Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [138]
There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told. Of the injured student’s background very little was known, and no one seemed to care. It dawned on me only much later that despite the precision with which I remembered all the stories related to him and his comrades, I could not remember his name. He had turned himself into a revolutionary, a martyr and a war veteran, but not an individual. Did he ever fall in love? Did he ever desire to hold one of those girls whose throats, under their black scarves, blazed so white?
Like many others at that university, I had climbed the stairs and walked the halls with resentment. Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into “us” and “them.” It did not occur to me or to my students and colleagues as we shared stories and anecdotes that day, like conspirators delighting in the setback of a far more powerful adversary, that he who seemingly wielded so much power was in fact the one with the strongest urge to self-destruction. Had he, by burning himself, usurped our right to revenge?
He who in life had been nothing to me in death had become an obsession. All we ever found out about his personal life was that he came from a poor family and that his only close relative was a very old mother, whom he supported. He had gone to the war as a volunteer. He had been shell-shocked and sent home early. Apparently, he never fully recovered. After “peace” with Iraq, he returned to the university. But the peace had created a sense of disillusionment. The excitement of the war was gone, and with that, many young revolutionaries had lost their power.
THIS WAR HAS BEEN A BLESSING FOR US! For us, it was a war that we never felt quite a part of. Yet for people like him, in a strange way the war must have been a blessing. It gave them a sense of community and purpose and power. He lost all that as soon as he returned from the front. His privilege and power meant nothing to him now, and his fellow Islamic students had already moved on. What must have gone through his mind when he saw that his old comrades were more eager to watch the Oscar celebrations, via forbidden satellite dishes, than clips from the war? He could deal with us, but what could he do with a Mr. Forsati, who had become as unfamiliar and as baffling to him as characters in a novel by Henry James?
I kept thinking of him coming early to the university with two full cans of gasoline—probably not searched, because he was a privileged war veteran. I see him going into an empty classroom and pouring gasoline over his head. Next, he would have struck a match and slowly set fire to himself—did he light himself just once, or in several places? Then he ran down the hall and burst into his classroom, shouting, “They betrayed us! They lied to us! Look at what they did to us!” And that was the last of his rhetoric.
One did not have to agree with him or approve of him to understand his position. He had returned from a war where he belonged to a university he had never been a part of. No one wanted to hear his stories. Only his moment of death could spark interest. It was ironic that this man, whose life had been so determined by doctrinal certainty, would now gain so much complexity in death.
He died that night. Did his comrades mourn him in private? Nothing was said about him—no commemoration, no flowers or speeches, in a country where funerals and mourning were more magnificently produced than any other national art form. I, who prided myself on speaking out against the veil or other forms of harassment, also