THINGS I'VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT 英文原版

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
RPOLOGUE
PART ONE FAMILY FICTIONS
PPRT TWO LESSONS AND LEARNING
PPRT THREE MY FATHER'S JAIL
PART FOUR RBVILTS AND REVOLUTION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SUGGESTED READING LIST
SUGGED READING LIST
MOMENTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRNIAN HISTORY
GLOSSARY

　　Absorbing . . . a testament to the ways in which narrativetruth-telling—from the greatest works of literature to the mostintimate family stories—sustains and strengthens us.”—O: The OprahMagazine
　　“Deeply felt . . . an affecting account of a family’sstruggle.”—New York Times
　　“A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature,Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and toseduce.”—New York Times Book Review
　　 “An immensely rewarding and beautifully written act of courage,by turns amusing, tender and obsessively dogged.”—Kirkus Reviews,starred review
　　“A lyrical, often wrenching memoir.”—People
　　Azar Nafisi is a visiting professor and the director of theDialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns HopkinsUniversity. She has taught Western literature at the University ofTehran, the Free Islamic University, and the University of AllamehTabatabai in Iran. In 1981 she was expelled from the University ofTehran after refusing to wear the veil. In 1994 she won a teachingfellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her familyleft Iran for America. She has written for The New York Times, TheWashington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic andhas appeared on countless radio and television programs. She livesin Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.
　　From the Hardcover edition. In this stunning personal story ofgrowing up in Iran, Azar Nafisi shares her memories of living inthrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of acountry’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets,a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature,the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset byupheaval—these and other threads are woven together in thisbeautiful memoir as a gifted storyteller once again transforms theway we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the firstplace” (Newsday)
　　Chapter 1
　　Saifi
　　I have often asked myself how much of my mother’s account of hermeeting with her first husband was a figment of her imagination. Ifnot for the photographs, I would have doubted that he had everexisted. A friend once talked of my mother’s “admirable resistanceto the unwanted,” and since, for her, so much in life was unwanted,she invented stories about herself that she came to believe withsuch conviction that we started doubting our own certainties.
　　In her mind their courtship began with a dance. It seemed morelikely to me that his parents would have asked her father for herhand, a marriage of convenience between two prominent families, ashad been the convention in Tehran in the 1940s. But over the yearsshe never changed this story, the way she did so many of her otheraccounts. She had met him at her uncle’s wedding. She was carefulto mention that in the morning she wore a flowery crêpe-de-chinedress and in the evening one made of duchess satin, and they dancedall evening (“After my father had left,” she would say, and thenimmediately add, “because no one dared dance with me in my father’spresence”). The next day he asked for her hand in marriage.
　　Saifi! I cannot remember ever hearing his last name spoken in ourhouse. We should have called him—with the echo of proper distance—Mother’s first husband, or perhaps by his full title, Saif ol MolkBayat, but to me he was always Saifi, good-naturedly part of ourroutine. He insinuated himself into our lives with the same easewith which he stood behind her in their wedding pictures, appearingunexpectedly and slyly whirling her away from us. I have two photosfrom that day—more than we ever had of my own parents’ wedding.Saifi appears relaxed and affable, with his light hair and hazeleyes, while my mother, who is in the middle of the group, standsfrozen like a solitary centerpiece. He seems nonchalantly,confidently happy. But perhaps I am wrong and what I see on hisface is not hope but utter hopelessness. Because he too has hissecrets.
　　There was something about her story that always bothered me, evenas a child. It seemed not so much untrue as wrong. Most people havea way of radiating their potential, not just what they are but whatthey could become. I wouldn’t say my mother didn’t have thepotential to dance. It is worse than that. She wouldn’t dance, eventhough, by all accounts, she was a good dancer. Dancing would haveimplied pleasure, and she took great pride in denying herselfpleasure or any such indulgences.
　　All through my childhood and youth, and even now in this city sofar removed from the Tehran that I remember, the shadow of thatother ghostly woman who danced and smiled and loved disturbs thememories of the one I knew as my mother. I have a feeling that ifsomehow I could understand just when she stopped dancing—when shestopped wanting to dance—I would find the key to my mother’s riddleand finally make my peace with her. For I resisted my mother—if youbelieve her stories—almost from the start.
