THINGS I’VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT(ISBN=) 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 narrative
truth-telling—from the greatest works of literature to the most
intimate family stories—sustains and strengthens us.”—O: The Oprah
Magazine
　　“Deeply felt . . . an affecting account of a family’s
struggle.”—New York Times
　　“A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature,
Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and to
seduce.”—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 the
Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins
University. She has 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 America. She has written for The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic and
has appeared on countless radio and television programs. She lives
in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.
　　From the Hardcover edition. In this stunning personal story of
growing up in Iran, Azar Nafisi shares her memories of living in
thrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of a
country’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 by
upheaval—these and other threads are woven together in this
beautiful memoir as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the
way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first
place” (Newsday)
　　Chapter 1
　　Saifi
　　I have often asked myself how much of my mother’s account of her
meeting with her first husband was a figment of her imagination. If
not for the photographs, I would have doubted that he had ever
existed. A friend once talked of my mother’s “admirable resistance
to the unwanted,” and since, for her, so much in life was unwanted,
she invented stories about herself that she came to believe with
such conviction that we started doubting our own certainties.
　　In her mind their courtship began with a dance. It seemed more
likely to me that his parents would have asked her father for her
hand, a marriage of convenience between two prominent families, as
had been the convention in Tehran in the 1940s. But over the years
she never changed this story, the way she did so many of her other
accounts. She had met him at her uncle’s wedding. She was careful
to mention that in the morning she wore a flowery crêpe-de-chine
dress and in the evening one made of duchess satin, and they danced
all evening (“After my father had left,” she would say, and then
immediately add, “because no one dared dance with me in my father’s
presence”). The next day he asked for her hand in marriage.
　　Saifi! I cannot remember ever hearing his last name spoken in our
house. We should have called him—with the echo of proper distance—
Mother’s first husband, or perhaps by his full title, Saif ol Molk
Bayat, but to me he was always Saifi, good-naturedly part of our
routine. He insinuated himself into our lives with the same ease
with which he stood behind her in their wedding pictures, appearing
unexpectedly and slyly whirling her away from us. I have two photos
from that day—more than we ever had of my own parents’ wedding.
Saifi appears relaxed and affable, with his light hair and hazel
eyes, while my mother, who is in the middle of the group, stands
frozen like a solitary centerpiece. He seems nonchalantly,
confidently happy. But perhaps I am wrong and what I see on his
face is not hope but utter hopelessness. Because he too has his
secrets.
　　There was something about her story that always bothered me, even
as a child. It seemed not so much untrue as wrong. Most people have
a way of radiating their potential, not just what they are but what
they could become. I wouldn’t say my mother didn’t have the
potential to dance. It is worse than that. She wouldn’t dance, even
though, by all accounts, she was a good dancer. Dancing would have
implied pleasure, and she took great pride in denying herself
pleasure or any such indulgences.
　　All through my childhood and youth, and even now in this city so
far removed from the Tehran that I remember, the shadow of that
other ghostly woman who danced and smiled and loved disturbs the
memories of the one I knew as my mother. I have a feeling that if
somehow I could understand just when she stopped dancing—when she
stopped wanting to dance—I would find the key to my mother’s riddle
and finally make my peace with her. For I resisted my mother—if you
believe her stories—almost from the start.
　　I have three photographs of my mother and Saifi. Two are of their
wedding, but I am interested in the third, a much smaller picture
of them out on a picnic, sitting on a rock. They are both looking
into the camera, smiling. She is holding onto him in the casual
manner of people who are intimate and do not need to hold onto one
another too tightly. Their bodies seem to naturally gravitate
together. Looking at the photograph, I can see the possibility of
this young, perhaps not yet frigid, woman letting go.
　　I find in the photograph the sensuality that we always missed in
my mother in real life. When? I would say, when did you graduate
from high school? How many years later did you marry Saifi? What
did he do? When did you meet Father? Simple questions that she
never really answered. She was too immersed in her own inner world
to be bothered by such details. No matter what I asked her, she
would tell me the same stock stories, which I knew almost by heart.
Later, when I left Iran, I asked one of my students to interview
her and I gave specific questions to ask, but I got back the same
stories. No dates, no concrete facts, nothing that went outside my
mother’s set *.
　　A few years ago, at a family gathering, I ran into a lovely
Austrian lady, the wife of a distant relative, who had been present
at my mother’s wedding to Saifi. One reason she remembered the
wedding so clearly was the panic and confusion caused by the
mysterious disappearance of the bride’s birth certificate. (In
Iran, marriages and children are recorded on birth certificates.)
She told me, with the twinkle of a smile, that it was later
discovered that the bride was a few years older than the groom.
