Persian Paradise Lost that gets, um, lost: "Mornings at the Ministry" by Ehsaneh Sadr

I was pretty sure during my first read-through of "Mornings at the Ministry" by Ehsaneh Sadr that I was dealing with an unreliable narrator. Dr. Amir Musavi insists during his account of his dealings with the other, female Dr. Musavi, that he wishes her well at every turn until she becomes his supervisor, and even then that he only turns against her because of her unkind and dishonorable behavior. He explains that he never actually intends to turn over the incriminating evidence he finds against her--that she went without her chador and allowed men close to her while studying abroad--to anyone who could have used it to damage her. At the very end, we find that Amir is unable to hit his daughter in order to teach her not to be like the other Dr. Musavi, but that he does try to hurt her with words. Maybe Amir lacks the killer instinct needed to have really tried to do Ms. Musavi harm, and therefore, perhaps we can believe some of his claims to have not meant to hurt her. 

My guess was that if I looked at it more carefully, though, I would find that Amir is overlooking his own misogyny, his own complicity with Iran's patriarchal and highly sexually repressive society, and that because of this, he misses his own culpability in Ms. Musavi's undoing. On a second reading, I did find some evidence for this, but I would argue that Amir's moral position is more complicated than that of a sexist, Iranian version of Iago. 

Types of unreliable narrator

In considering whether Amir should be considered an unreliable narrator, it might be a good idea to consider some of the ways in which a narrator might be unreliable.

• They might simply be in a bad position to have reliable knowledge. They might have heard a story second-hand, or have incomplete materials to draw from.
• They might know they are lying, and the narrative is a deliberate attempt to deceive.
• They might have an inkling that they are being less than fully true, but they are deceiving themselves as much as the reader. This is probably the most common type of unreliable narrator in contemporary fiction. It's also probably the most common type of lie you'll hear in real life.

It suddenly hit me while reading through the second time that Amir isn't the narrator. This should have been pretty obvious, since it's a third-person narrative, but because it was so closely told from Amir's point of view, I nearly didn't pick up on it. The third-person narrator was revealing Amir's own self-justifications in Amir's own language, exactly as Amir's own thoughts would have run. Above all, the narrator was logging Amir's many examples of protesting too much that he had goodwill toward Ms. Musavi. For example:

• Amir expresses sincere regret that he and his wife Seema had not "gotten around" to inviting Ms. Musavi over for dinner when both Amri and Ms. Musavi were studying abroad in Australia. The justification is that Amir and Seema were too busy with their children. 
• Amir claims it wasn't just a surprise when Ms. Musavi joined his team back in Iran years later, but a pleasant surprise. 
• Amir records having done his best to get Ms. Musavi acclimated to the team, including getting her a better chair than she otherwise might have gotten.
• Amir, in an unexpected show of quasi-feminist enlightenment, scolds his wife for assuming that Ms. Musavi's high rank upon getting hired was a result of connections, a notion he derides as "sexist." 
• Amir supposedly admires Ms. Musavi at first, but does not sexualize her, in spite of the extraordinary amount of time he spends observing her eyebrows from within her chador.

Because I can never remember which is which, here's a helpful visual from the Montreal Gazette.

Everybody's nice until somebody gets promoted over you

Up until Ms. Musavi's promotion, Amir's claims (or the narrator's claims about Amir) to have largely congenial feelings toward Ms. Musavi seem plausible, perhaps even believable. But when she gets promoted over him, his feelings go off the rails. There are a few sources of his newfound hostility to her: she rebuffs his attempts to suggest she be more genial at work, she is tough on junior researchers, but mostly, he finds her sycophantic attitude toward senior officials at work repulsive--especially when contrasted to her bullying attitude toward junior members.

And here, I have to admit to having feelings a little like those that many people have when reading Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton did such a good job of imagining the motivations of Satan in his poem that many people--myself included--report feeling more sympathy toward Lucifer than with God when reading the poem. I knew that Amir's motives were suspect, and that I wasn't supposed to trust his account of Ms. Musavi, and yet I found myself rooting for him and against Ms. Musavi anyway. This is true even though I highly suspected while reading that Amir--or the third person voice reporting on behalf of Amir-was not reliable. Perhaps because the voice was in third person, I felt it was at least somewhat objective when it recorded events and attitudes. This was reinforced because of occasional admissions, such as Amir admitting to jealousy. Sure, maybe she wasn't as bad as Amir said, but still, she was bad enough to root against. 

Who is at fault?

I'm not going to do my "literary court" schtick here, but if I were to do it, this would be a good story for it. 

It is easy to sympathize with Ms. Musavi because of the pervasive patriarchal oppression she finds herself in. It's an oppression in which refusal to meet with expectations can be met with draconian punishments such as acid thrown into a woman's face. It's an oppression where the word "khanoom," a respectful title for a lady like "Miss," can also mean simply "wife of," such that the title that Ms. Musavi is given to disambiguate her from Amir, the other Dr. Musavi, makes her sound like she is his wife, rather than a PhD of her own accord. 

Even though it's easy to feel compassion for Ms. Musavi for being a highly educated woman in a society where she has to hide behind her chador all day in the presence of men, I still found myself not liking her, and agreeing with Amir when he dislikes her. Just like when reading Paradise Lost, even though I know that this isn't what I'm supposed to feel, I felt it anyway. Ms. Musavi strikes me as the type of woman I've come across in professional circles who was given bad advice about how to act like a man as an act of defiance and also as a way to insist on being taken seriously and get ahead. Most women I've known who adopt this philosophy act either like no man I've ever known, or like the kind of man nobody likes. Maybe a hard-edged, opportunistic shark of man does occasionally rise to the top, but in my experience, the one personality type that does well everywhere is the go-along-to-get-along kind. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it does seem to be a truth. Amir's advice to Ms. Musavi was essentially that: chill out, get along better with your colleagues. 