　　I have three photographs of my mother and Saifi. Two are of theirwedding, but I am interested in the third, a much smaller pictureof them out on a picnic, sitting on a rock. They are both lookinginto the camera, smiling. She is holding onto him in the casualmanner of people who are intimate and do not need to hold onto oneanother too tightly. Their bodies seem to naturally gravitatetogether. Looking at the photograph, I can see the possibility ofthis young, perhaps not yet frigid, woman letting go.
　　I find in the photograph the sensuality that we always missed inmy mother in real life. When? I would say, when did you graduatefrom high school? How many years later did you marry Saifi? Whatdid he do? When did you meet Father? Simple questions that shenever really answered. She was too immersed in her own inner worldto be bothered by such details. No matter what I asked her, shewould tell me the same stock stories, which I knew almost by heart.Later, when I left Iran, I asked one of my students to interviewher and I gave specific questions to ask, but I got back the samestories. No dates, no concrete facts, nothing that went outside mymother’s set *.
　　A few years ago, at a family gathering, I ran into a lovelyAustrian lady, the wife of a distant relative, who had been presentat my mother’s wedding to Saifi. One reason she remembered thewedding so clearly was the panic and confusion caused by themysterious disappearance of the bride’s birth certificate. (InIran, marriages and children are recorded on birth certificates.)She told me, with the twinkle of a smile, that it was laterdiscovered that the bride was a few years older than the groom.Mother’s most recent birth certificate makes no mention of herfirst marriage. According to this document, which replaced the oneshe claimed to have lost, she was born in 1920. But she maintainedthat she was really born in 1924 and that her father had added fouryears to her age because he wanted to send her to school early. Myfather told us that my mother had actually subtracted four yearsfrom her real age when she picked up the new birth certificate,which she needed so that she could apply for a driver’s license.When the facts did not suit her, my mother would go to greatlengths to refashion them altogether.
　　Some facts are on record. Her father-in-law, Saham Soltan Bayat,was a wealthy landowner who had seen one royal dynasty, the Qajars(1794–1925), replaced by another, the Pahlavis (1925–79). Hemanaged to survive, even thrive, through the change in power.Mother sometimes boasted that she was related to Saifi on hermother’s side and that they were both descendants of Qajar kings.During the fifties and sixties when I was growing up, being relatedto the Qajars, who, according to the official history books,represented the old absolutist system, was no feather in anyone’scap. My father would remind us mischievously that all Iranians werein one way or another related to the Qajars. In fact, he would say,those who could not find any connections to the Qajars were thetruly privileged. The Qajars had reigned over the country for 131years, and had numerous wives and offspring. Like the kings thatcame before them, they seemed to have picked their wives from allranks and classes, possessing whoever caught their fancy:princesses, gardeners’ daughters, poor village girls, all were partof their collection. One Qajar king, Fath Ali Shah (1771–1834), issaid to have had 160 wives. Being of a judicious mind-?set, Fatherwould usually add that of course that was only part of the story,and since history is written by the victors, especially in ourcountry, we should take all that is said about the Qajars with agrain of salt—after all, it was during their reign that Iranstarted to modernize. They had lost, so anything could be said ofthem. Even as a child I sensed that Mother brought up thisconnection to the Qajars more to slight her present life withFather than to boast about the past. Her snobbism was arbitrary,and her prejudices were restricted to the rules and laws of her ownpersonal kingdom
　　Saham Soltan, mother’s father-in-law, appears in various historybooks and political memoirs—one line here, a paragraph there—onceas deputy and vice president of Parliament, twice as minister offinance in the early 1940s, and as prime minister for a few months,from November 1944 to April 1945—during the time my mother claimsto have been married to Saifi. Despite the fact that Iran haddeclared neutrality in World War II, Reza Shah Pahlavi had made themistake of sympathizing with the Germans. The Allies, the Britishand the Soviets in particular, who had an eye on the geopoliticalgains, occupied Iran in 1941, forced Reza Shah to abdicate, exiledhim to Johannesburg, and replaced him with his young and moremalleable son, Mohammad Reza. The Second World War triggered suchupheaval in Iran that between 1943 and 1944 four prime ministersand seven ministers of finance were elected.