Mother’s most recent birth certificate makes no mention of her
first marriage. According to this document, which replaced the one
she claimed to have lost, she was born in 1920. But she maintained
that she was really born in 1924 and that her father had added four
years to her age because he wanted to send her to school early. My
father told us that my mother had actually subtracted four years
from 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 great
lengths 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). He
managed to survive, even thrive, through the change in power.
Mother sometimes boasted that she was related to Saifi on her
mother’s side and that they were both descendants of Qajar kings.
During the fifties and sixties when I was growing up, being related
to the Qajars, who, according to the official history books,
represented the old absolutist system, was no feather in anyone’s
cap. My father would remind us mischievously that all Iranians were
in one way or another related to the Qajars. In fact, he would say,
those who could not find any connections to the Qajars were the
truly privileged. The Qajars had reigned over the country for 131
years, and had numerous wives and offspring. Like the kings that
came before them, they seemed to have picked their wives from all
ranks and classes, possessing whoever caught their fancy:
princesses, gardeners’ daughters, poor village girls, all were part
of their collection. One Qajar king, Fath Ali Shah (1771–1834), is
said to have had 160 wives. Being of a judicious mind-?set, Father
would usually add that of course that was only part of the story,
and since history is written by the victors, especially in our
country, we should take all that is said about the Qajars with a
grain of salt—after all, it was during their reign that Iran
started to modernize. They had lost, so anything could be said of
them. Even as a child I sensed that Mother brought up this
connection to the Qajars more to slight her present life with
Father than to boast about the past. Her snobbism was arbitrary,
and her prejudices were restricted to the rules and laws of her own
personal kingdom
　　Saham Soltan, mother’s father-in-law, appears in various history
books and political memoirs—one line here, a paragraph there—once
as deputy and vice president of Parliament, twice as minister of
finance in the early 1940s, and as prime minister for a few months,
from November 1944 to April 1945—during the time my mother claims
to have been married to Saifi. Despite the fact that Iran had
declared neutrality in World War II, Reza Shah Pahlavi had made the
mistake of sympathizing with the Germans. The Allies, the British
and the Soviets in particular, who had an eye on the geopolitical
gains, occupied Iran in 1941, forced Reza Shah to abdicate, exiled
him to Johannesburg, and replaced him with his young and more
malleable son, Mohammad Reza. The Second World War triggered such
upheaval in Iran that between 1943 and 1944 four prime ministers
and seven ministers of finance were elected.
　　Mother knew little and seemed to care less about what kind of
prime minister her father-?in-?law had been. What was important was
that he played the fairy godfather to her degraded present. This is
how so many public figures entered my life, not through history
books but through my parents’ stories.
　　How glamorous mother’s life with Saifi really was is open to
debate. They lived at Saham Soltan’s house, in the chink of time
between the death of his first wife and his marriage to a much
younger and, according to my mother, quite detestable woman. In the
absence 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 the
impact of her flawless French. As a child I would picture her
coming down the stairs in her red chiffon dress, her black eyes
shining, her hair immaculately done.
　　“The first night Doctor Millspaugh came…you should have been
there!” Dr. Millspaugh, the head of the American Mission in the
1940s, had been assigned by both the Roosevelt and the Truman
administrations to help Tehran set up modern financial
institutions. Mother never saw any reason to tell us who this man
was, and for a long time, for some reason I was convinced that he
was Belgian. Later, when I reviewed my mother’s accounts of these
dinners, I was struck by the fact that Saifi was never present. His
father would always be there, and Dr. Millspaugh or some other
publicly important and personally insignificant character. But
where was Saifi? That was the tragedy of her life: the man at her
side was never the one she wanted.
　　My father, to bribe my brother and me into silence against her
impositions, and perhaps to compensate for… book 0307388433 The
Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar
Augustus to the Internet paperback D’Epiro, Peter Anchor 20100309
640 english … carves up 2,000 years of history into easily
digestible portions. . . . The 150 essays . . . explain how a host
of 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, yet
D’Epiro must be credited for writing a set of witty, sophisticated
short essays on some of history’s turning points.
–ExpressMilwaukee.com
　　The Book of Firsts is a wonderfully engaging treasure trove of
information. . . . It can be read all the way through or savored in
small amounts. –blogcritics.org Peter D’Epiro received a B.A. and
M.A. from Queens College and his Ph.D. in English from Yale
University. He has taught English at the secondary and college
levels and worked as an editor and writer for thirty years. He has
written (with Mary Desmond Pinkowish) Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian
Genius Shaped the World (Anchor Books, 2001) and What Are the Seven
Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists—Fully
Explicated (Anchor Books, 1998), which has appeared in British,
German, Russian, Lithuanian, and Korean editions. He has also
published a book and several articles on Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a
book of translations of African-American poetry into Italian, and
rhymed verse translations from Dante’s Inferno. He has a grown son,
Dante, and lives with his wife, Nancy Walsh, in Ridgewood, New
Jersey.   The Book of Firsts is an entertaining,
enlightening, and highly browsable tour of the major innovations of
the past twenty centuries and how they shaped our world.
