Reading "Lolita" In Tehran

“When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendors of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish rabbi, teacher and theologian

Why are people afraid to think? Why do they want to suffocate their own free thinking, and that of others, with rigid ideologies? That's what I wondered as I read this memoir by a professor of English literature who experienced the frenzied descent of her country into pseudo-religious madness.

It's not a faraway happening. These days, ideology is everywhere, threatening to overwhelm our individual ability to connect to one another through a dynamic relationship to an evolving truth, which is too often replaced by a drive to protect our fixed ideas of what truth is at all costs. In the great literature of the past, may we still find a space to think more freely, to feel more flexibly and humanly, to develop the will to reject tyranny's hold over our minds, if not our bodies.

Azar Nafisi has put together an unusual narrative weaving personal memoir, literary criticism and social history into a strong commentary about living during the Iranian Revolution. Although a familiarity with the novels she examines would help readers connect with the book more, I came away wanting to add them all to my reading list. She has a flair for uncovering the similarities and themes in each novel that speak to the real problems and issue these women are facing in their everyday lives—lives being torn apart and destroyed by Islamic fundamentalist uprisings.

I was often amazed at her creative use of the novels to teach or explore life issues, and appreciated her ability to explain her inner thoughts as she discussed the book with the women. I would love to be able to read literature as close as she does and this book is like a case study of the way that kind of fluency might develop.

Totalitarian regimes tend to believe everything about reading is bad. An uninformed, incurious population is much easier to control. Theocracies, too, tend to be interested in suppression of alternate ideas. So a totalitarian theocracy, like the modern-day Republic of Iran, is doubly suspicious of books. So when native Iranian but American-educated former university professor Azar Nafisi starts teaching Western literary classics to a small group of past students in her home, she's doing more than assembling a book club with promising young minds. She can't even get enough black market copies of Lolita for everyone to have one...some of the girls use photocopies to read from.

Nafisi uses four major works of the literary canon as lenses through which to tell her story: the titular Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice. She touches relatively briefly on her childhood in Iran, her emigration to the United States to study, and her brief, unhappy first marriage followed by her second, much better one. The book spends much more time discussing life when she returns to Iran with her husband and begins teaching as the Islamic Revolution unfolds, and the restrictions on female and literary life under the ayatollahs.

Nafisi has a unique perspective on the Islamic Revolution as both insider (she was born and spent a large portion of her childhood in Iran, and married a fellow Persian and moved back) and outsider (she spent her early adulthood in the United States and got a Western education before she came back). It's fascinating and horrifying to read about how women's roles and rights were pushed back and back as time went on...Nafisi is never run out of the workplace per se, but she is threatened with an anonymous note and was subject to constant harassment over not wearing her headscarf properly, and eventually decides that continuing to teach is more trouble than it's worth. As she watches her students struggle to make their own lives and raises her daughter, it becomes obvious to her that she can't stay in Iran even though she doesn't want to leave, either.

It's useful to come in with a working comprehension of the novels Nafisi focuses on, since she discusses them and how their themes relate to situations she deals with at length. I'd read three of the four coming in (no Daisy Miller for me), and while it's certainly possible to understand the book without the literary references, it's definitely richer and deeper if you can follow along. For the most part I enjoyed the way she used the focus novels, though I did get a little irritated in the section on Lolita when she claimed repeatedly that she wasn't comparing the ayatollahs to Humbert and Iranian women to Lolita and then went on to do just that over and over. I think it's an interesting and valid way to look at Lolita, but if you're going to go there don't pretend that's not what you're trying to do. On the whole, though, it's a very interesting memoir, especially for a bookish audience!