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‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’: Literature as Rebellion
During a time of turbulence and political upheaval, Nafisi urges us to look inwards.
TW: This review contains mentions of crimes committed by morality police, including recent and distressing events.
Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran celebrates the power of literature in times of the most suffocating oppression. After 21 years, it still holds a prestigious place in the memoir genre and (despite not always being able to follow Nafisi’s arguments to the very end) it certainly deserves to.
Written in 2003, Nafisi opens up a secret world that she had created in the mid-90s: a clandestine reading group that discusses banned Western literature. The brutality of the Khomeini regime is peppered so consistently across the book, making its violence seem simultaneously relentless and arbitrary.
When the Islamic Revolution took hold of Iran in 1979, daily life was unrecognisably transformed; protests were met with bloody suppression, religious minorities were singled out and attacked, and the hijab became mandatory for women. A hair out of place, running to class when you’re late, or even laughing could result in draconian punishment.