　　Peter D’Epiro makes this handy overview of human history both fun
and thought-provoking with his survey of the major
“firsts”—inventions, discoveries, political and military upheavals,
artistic and scientific breakthroughs, religious controversies, and
catastrophic events—of the last two thousand years. Who was the
first to use gunpowder? Invent paper? Sack the city of Rome? Write
a sonnet? What was the first university? The first astronomical
telescope? The first great novel? The first Impressionist painting?
The Book of Firsts explores these questions and many more, from the
earliest surviving cookbook (featuring parboiled flamingo) and the
origin of chess (sixth-century India) to the first civil service
exam (China in 606 AD) and the first tell-all memoir about
scandalous royals (Byzantine Emperor Justinian and Empress
Theodora). In the form of 150 brief, witty, erudite, and
information-packed essays, The Book of Firsts is ideal for anyone
interested in an enjoyable way to acquire a deeper understanding of
history 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 an
empire. Beginning with Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain, all
wrested from Carthage in the third century BC, the Roman republic
had strung together an imperial bastion of overseas possessions. By
the time Octavian seized sole control of the Roman world by
defeating his former ruling partner Mark Antony at the naval battle
of Actium in 31 BC, the legions sent out from the Eternal City on
the Tiber had conquered territories comprising most of Western
Europe and great swaths of northern Africa, the Balkans, Turkey,
Syria, and Judea. In the following year, Octavian converted the
late Cleopatra’s massively wealthy Egyptian kingdom into just
another province of Rome.
　　After several generations of butchery in the successive civil
wars between Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, the assassins of
Julius Caesar (led by Brutus and Cassius) and the avengers of
Caesar (led by Octavian and Mark Antony), and, finally, between
Octavian and Antony, the Roman world was ready for peace and unity
at just about any price. It received them from a cagey young man,
handsome and intelligent but sickly and not overly courageous, who
had the fortune of being Julius Caesar’s great-nephew, adoptive
son, and chief heir.
　　Caesar had been king of Rome in all but name, and that’s why, in
44 BC, he was murdered at a meeting of the senate. Having thrown
out their last king more than four centuries earlier, the Romans
were fiercely proud of their republic presided over by magistrates
elected for one-year terms. Not only had Caesar had himself
declared dictator for life, he also affected an un-Roman
monarchical demeanor with his purple robes, scorn for the senate,
and godlike haughtiness. The Roman nobles feared Caesar, but they
hated him even more.
　　The lesson was not lost on young Octavian (63 BC-AD 14). He
graciously accepted from the senate the honorific Augustus
(revered, majestic, worthy of awe”) on January 13, 27 BC, when, in
a staged little drama, he offered to resign the extraordinary
powers he had exercised since Caesar’s death, and the senate made
him a counteroffer he couldn’t refuse. But there would be no regal
pretensions in the public manner or official status of Augustus. He
was content to be princeps civitatis–first citizen–and princeps
senatus–leader of the senate (hence the English term Principate
for his regime). Meanwhile, he was lavished concurrently with the
key offices of the old Roman constitution–consul, proconsul,
tribune–which guaranteed his control of the civil government while
fostering the illusion that he had restored the republic by acting
only as a senior colleague of its traditional political
leaders.
　　But Augustus’s main basis of power, as commander in chief of
Rome’s armies, derived from his being proclaimed imperator, the
origin of our word emperor. An imperator was, at first, a Roman
military commander–the general of an army. Then the word was
applied to a general who had been acclaimed by his soldiers after a
victory and to a proconsul who held the military command of a
province. But the power of an imperator was always meant to be
limited in time and place.
　　When the senate eventually created Augustus imperator over the
entire empire and for life, prefixing the title to his name, it
officially sanctioned his control over all the military forces and
foreign possessions of Rome, and this is why historians consider
him the first Roman emperor. Subsequent emperors were invested with
the same title, which required the armies of Rome to swear
allegiance 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 convened
the senate and initiated legislation that it rubber-stamped. He
made and unmade senators, he handpicked cronies to govern the most
critical territories of the empire in his name, and he deprived the
popular assemblies of their legislative or veto powers. The old
majestic formula for the twin pillars of the Roman state–senatus
populusque Romanus, the Roman senate and people–had become a
sham.