　　Mother knew little and seemed to care less about what kind ofprime minister her father-?in-?law had been. What was important wasthat he played the fairy godfather to her degraded present. This ishow so many public figures entered my life, not through historybooks but through my parents’ stories.
　　How glamorous mother’s life with Saifi really was is open todebate. They lived at Saham Soltan’s house, in the chink of timebetween the death of his first wife and his marriage to a muchyounger and, according to my mother, quite detestable woman. In theabsence of a lady of the house, my mother did the honors.“Everybody’s eyes were on me that first night,” she would tell us,describing in elaborate detail the dress she had worn and theimpact of her flawless French. As a child I would picture hercoming down the stairs in her red chiffon dress, her black eyesshining, her hair immaculately done.
　　“The first night Doctor Millspaugh came...you should have beenthere!” Dr. Millspaugh, the head of the American Mission in the1940s, had been assigned by both the Roosevelt and the Trumanadministrations to help Tehran set up modern financialinstitutions. Mother never saw any reason to tell us who this manwas, and for a long time, for some reason I was convinced that hewas Belgian. Later, when I reviewed my mother’s accounts of thesedinners, I was struck by the fact that Saifi was never present. Hisfather would always be there, and Dr. Millspaugh or some otherpublicly important and personally insignificant character. Butwhere was Saifi? That was the tragedy of her life: the man at herside was never the one she wanted.
　　My father, to bribe my brother and me into silence against herimpositions, and perhaps to compensate for... book 0307388433 TheBook of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from CaesarAugustus to the Internet paperback D'Epiro, Peter Anchor 20100309640 english ... carves up 2,000 years of history into easilydigestible portions. . . . The 150 essays . . . explain how a hostof inventions and developments in war, politics, science, religion,art, and literature shaped the world.
　　--The Boston Globe Online
　　Every reader will quibble over what's in and what's out, yetD'Epiro must be credited for writing a set of witty, sophisticatedshort essays on some of history's turning points.--ExpressMilwaukee.com
　　The Book of Firsts is a wonderfully engaging treasure trove ofinformation. . . . It can be read all the way through or savored insmall amounts. --blogcritics.org Peter D’Epiro received a B.A. andM.A. from Queens College and his Ph.D. in English from YaleUniversity. He has taught English at the secondary and collegelevels and worked as an editor and writer for thirty years. He haswritten (with Mary Desmond Pinkowish) Sprezzatura: 50 Ways ItalianGenius Shaped the World (Anchor Books, 2001) and What Are the SevenWonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists—FullyExplicated (Anchor Books, 1998), which has appeared in British,German, Russian, Lithuanian, and Korean editions. He has alsopublished a book and several articles on Ezra Pound’s Cantos, abook of translations of African-American poetry into Italian, andrhymed verse translations from Dante’s Inferno. He has a grown son,Dante, and lives with his wife, Nancy Walsh, in Ridgewood, NewJersey. The Book of Firsts is an entertaining,enlightening, and highly browsable tour of the major innovations ofthe past twenty centuries and how they shaped our world.
　　Peter D’Epiro makes this handy overview of human history both funand thought-provoking with his survey of the major“firsts”—inventions, discoveries, political and military upheavals,artistic and scientific breakthroughs, religious controversies, andcatastrophic events—of the last two thousand years. Who was thefirst to use gunpowder? Invent paper? Sack the city of Rome? Writea sonnet? What was the first university? The first astronomicaltelescope? The first great novel? The first Impressionist painting?The Book of Firsts explores these questions and many more, from theearliest surviving cookbook (featuring parboiled flamingo) and theorigin of chess (sixth-century India) to the first civil serviceexam (China in 606 AD) and the first tell-all memoir aboutscandalous royals (Byzantine Emperor Justinian and EmpressTheodora). In the form of 150 brief, witty, erudite, andinformation-packed essays, The Book of Firsts is ideal for anyoneinterested in an enjoyable way to acquire a deeper understanding ofhistory and the fascinating personalities who forged it. 1.Who was the first Roman emperor?
