Sara's Reviews > Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

I first read this book in February 2011, after meeting an Iranian woman in a restaurant in Paris. This woman and this place have occupied an essential place in my life. Her dignity, her kindness, and her welcome for an American who was totally new to France and knew very little about Iran was unforgettable.

Azar Nafisi is also unforgettable. She spent 18 years of her life under the Islamic Republic, which she describes as "like having sex with a man you loathe...you make your mind blank -- you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body."
She fought back by feeding the one thing that the regime could not control - the imagination.

Through reading and discussing great novels with her students, both in "official classes" where she had to fight for the right to speak honestly and clearly and in unofficial classes with a group of women students whom we come to know quite well. The classes cause controversy, of course, but she maintains her integrity and continues to speak out, to supporters of the regime in her classes as well as to those who appreciate her more nuanced perspective.

Reading and discussing the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jane Austen, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, is controversial and, by the time she leaves in 1997, their works cannot be bought in Iran.

Three heroines stand out from the discussions recounted here - Lolita, of course, but also Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and Catherine Sloper from Washington Square. When I studied English literature a century ago, these books were not discussed either, but for different reasons - we were given survey courses of prose and poetry from different centuries of English literature, and these were discussed for their form, not their content. I read the great English and American novels later, on my own -- and now I am moved to re-read them, I want to get to know all these books in the way her students came to. They analyzed the characters in their social context, examining the individual and often courageous choices they made, even though most of the women had limited options due to the societies they were part of. That was NOT DONE before the women's movement in the United States in the late 60s-70s.

So yes, one can identify with these women, even though we don't have to worry about going to prison for a strand of hair escaping from under a headscarf or an arranged marriage with a fanatical Islamist.

We can think of Florida, where students are being denied the opportunity to study Shakespeare. We can think of the world view being espoused by numerous "Republicans" in the United States which would return the status of women to... if not chattel, then certainly "barefoot, pregnant and chained to the kitchen stove," as conservative people I once knew would joke.

The choices were, and are, difficult. Nafisi finally left Iran after much soul-searching. And yet she tells her mentor, her "magician," "You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again."

"I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?"

But does genuine democracy exist anywhere?
"We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy."

"I said to him that I wanted to write a book in which I would thank the Islamic Republic for all the things it had taught me -- to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom...He said, You will not be able to write about Austen without writing about us, about this place where you rediscovered Austen...This is the Austen you read here, in a place where the film censor is nearly blind and where they hang people in the streets and put a curtain across the sea to segregate men and women. I said, When I write all that, perhaps I will become more generous, less angry."