　　Though crafty and manipulative, Augustus, “that subtle tyrant” in
Edward Gibbon’s phrase, was ruthless during his reign only when he
had to be, preferring to overlook petty affronts. He ruled the
Roman Empire for more than forty years, during which he ushered in
the era of peace known as the pax Romana, promoted family values
(though failing signally with his own debauched daughter and
granddaughter), and patronized the best writers of Rome’s Golden
Age. Virgil’s Aeneid, Horace’s patriotic odes, and Livy’s epic
history of Rome glorified the ancient Roman military and moral
virtues that Augustus was attempting to resurrect. (No paragon of
virtue himself, the Revered One and Father of His Country was
addicted to women and dice.) His massive building program led him
to boast that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city
of marble. For his own dwelling, he chose a site above the ancient
sanctuary where Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus, had supposedly
been suckled by a she-wolf on the Palatine Hill. Augustus’s
residence was thus called the Palatium–the source of our word
palace.
　　The emperor’s last years were clouded by a catastrophic Roman
defeat under the inept governor Varus in Germany, in which three
legions–more than twenty thousand men–were cut down in AD 9.
Augustus would bang his head against a door and shout, “Quinctilius
Varus, give me back my legions!” After a favorite nephew and two
grandsons died young, he reconciled himself to bequeathing his
position–and Rome’s twenty-five legions–to his stepson and
adopted son Tiberius who, though a capable general and
administrator, had always struck the emperor as too proudly aloof,
morose, and temperamental to continue the Augustan constitutional
charade. But Tiberius went on to have a long reign of his own (AD
14-37), and the sometimes admirable, sometimes deranged men known
as Roman emperors succeeded to the throne until 476 in the Western
Empire and 1453 in the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, besides
inspiring Russian czars, German kaisers, and even an Italian
ex-socialist known as il Duce.
　　In the account he himself wrote of his remarkable career, which
was engraved on two bronze pillars in Rome and carved in stone
throughout the empire, Augustus sometimes blusters like Shelley’s
Ozymandias: “In my triumphs there were led before my chariot nine
kings or children of kings” and “Twenty-six times I provided for
the people . . . hunting spectacles of African wild beasts . . . ;
in these exhibitions about three thousand and five hundred animals
were killed.” He also can’t resist one final iteration of the big
lie at the center of his administration: “After that time I
excelled all in authority, but I possessed no more power than the
others who were my colleagues in each magistracy.”
　　The first, greatest, and longest-reigning of all the Roman
emperors died in his mid-seventies in AD 14, in the month that had
been renamed August in his honor, and he was promptly deified by
the compliant senate. On his deathbed, he summoned his friends and,
in the tradition of comic actors, asked for their applause if they
thought he had played his part well in the farce of life.
　　Did the hypocritical role assumed by this political actor fool
anyone? It all depends on your definition of fool. Roman
aristocrats realized they could prosper by administering Rome and
the empire in Augustus’s name if they just threw a little
sycophancy into their lives. The chief writers of the time obtained
funds and farms from Augustus’s cultural minister Maecenas, whose
name has become synonymous with enlightened patronage. The soldiers
got bonuses, while the common people got cheap food and
gladiatorial games. And in those far-off days of children being
seen and not heard, not one of them had ever dared shout out, “But
the emperor has no clothes!”
　　2. What was the first poetic handbook of Greek mythology?
　　Ovid’s Metamorphoses, completed c. AD 8, one of the most
influential books of all time
　　Just before his banishment to frigid, semibarbarous Tomis on the
Black Sea coast by Caesar Augustus in AD 8 for an offense that may
have involved the emperor’s slutty granddaughter Julia as well as a
sexy earlier work–a tongue-in-cheek seduction manual called The
Art of Love–the Roman poet Ovid completed his Metamorphoses, a
Latin poem of nearly twelve thousand hexameter lines. This treasure
trove of Greek myths is thematically unified by the miraculous
transformation 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 a
different kind of epic from the martial sagas of Homer and Virgil.
His aim was to collect the most important Greek myths into a single
narrative with the leitmotif that all is constant flux in the
universe. The artistic problem was to keep the momentum going over
a sprawling and varied terrain, which Ovid solved by weaving myths
into other myths and quoting speakers who quote other speakers in a
kaleidoscopic orgy of narration that never degenerates into a
shaggy-dog story.
　　Ovid recounts about fifty myths in detail, such as that of
Narcissus, who falls in love with his reflection in a pool while
ignoring the proffered love of Echo (who pines away until only her
voice remains), and the tales of the famous lovers Hero and
Leander, Venus and Adonis, and Orpheus and Eurydice. The myth of
Daphne, changed into a laurel tree to save her from rape by Phoebus
Apollo, inspired one of Bernini’s marble masterpieces, besides
countless literary retellings. In some pruriently macabre lines
from the tale, Ovid dramatizes the frustrated erotic desire of
Apollo, the original tree hugger:
　But Phoebus loves her even as a tree–placing his hand