　　Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, aka Augustus
　　(reigned 27 BC-AD 14)
　　Long before they had an emperor, the ancient Romans had anempire. Beginning with Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain, allwrested from Carthage in the third century BC, the Roman republichad strung together an imperial bastion of overseas possessions. Bythe time Octavian seized sole control of the Roman world bydefeating his former ruling partner Mark Antony at the naval battleof Actium in 31 BC, the legions sent out from the Eternal City onthe Tiber had conquered territories comprising most of WesternEurope and great swaths of northern Africa, the Balkans, Turkey,Syria, and Judea. In the following year, Octavian converted thelate Cleopatra's massively wealthy Egyptian kingdom into justanother province of Rome.
　　After several generations of butchery in the successive civilwars between Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, the assassins ofJulius Caesar (led by Brutus and Cassius) and the avengers ofCaesar (led by Octavian and Mark Antony), and, finally, betweenOctavian and Antony, the Roman world was ready for peace and unityat just about any price. It received them from a cagey young man,handsome and intelligent but sickly and not overly courageous, whohad the fortune of being Julius Caesar's great-nephew, adoptiveson, and chief heir.
　　Caesar had been king of Rome in all but name, and that's why, in44 BC, he was murdered at a meeting of the senate. Having thrownout their last king more than four centuries earlier, the Romanswere fiercely proud of their republic presided over by magistrateselected for one-year terms. Not only had Caesar had himselfdeclared dictator for life, he also affected an un-Romanmonarchical demeanor with his purple robes, scorn for the senate,and godlike haughtiness. The Roman nobles feared Caesar, but theyhated him even more.
　　The lesson was not lost on young Octavian (63 BC-AD 14). Hegraciously accepted from the senate the honorific Augustus(revered, majestic, worthy of awe") on January 13, 27 BC, when, ina staged little drama, he offered to resign the extraordinarypowers he had exercised since Caesar's death, and the senate madehim a counteroffer he couldn't refuse. But there would be no regalpretensions in the public manner or official status of Augustus. Hewas content to be princeps civitatis--first citizen--and princepssenatus--leader of the senate (hence the English term Principatefor his regime). Meanwhile, he was lavished concurrently with thekey offices of the old Roman constitution--consul, proconsul,tribune--which guaranteed his control of the civil government whilefostering the illusion that he had restored the republic by actingonly as a senior colleague of its traditional politicalleaders.
　　But Augustus's main basis of power, as commander in chief ofRome's armies, derived from his being proclaimed imperator, theorigin of our word emperor. An imperator was, at first, a Romanmilitary commander--the general of an army. Then the word wasapplied to a general who had been acclaimed by his soldiers after avictory and to a proconsul who held the military command of aprovince. But the power of an imperator was always meant to belimited in time and place.
　　When the senate eventually created Augustus imperator over theentire empire and for life, prefixing the title to his name, itofficially sanctioned his control over all the military forces andforeign possessions of Rome, and this is why historians considerhim the first Roman emperor. Subsequent emperors were invested withthe same title, which required the armies of Rome to swearallegiance to them personally rather than to the state.
　　Vested with overall command of the Roman army, navy, provinces,and a large personal army guard, the Praetorians, Augustus convenedthe senate and initiated legislation that it rubber-stamped. Hemade and unmade senators, he handpicked cronies to govern the mostcritical territories of the empire in his name, and he deprived thepopular assemblies of their legislative or veto powers. The oldmajestic formula for the twin pillars of the Roman state--senatuspopulusque Romanus, the Roman senate and people--had become asham.
　　Though crafty and manipulative, Augustus, "that subtle tyrant" inEdward Gibbon's phrase, was ruthless during his reign only when hehad to be, preferring to overlook petty affronts. He ruled theRoman Empire for more than forty years, during which he ushered inthe era of peace known as the pax Romana, promoted family values(though failing signally with his own debauched daughter andgranddaughter), and patronized the best writers of Rome's GoldenAge. Virgil's Aeneid, Horace's patriotic odes, and Livy's epichistory of Rome glorified the ancient Roman military and moralvirtues that Augustus was attempting to resurrect. (No paragon ofvirtue himself, the Revered One and Father of His Country wasaddicted to women and dice.) His massive building program led himto boast that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a cityof marble. For his own dwelling, he chose a site above the ancientsanctuary where Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus, had supposedlybeen suckled by a she-wolf on the Palatine Hill. Augustus'sresidence was thus called the Palatium--the source of our wordpalace.
