Reading Lolita in Tehran
Reading Lolita in Tehran: These two nouns are startling enough juxtaposed in a phrase — but applied to a book title?
To speak of a best approach to a book — is it better to know starting out what is to come, or to be brought into the story by slow degrees? The latter is an author’s risk in that her readers may not delve deep enough to arrive at the heart of her story. And a memoir about a Persian teacher gathering her students in her home clandestinely to discuss banned Western literature — the writings of the Great Satan’s followers —my thought was how could that premise be sustained for more than an essay? And labeled a memoir, how personal might an Iranian woman properly go?
I ran across the book by accident. Evidently, the hardcover book had been years on a bookshelf in our house — given the Borders Books bookmarker. Yet neither D nor I recall buying it, let alone reading it. Though references to Nabokov’s mastery of the English language kept coming up in other readings, so I gave this one a try.
True confession: I’ve not read Nabokov’s Lolita and I may never. It would be hard to shake feeling complicit in the corruption of a child. A novel written in English by a Russian expat, written first person in the devil’s voice, being discussed by Persian women reluctantly donning chadors in public and shedding them in private in Ayatollah Khomeini’s time. As improbable as the title, the subject she attempts is crossing cultures, religions and multiple time zones.
You can be sure it’s on the banned books lists in Florida, which is sufficient motivation for any conscious teenage Floridian to seek it out. In that its subject is perversion enough to Western minds, Lolita surely would have been anathema to a follower of Ayatollah Komani. If Nabokov had been around, there would be a fatwa named in his honor.
“Yet I suppose that if I were to go against my own recommendations and chose a work of fiction that would most resonate with our lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran… [it would be] Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading or better yet, Lolita.” from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi is the author, a scholar from a old family of Iranian scholars, belying what little we in America know of that culture, and least of all its long waves of history. Her father was for a time before Komani the mayor of Tehran. It was strange, reading such passion for American literature coming from that part of the world, that a teacher would consider it fundamental to her students’ understanding of literature. In Nafisi’s case, she had studied in the U.S. Though her interest wasn’t unique — the influence of American culture extended that far.
“Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said [to the class] Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches [read intolerant folk] who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak stepfathers who leave their behind in forests.” from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Obviously, Komani felt resentful for his years in exile and was threatened enough by America to declare it the Great Satan. A useful strawman. Never let a man with a chip on his shoulder, unable to put distance between sanctimony and the greater world, be allowed to exercise infallibility — it’s just not a good project.
More obvious was the hatred Iranian theocrats poured on Salman Rushdie for his novel, Satanic Verses. Enough to announce a shoot-on-sight warrant to be carried out by any right-thinking Muslim.
“In his essay on Stalinism, Koba the Dread, Martin Amis proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism that destroyed the Russia of Nabokov’s childhood… Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. ‘Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies,’ he says. ‘Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny.’ “ from the Wikipedia page on Lolita
Nafisi’s book’s slip cover includes a photo of two gentle women one older one younger, possibly heads bowed in prayer. Though if they represent her small cadre of scholars it’s more probable they’re surreptitiously studying a book already banned. Muslim women with scarves immodestly pushed back on their heads sufficient to reveal hair — two survivors amid the turmoil of a retrograde revolution hiding the proof of their insolence.
In my own lifetime, the women in my Catholic family wore scarves to church — though no man would confront them if they didn’t. As one of Nafisi’s students complains in the book, she a practicing Muslim, but she’s angry being dictated to — defeating the purpose of humility.
The times Nafisi is writing of were tumultuous, old guard monarchists versus rioting leftists — and the politically correct enforcers who turned their hatred for the West into a bloody campaign against their own people.
Though Komani’s allies have insisted otherwise, the Shah was not overthrown by Islamic religious patriots alone, much like Lenin’s Bolsheviks did not ascend to power in Russia except by a failing autocracy and peasants seeking freedom. Similar to Russia, Iranians replaced their secular autocrat for a religious one, even if the stripes on the cat weren’t too different.
