Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books — Azar Nafisi (2003)
Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir is a first-hand account of the life of a female academic intellectual in the post-revolution Islamic state of Iran. It is an unhappy account of the oppression of Western ideas and feminism, though in private the spirit of debate and female empowerment occurs vigorously, if not dangerously.
One could emphasize any of many angles of this book – a story of the intellectual underground in Iran, a story of female survival in Iran, or even a collection of English literary criticism. My angle is the tragedy that is the Islamic revolution of Iran.
It’s a story of “watch what you ask for.” I went to college in Nebraska in the mid-1970s and the campus (like most colleges across America at the time) was chock full of secular Iranian students who simply hated the Shah. They were fixated on the injustice that the Shah royal family was installed by the CIA. These students were smart, educated and informed — and obsessed by the priority to rid Iran of the Shah. I remember once that an Iranian student on my dorm floor showed me a cassette tape that contained speeches by someone named Khomeini who, my friend told me, was operating out of Europe and developing a following to depose the Shah. He was excited to be part of an informal conspiratorial black market of these cassettes.
I didn’t listen to the tape, and I’m not sure that my friend did either. Rather, the student was willing to throw his support behind anyone who could develop enough power to take down the Shah.
Azar Nafisi recounted a somewhat similar tale of her experience as a college student in Oklahoma. She didn’t mention throwing any support to Khomeini, but her sentiment, at the time for change, any change, was familiar to what I heard.
Look at what the Iranian people wrought for their anti-Shah obsession – a religious state that imprisoned and executed thousands of counter-revolutionary Iranians for their support of communism or decadent western ideas. A state that enforced its moral code with cultural police who examine women on the street to see whether a few strands of hair peek out from the scarf or whether they are accompanied by men other than their husbands and brothers.
There are worse regimes – Saudi Arabia, the most obvious – but that doesn’t give Iran a pass. Officially religious states, whether Islamic, Jewish, or Christian, are, by definition, oppressive of their religious minorities and their “others.”
Enter the scene one female intellectual, Azar Nafisi, an expert on English-language traditional literature, especially Nabokov, Jane Austin, Henry James, and Saul Bellow. Having been terminated from several Iranian universities in Tehran for her failure to conform to religious laws of dress and speech, she decides to conduct a weekly class in her home with a carefully selected group of female students. Each young woman arrives at her door each week in the veil and black dress, and then flings off the shapeless chador to reveal jeans and t-shirt underneath. Their private time together is sacred, discussing literature and current events. Each student has a story to tell of callow men who seek a traditional Islamic marriage, and of cultural police who look for female dissent. Some of the students have been previously imprisoned and have had close friends executed.
The pity, all the more bitter, as Nafisi relates, is that the Iranians brought this on themselves. And yet, today as I write this, on May 14, 2019, I open the NY Times to the story White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran in Echoes of Iraq War. Again, the American government, we, us, me, countenance the political and military mobilization of a war based on the vaguest of cynical pretexts. It may be Republicans who instigate this self-destruction, but in fairness, it is all the more bitter that with our democracy we bring it upon ourselves. (Memo to self: a war against Iran will make the war against Iraq look like a walk in the park.)
Nafisi sees herself, at her core, as a literary critic and essayist, more than a novelist. She confesses, unnecessarily, that creating a story, a dialogue, a descriptive scene, is not her strength. So she weaves in intermittent chapters of academic literary analysis of the works of Nabokov and other authors. These are the weakest chapters, and she should have just powered through the memoir with only her experiences. Some of her best chapters are when the students discuss English fiction and the analogies of the fiction to the struggles and forces at play in their own lives.
In the end, as is foreshadowed throughout the book, Nafisi moves to the United States to escape the suffocation that is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Many of her students also move abroad. It is a shame that such a proud and ancient intellectual culture should be lost to religious ideology.
I think of those secular, intelligent, proud Iranians of the 1970s seeking anyone and anything other than the Shah.
Bob Fall 