing in the rain, eating groundnuts in the winters, and mangoes in the summers. 

We are silent about the not so good parts. The scoldings, the night monsters, getting lost outside home, difficult parents, sickness, hurt, bullying, fighting, hitting and screaming! The accidents, deaths and crisis. The hateful words and the voices that stay with you. The things which feel like a bad dream. You remember in fragments wishing it never happened. Like scars they stay! 

Azar Nafisi is a brilliant author whose understanding of human nature and the links to the past is astonishing! She once again shares a part of her soul touching your heart and ringing in nostalgia. I generally don’t like autobiographies or biographies generally full of praise of the big people. But this one was a story and some history, the way I like it. 

She opens the doors flooding with memories of the screams and the silent voices. I can understand how one needs to articulate this past. Or else like a loose thread it keeps unravelling and tears you apart. She speaks for herself - 

When I told my brother that it seemed wrong to suppress one’s feelings to such a degree, he said, “Maybe that’s how we grow up.” “What do you mean?” “We define ourselves not through what we reveal, but what we hide.”

However, what left me perplexed was the mother daughter relationship. The constant desire for her mothers love haunts her thru the book and she tries to understand why is it so. Even though it’s not a child’s job to understand the parents. Here is a famous author and intellectual critic who can beautifully explain the role of women in society and the political turmoil of her country. Ironically, she can’t fathom her own mother. 

Her mother had a difficult past loosing her own mother to suicide at a young age, a missing father and a dead first husband. With all this loss she probably lost her capacity to love. It’s difficult to love and loose but it’s even more difficult to live with unrequited love. Probably that’s why Azar connects with her romantic father more than her cold mother. 

As much as she tries you can see her turning into her own mother. There are hints in the book - her way of analysing and reading people, gathering her favorite people around, her strong association with nostalgia, love for pictures and many other things. Probably we attempt to understand our parents only to understand ourselves better. She quotes - 

‘’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.’’

And

‘’If you view reality the way it really is you will make fewer mistakes. Your problem is that you mistake your own dreams and desires for reality and then you become disillusioned.”

The review of this book would be incomplete if I am silent on Iran. A country with complex politics and surreal culture. Persian artists and authors have compared the country to a beautiful damsel corrupted by the zealousness of greedy and power hungry men. As an outsider my view quote unquote is distant and limited. But every time I read about it I am reminded of the counterbalance of masculine and feminine society referred in Amish’s Immortals of Meluha - 

The masculine way of life is defined by truth, duty and honour. At its peak, masculine civilisations are efficient, just and egalitarian. But as they decline, they become fanatical, rigid and especially harsh towards the weak. Feminine way of life is "life by probabilities". There are no absolutes, and the same laws can be interpreted differently at different times. Change is the only constant, and people live by Passion, Beauty and Freedom. But with too much freedom it can decline into decadence, corruption and debauchery.

A well balanced masculine and feminine build a good society or else it’s just a cycle of life destroying and replacing each other.

Ending with some beautiful Lines by Nafisi, which is why I am her fan - 

If the present was fragile and fickle, then the past could become a surrogate home. 

Scandals were constantly alluded to, but on the surface there was a smooth veneer, glossed over with rosy phrases. Protective fictions were more important than the truth.

Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that it exists.

His family was proud of his literary reputation but constantly exasperated by his attacks on their friends and peers.

I read a book called How to Be an Alien. I still remember the line where it said that the Continental people have sex lives, the British have the hot water bottle. 

The parent who disciplines a child is always the one who is disliked. It is the indulgent one they want to spend time with.

Our parents’ old age shocks us in the same manner that our children’s growth to maturity does, but without the joy; there is only sadness.

Why don’t we pay more attention to those we love? Why don’t we ask them more about every little detail, about their childhood, about how they feel, what they dream of, and if they are tired or don’t want to talk, why don’t we insist? Why don’t we keep every photograph, take notes, why don’t we ask others about what they know, those who were there before us, those who know things we don’t?

Father had given me the stories, my portable home.

“That is the point of novels,” I told her. “The only thing sacred about them is that they are by nature profane.

MOST SERIOUS CONFRONTATIONS in life are not political, they are existential.

I will always remember her litmus test for love. You know you love him if you love even his dirty socks, she said with a smile that was genuinely sweet. If you can’t tolerate the dirty socks then you should get out.

“Don’t ever trust the wily clerics, their livelihood depends on deceit.”

Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting.