JHU SAIS Scholar Azar Nafisi Publishes New Memoir on Life in Iran
Washington, D.C.-12/30/2008-Best-selling author Azar Nafisi, executive director of Cultural Conversations and a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), has written a new memoir, Things I've Been Silent About. Random House released the book today.
In her 2003 New York Times best-seller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Nafisi opened up her world to readers around the globe, offering a vibrant portrait of women's lives in Iran. Now she tells her own stunning story in Things I've Been Silent About, a moving narrative of her family's life that crosses all cultural boundaries.
In this new memoir, Nafisi delivers a compelling story of a family's life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, and the mesmerizing fictions she created about herself and her past. But her daughter, Azar, soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed. Nafisi's father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting his children with the classic tales like the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings. When her father started seeing other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother. Nafisi's complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal-as well as political, cultural and social-injustices.
Things I've Been Silent About is also a powerful historical portrait of a family that spans many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which turned Nafisi's beloved Iran into a religious dictatorship. Writing of her mother's historic term in parliament, even while her father, once mayor of Tehran, was in jail, Nafisi explores the remarkable "coffee hours" her mother presided over, where at first women came together to gossip, to tell fortunes, and to give silent acknowledgement of things never spoken about, and which then evolved into gatherings where men and women would meet to openly discuss the unfolding revolution. Lastly, this memoir is a deeply personal reflection on women's choices, and on how Nafisi found the inspiration in a different kind of life.
Nafisi also is the author of Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels and Bibi and the Green Voice. Prior to joining SAIS, Nafisi taught Western literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and the University of Allameh Tabatabai in Iran. In 1981 she was expelled from the University of Tehran after refusing to wear the veil. In 1994 she won a teaching fellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her family left Iran for the United States.
SAIS is one of the country's leading graduate schools devoted to the study of international relations. Located along Embassy Row in Washington's Dupont Circle area, the school enrolls more than 550 full-time graduate students and mid-career professionals and has trained more than 15,000 alumni in all aspects of international affairs.
On Monday, 01/26 at 7 p.m., Nafisi will discuss Things I've Been Silent About during a SAIS forum about politics and the challenges of literature. She will be joined by Scott Simon, host of NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday" and author of several books, including the best-selling Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan and Windy City: A Novel of Politics. The event will take place in the school's Kenney Auditorium at 1740 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., in Washington, D.C.