　　The emperor's last years were clouded by a catastrophic Romandefeat under the inept governor Varus in Germany, in which threelegions--more than twenty thousand men--were cut down in AD 9.Augustus would bang his head against a door and shout, "QuinctiliusVarus, give me back my legions!" After a favorite nephew and twograndsons died young, he reconciled himself to bequeathing hisposition--and Rome's twenty-five legions--to his stepson andadopted son Tiberius who, though a capable general andadministrator, had always struck the emperor as too proudly aloof,morose, and temperamental to continue the Augustan constitutionalcharade. But Tiberius went on to have a long reign of his own (AD14-37), and the sometimes admirable, sometimes deranged men knownas Roman emperors succeeded to the throne until 476 in the WesternEmpire and 1453 in the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, besidesinspiring Russian czars, German kaisers, and even an Italianex-socialist known as il Duce.
　　In the account he himself wrote of his remarkable career, whichwas engraved on two bronze pillars in Rome and carved in stonethroughout the empire, Augustus sometimes blusters like Shelley'sOzymandias: "In my triumphs there were led before my chariot ninekings or children of kings" and "Twenty-six times I provided forthe people . . . hunting spectacles of African wild beasts . . . ;in these exhibitions about three thousand and five hundred animalswere killed." He also can't resist one final iteration of the biglie at the center of his administration: "After that time Iexcelled all in authority, but I possessed no more power than theothers who were my colleagues in each magistracy."
　　The first, greatest, and longest-reigning of all the Romanemperors died in his mid-seventies in AD 14, in the month that hadbeen renamed August in his honor, and he was promptly deified bythe compliant senate. On his deathbed, he summoned his friends and,in the tradition of comic actors, asked for their applause if theythought he had played his part well in the farce of life.
　　Did the hypocritical role assumed by this political actor foolanyone? It all depends on your definition of fool. Romanaristocrats realized they could prosper by administering Rome andthe empire in Augustus's name if they just threw a littlesycophancy into their lives. The chief writers of the time obtainedfunds and farms from Augustus's cultural minister Maecenas, whosename has become synonymous with enlightened patronage. The soldiersgot bonuses, while the common people got cheap food andgladiatorial games. And in those far-off days of children beingseen and not heard, not one of them had ever dared shout out, "Butthe emperor has no clothes!"
　　2. What was the first poetic handbook of Greek mythology?
　　Ovid's Metamorphoses, completed c. AD 8, one of the mostinfluential books of all time
　　Just before his banishment to frigid, semibarbarous Tomis on theBlack Sea coast by Caesar Augustus in AD 8 for an offense that mayhave involved the emperor's slutty granddaughter Julia as well as asexy earlier work--a tongue-in-cheek seduction manual called TheArt of Love--the Roman poet Ovid completed his Metamorphoses, aLatin poem of nearly twelve thousand hexameter lines. This treasuretrove of Greek myths is thematically unified by the miraculoustransformation of humans into beasts, birds, trees, plants, rocks,bodies of water, and even heavenly bodies.
　　Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-AD 17/18) set out to write adifferent kind of epic from the martial sagas of Homer and Virgil.His aim was to collect the most important Greek myths into a singlenarrative with the leitmotif that all is constant flux in theuniverse. The artistic problem was to keep the momentum going overa sprawling and varied terrain, which Ovid solved by weaving mythsinto other myths and quoting speakers who quote other speakers in akaleidoscopic orgy of narration that never degenerates into ashaggy-dog story.
　　Ovid recounts about fifty myths in detail, such as that ofNarcissus, who falls in love with his reflection in a pool whileignoring the proffered love of Echo (who pines away until only hervoice remains), and the tales of the famous lovers Hero andLeander, Venus and Adonis, and Orpheus and Eurydice. The myth ofDaphne, changed into a laurel tree to save her from rape by PhoebusApollo, inspired one of Bernini's marble masterpieces, besidescountless literary retellings. In some pruriently macabre linesfrom the tale, Ovid dramatizes the frustrated erotic desire ofApollo, the original tree hugger:
　But Phoebus loves her even as a tree--placing his hand