Reading Lolita in Tehran in Palmdale

The American flag burned outside the gates of the embassy as irate Iranians screamed, “Death to America!”  Announcing to the world their hatred of all things Western, crowds broiled around the media cameras.  The Ayatollah was now in charge, the Shah deposed, and American hostages were held in the embassy, what was now a symbol of the Great Satan.  These are the images I remember from those days.  This was the Iran of news bits and the powerful movie Not Without My Daughter.  Until I read Reading Lolita in Tehran, my concept of the Iranian people was uniform, brushed with broad strokes.  Even though in one part of my brain I assumed it was probably not fair, because of the media exposure they appeared to be all legalistic radicals bent on the destruction of America. 

I was not looking forward to reading the book.  I would do so because it was assigned for a class, but I anticipated that it would be some kind of diversity propaganda to merely tolerate.  What was so interesting to me in reading Nafisi’s account was the fact that I immediately identified with a person I would have assumed I had nothing in common with.  I identified with her passion for literature and writing.  I identified with her struggles for significance—her feelings of irrelevance when she no longer could teach.  Opening Reading Lolita was like opening a window in a close room and finding a lush garden that you never knew was there, right outside, within reach. 

The tension, the growing violence, the hypocrisy which served as a context for the developing relationships of the girls in the literature class and Nafisi’s own intellectual and personal growth helped me to understand that what happened in Iran was not political uniformity and not equally welcomed by its citizenry.  It was a radical birthing process—a violent process initiated and controlled by a minority—which alienated many of its citizens and destroyed through death and oppression much of the intellectual vibrancy of its culture.  The description of life for those who had known freedom under the Shah, contrasted with those who had grown up under the Islamic Republic helped me to humanize the people of Iran and their struggle to be real persons and not just tools of the state.  Especially for the women, behind the veil I saw individuality struggling to be free, but rules, fear, and conflicting values held them in a kind of bondage.  For some, the veil I’m sure was a true testimony to their deeply held faith, but for so many others it was binding shackles, a symbol of unworthiness, oppression, and fear.  The history that I thought I knew has been displaced by a multifaceted view.  It is like looking through a clear lens and then looking through a kaleidoscope.  The view now is much more complex.

In addition to the clever way she intertwines the fictional works with her reality, another aspect of the book that served to draw me is the language itself.  Nafisi’s descriptive language is not something to labor through, but rather to enjoy and savor.  The following are some of the phrases and sentences that I underlined, in just the first few pages: 

“She [Manna] made poetry out of things most people cast aside” (4).
“Mashid is very sensitive.  She’s like porcelain.”
“This is Tehran for me:  its absences were more real than its presences” (5).
“The truth is I can’t describe her [Nassrin]:  she was her own definition.”
“I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color” (5-6).
“[T]he living room was symbolic of my nomadic and borrowed life.  Vagrant pieces of furniture from different times and places were thrown together” (7).
“This class was the color of my dreams.  It entailed an active withdrawal from a reality that had turned hostile” (11).

I bought Reading Lolita in Tehran for a dollar plus shipping, used from Amazon.com—a rather ragged copy with someone else’s illegible annotations scrawled in the margins.  I obviously did not want to make a huge investment in a book that probably would not find a home on my library shelves.  After finishing the final pages, however, I am on the lookout for an affordable hard copy.  I loved this book and knew somewhere in the middle of Henry James that I would be reading it again. 

(Oh, and by the way, on the way home from exercising this morning, I stopped by Barnes and Noble to get my latté and picked up two books by James.  They were out of the Gatsby!)