Which makes Nafisi’s book sadly relevant: we live amidst a pandemic of religious intolerance, spread from the Middle East to India — and the United States. Here in the U.S., secularists are fighting a rearguard action against the same ones Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and their cohorts resisted.
Pray for what you hope for, and I’ll thank you for that charity. Write laws instead, and I will resist until I can no longer.
Reading Nafisi’s memoir recreates what it was to live in Iran in those days, especially for women. If one finds it too slow starting out with modest observations about her students, keep reading. It’s not a social media piece — more a social engagement story.
If Samuel Alito’s religion (aligned with Matthew Hale, who argued husbands cannot be charged with the rape of their wives) justifies that women must be ruled for their own good, it is scarcely different from what Komani’s tribe preached.
Following God’s orders?
Is there something deep in the basil brain that propels men to dominate women and some women to willingly submit? Otherwise, why is this such a curse? It’s said sex and violence are close mates in the human brain. Maybe that’s it.
Nafisi mourns the loss of Western literature in her homeland throughout the book — and only mentions the physical assaults on women intermittently. She knows of women being imprisoned, raped, murdered, but it isn’t her primary focus.
Because, to a scholar, the destruction of culture is the greater loss? I’d have been howling to the moon about that much misery. Still, I should have known better.
“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance… an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.” from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Because we creatures of time haven’t enough of it, we dearly need those coming before to reassure us when the forest becomes terrifying. When a culture chooses to erase its past, the great and the ugly, we forget — we more than forget, we repeat those evils.
“The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in your own home.” Theodor Adorno, as quoted by Azar Nafisi.
Not far into the book, Nafisi gets to The Great Gatsby.
At the cusp of the modern, before the jet age, long before Facebook, with 19th century baggage, with the impossible separations of class by wealth, this is the American golden age F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel inhabits. Social class measured as closely as in feudal countries, yet America laid claim to democracy. Fitzgerald used his own teenage crush on an heiress to paint his master work about unrequited love.
In Iran this many years later, one teacher of English lit presented his book to her pupils. In her university classroom, Nafisi puts the book on trial: does the story celebrate an evil — or is its intention to argue against immorality? Continuing, she uses first names for the book’s characters, Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, and expects enough of her readers to follow the shorthand.
Well, ah, er, she’s for sure a butterfly — but flapper?
Even if it was popularly considered a weak novel in his lifetime, mention Fitzgerald today, and The Great Gatsby is the first of his stories. Perhaps on account of his less than flattering depictions of the Jazz Age at its zenith before the lights went out again all over Europe.
What was it about American novels like The Great Gatsby that so vexed the Iranian clerics? Given the surface hedonism, the question may seem rhetorical, though, Nick Carraway hardly misses the superficiality of the upper class society he was witnessing. Did these clerics understood their own superficial morality?
“That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish… I explained that we would in the course of the semester read and discuss many different authors, but that one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness. Some like Gorky… were overtly subversive in their political aims. Others, like Fitzgerald and Mark Twain were in my opinion more subversive, if less obviously so… I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in one’s own home. The best fiction always forced us to consider what we took for granted.” from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Nafisi’s book delves into how the best writers depict the time and place their characters inhabit, and she more than stands against the simplistic gatekeepers, political and religious alike. Like the best teachers, she draws her students to her because of what she knows, but more because she wants to teach them.
It’s a kind of love, to be this person who seeks broadening her students’ horizons. Somewhere in my own Catholic upbringing I heard that charity is the same as love, that theologically the words should be used interchangeably. Nafisi’s teaching was that kind of charity, instructions on life in a time of near total darkness.
When she comes to Henry James, she reaches back to 19th century literature.
“One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century — Racine and Molière, whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare, when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. These poets are… occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable. They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the conditions of life.” from an essay on Henry James by Edmund Wilson
A number of James’s protagonists were young women. His subject — or at least his primary setting — was Americans in Europe, of which he knew well, being a voluntary expat himself. Which side to choose — brash New World or the old, closeted one of manners layered on traditions?