Amir has the good sense and tact to give her this advice one morning at the ministry when he and Ms. Musavi are the only ones there, so he isn't putting her on the spot. Up to that point, he had helped her out in her career and noticed her many strengths. The only drawback he has seen is her "inability or unwillingness to make friends at the ministry." He recognizes that as a woman, it is difficult for her to join in some of the banter with men that allows Amir to make friends. He isn't, perhaps, aware enough of the difficult she has as a woman, though, and as a result, he makes a mess of his advice. 

To my mind, though Ms. Musavi is unduly harsh with Amir. His advice is undoubtedly good, at least in spirit, although she was quick to point out the pitfalls in Iranian society of "making friends with all the men" in the office. Had she tried to respond more charitably, though, she might have learned something. If she came off as cold to Amir, she likely came off as cold to others, and it doesn't really even matter if that is just or not. There is a "perception is reality" predicament at work, and Amir, for all his tone-deafness, is trying to help her with it. 

How it turns out

In spite of being perceived as cold, Ms. Musavi advances to division leader over Amir. Her hard work and ability won out over her perceived aloofness. But I'm not sure Amir's feeling that she became unduly harsh can totally be written off as jealousy. I might be misreading the situation. Possibly, it's more normal in Iran for a senior boss to be very harsh, as Ms. Musavi seemingly was, and so she was just acting like any other male boss would have. But it's hard for me to think that, since so many of the workers in Amir's office seem to have been Western educated and to have picked up at least a little bit of the vibe to mellow out their conservativeness. I would guess the ministry isn't a place where her no-excuses toughness approach would succeed.  

The scene in which Amir goes to do the right thing and give Ms. Musavi the photos which were accidentally delivered to him, of her not wearing her chador and being casual in mixed company while in Australia, but then he is derailed from his good intentions by Ms. Musavi's own brusqueness, is pure Greek tragedy. Perhaps it's best to read the scene in that spirit, where Ms. Musavi's own strengths--her independence and her determination to be taken seriously--end up being her downfall. Had she not started the conversation with belittling Amir, he would have given her the photos and that would have been the end of it.

I think many Western readers--who, let's face it, if they're reading this story, are by and large liberals--will come to the conclusion that Amir was largely that ubiquitous boogeyman of online feminism, the insecure man afraid of a strong woman. That may be part of it, but to me, the story is better and far less obvious than this caricature of men that feminist activism often draws 

Rather than being a cartoonishly evil man who masks his evil through culturally accepted ideas of propriety, Amir is a good man who isn't quite good enough. He's been exposed to some modern ideas about women's roles, and to some extent, he agrees with them and is happy to comply. In a less unjust society, his casual willingness to be thoughtful when it isn't too hard for him would probably be all that is morally required of him. But in the context of an Iran that will put the feet of the non-compliant woman into a bed of cockroaches, it isn't enough. Amir is a man of average moral makeup when the situation requires moral greatness. 

Amir has good intentions but is irresolute. He has too much of a tendency to assume what has been passed on to him is good. He accepts most of the cultural conservatism as necessary, although he is willing to "be reasonable" about small sins. When confronted with his own daughter's laxity, his initial response, because he fears for his own daughter's safety, is to hit her for her own protection, in order to prevent her from ever ending up in the same compromising position as Ms. Musavi. He can't bring himself to do it, so he opts instead to call her a jendeh whore, which is kind of like calling her a whore twice. Even with that, though, he doubts himself: "Had he gone too far, saying words that might cause her to doubt her worth? All he wanted was to protect her." The story is a recognition of how difficult it can be for a person of ordinary moral judgment and strength to make sound moral decisions in a society where values are so wrong. 

Symbolism

Speaking of protecting, the story makes wonderful use of symbolism, particularly in the chador. When Amir and his wife were overseas, they tried to explain the virtues of the chador to skeptical Westerners. However, "Amir wasn't sure they were ever able to convince Westerners that the chador actually elevated and empowered women by protecting their delicate and yielding parts behind an impenetrable, iron curtain."

Amir believes that on an intelligent woman like Ms. Musavi, the chador served to both make her even more intimidating compared to unveiled men (maybe with a similar effect to mirrored sunglasses) and also to deaden sexual desire. And with this second claim, I do feel with a greater degree of certainty than with others that Amir really is protesting too much. The chador really does nothing to deaden his erotic feelings for her. He simply redirects them. Given only her eyebrows to work with, he manages to make them erotic and to fetishize them, to obsess about them until the mere suggestion of a similarity in his own daughter, another Ms. Musavi, drives him to act in a way he is himself ashamed of. 

The title of the story is "Mornings at the Ministry." There is only one morning at the ministry that is covered in any great detail in the story, and that's the morning when Amir tries to counsel Ms. Musavi. Yet the story is called "Mornings," plural, at the ministry. This title, perhaps, reveals what Amir has carefully tried to cover through the chador of a third-person narrator, which is that he sexualizes Ms. Musavi, in spite of himself, and that these feelings make him unable to keep his other feelings in balance enough to do the right thing. To the narrator naming the story, the thing that stands out most are the moments when Amir was alone with Ms. Musavi before anyone else came in to work.

It's possible that the erotic attraction is partly about more than sex. It might be that Ms. Musavi represents a greater cultural freedom that attracts Amir even while he fears it. Whatever the feeling is, Amir is eventually unable to reconcile his commitments to public rectitude with the private, undeveloped intuitions of his conscience.