Nafisi chose her subjects from a broad knowledge of literature. Choosing James, Fitzgerald and Austin as the novel’s cannon, she taught her students, first those in Iranian universities and later her ‘cohort of subversives’ to think for themselves. That her primary tool, other than her own example, were the words of writers oceans and continents apart from the Middle East, gave her power no tyrant could ultimately repel.
Into the 19th century in the American south, teaching slaves to read was illegal. Whipping them, raping them, perfectly appropriate, but never teach them lest they be given a gleam of hope. Nafisi’s resistance against erasing the truth “echoes off the testament walls.”
Totalitarianism is a deeply buried evil. It has never been excised, coming in shades and hues as varied as the cultures it’s grown from — all so very manmade. Some seek its power, others turn it to their own uses when they stumble on it. ‘Why looky what I found!’ I would like to believe that only men of small egos (and members) seek to dominate smaller creatures, women foremost. I would also like to believe that of women–minus the ellipse. That way I’d know who to avoid like the plague.
Trump was easy enough to spot as one of those: he came right out and declared it — and was elected president anyway. Talk about a morality play.
So the book title, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is fair warning: X-rated topics to come. But Nabokov’s Lolita gets but a passing shake. How would Nafisi ever teach “her girls” about 12-year-old virgins being violated when nine-year-old girls were being married off by Iranian law — handed down from the theocracy? Nafisi does not share what discussions her coterie of scholars might have held on that book.
Reading Lolita remains focused on literature, but her students’ stories slip through, about their youthful search for who they might become, badly conflicted by where they lived. Her students ranged from secular girls to practicing Muslims. You can hear Nafisi’s own struggle to stay within the bounds of literature while being pressed by her students to help with their more immediate questions. She was aware of their internal struggle, and writes about trying to maintain a professorial distance, yet why else would she have taken them into her home?
“A novel is not an allegory… It is a sensuous experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is the heart of the novel.” from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
One can accept that stories from another culture aren’t so out-of-world strange they can’t be translated; applying empathy can shrink the differences, leaving the author’s words to cover the distance. Seems Nafisi expected her students to grasp that essential point. Else, how would they ever make sense of The Great Gatsby? A story steeped in its time and place, Long Island in the 20s, a golden age about to collapse.
Here was Nick describing his retreat after all the celebrations were over:
“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Seems we simple creatures are either surfing the crest of a wave or falling off the edge of a cliff. Only an ideologue could think to dispute that image.
Nafisi doesn’t look to Western literature to the exclusion of her Persian roots. She is — my opinion — more grasping for a way to tell her personal story in translation to an English-speaking audience.
“I developed a ritual in preparation for my public appearance. I was careful not to wear any makeup. The contours and lines of my body would disappear as I slipped on my T-shirt and baggy black trousers… and over them my long black robe and the black scarf that coiled around my neck. Last, I put my books and notes in my bag.” from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Modest description for an ugly reality. As the book goes deeper into living in Iran in ‘interesting times,’ as the Chinese curse says, the balancing act Nafisi writes of becomes sadly familiar. The story plot is laid out: a country fresh from throwing off one dictator only to find another. Like the French getting rid of their king only to find Robespierre, and Russian peasants learning Stalin was no savior.
Published in 2003 — twenty years ago now and still Reading Lolita in Tehran is au courant — particularly in this country. For example, take the so-called Texas senator who has a bill awaiting the governor’s signature to plant Christian ministers in public schools. Senate Bill 763 is the brainchild of Mayes Middleton. Religious tyrants remain with us.
“[Texas] Senate Bill 763, which is headed to the governor’s desk after passing both chambers on party-line votes, says public schools may choose to hire chaplains or accept faith leaders as volunteers to provide ‘support, services and programs for students.’ “ from Texas public schools need more counselors — not religious chaplains by Bridget Grumet in the Austin American Statesman
Casting the first stone hasn’t gone away either. As an updated book title, what about Reading Lolita in Tallahassee?
Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.
