Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual 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 at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.

  12

  Throughout that year, between the fall of 1979 and the summer of 1980, many events happened that changed the course of the revolution and of our lives. Battles were being fought and lost. One of the most significant of these was over women’s rights: from the very start, the government had waged a war against women, and the most important battles were being fought then.

  One day, I think it was in early November, I announced to my students, after the last straggler had drifted in, that they had canceled class many times for their own reasons and I in principle did not agree with this, but on that day I would be forced to go against my own principles and cancel class. I told them I was going to a protest meeting, to oppose the government’s attempts to impose the veil on women and its curtailment of women’s rights. I had missed some of the large demonstrations against the revolutionary government’s policies against women, and I was determined not to miss any more.

  Unconsciously, I was developing two different ways of life. Publicly, I was involved in what I considered to be a defense of myself as a person. This was very different from my political activities during my student days, made in behalf of an unknown entity called the “oppressed masses.” This was more personal. At the same time, a more private rebellion began to manifest itself in certain tendencies, like incessant reading, or the Herzog-like passion of writing letters to friends in the States that were never sent. I felt a silent defiance that may also have shaped my public desire to defend a vague and amorphous entity I thought of as myself.

  From the beginning of the revolution there had been many aborted attempts to impose the veil on women; these attempts failed because of persistent and militant resistance put up mainly by Iranian women. In many important ways the veil had gained a symbolic significance for the regime. Its reimposition would signify the complete victory of the Islamic aspect of the revolution, which in those first years was not a foregone conclusion. The unveiling of women mandated by Reza Shah in 1936 had been a controversial symbol of modernization, a powerful sign of the reduction of the clergy’s power. It was important for the ruling clerics to reassert that power. All this I can explain now, with the advantage of hindsight, but it was far from clear then.

  Mr. Bahri’s body stiffened as he focused on my words. Zarrin kept her usual smile, and Vida whispered to her conspiratorially. I did not pay much attention to their reactions: I was very angry, and this anger was a new feeling for me.

  Mr. Bahri lingered on after I dismissed the class, hovering for a while near the cluster of students who had gathered around me—but he made no attempt to come closer. I had returned my notes and books to my bag, except my Gatsby, which I held absentmindedly in one hand.

  I did not want to enter a debate with Mahtab and her friends, whose Marxist organization had tacitly taken sides with the government, denouncing the protesters as deviant, divisive and ultimately acting in the service of the imperialists. Somehow I found myself arguing not with Mr. Bahri but with them, the ostensibly progressive ones. They claimed that there were bigger fish to fry, that the imperialists and their lackeys needed to be dealt with first. Focusing on women’s rights was individualistic and bourgeois and played into their hands. What imperialists, which lackeys? Do you mean those battered and bruised faces shown on nightly television confessing to their crimes? Do you mean the prostitutes they recently stoned to death or my former school principal, Mrs. Parsa, who, like the prostitutes, was accused of “corruption on earth,” “sexual offenses” and “violation of decency and morality,” for having been the minister of education? For which alleged offenses she was put in a sack and either stoned or shot to death? Are those the lackeys you are talking about, and is it in order to wipe these people out that we have to defer and not protest? I am familiar with your line of arguments, I shot back—after all, I was in the same business not so long ago.

  Arguing with my leftist students, I had a funny feeling that I was talking to a younger version of myself, and the gleam I saw in that familiar stranger’s face frightened me. My students were more respectful, less aggressive than I had been when I argued a point—they were talking to their professor, after all, with whom they sort of sympathized, to a fellow traveler who might be saved.

  As I write about them in the opaque glow of hindsight, Mahtab’s face slowly fades and is transformed into the image of another girl, also young, in Norman, Oklahoma.

  13

  At the time I lived in Oklahoma, one of our rival factions in the student movement, the most radical group within the Confederation of Iranian Students, convened a conference in Oklahoma City. I missed the conference, having gone to another meeting in Texas. When I returned I noticed an unusual air of excitement among both “our” people and “theirs.” Apparently one of their members, a former running champion, was suspected of being an agent of the Iranian secret police, SAVAK. Some zealous members had decided to “extract” the truth from him. They had lured him into a room at the Holiday Inn and tried to get him to confess by means of torture, including burning his fingers with a cigarette. When they had left the room and were in the parking lot, their victim managed to escape.

  The next day the door flew open in the middle of the conference, admitting several FBI agents with dogs and the “culprit,” who was told to identify his assailants. One of our friends, who had previously admonished me for my anti-revolutionary clothes, her voice breaking with excitement, related to me what had happened, boasting about “the power of the masses.” By “masses” she meant the participants in the conference who had stood aside, creating an avenue for the agents, their dogs and the hapless culprit to walk through. As he passed by, they muttered threats in Persian. When he finally reached one of the leaders of that faction, the most popular in fact, a short, intense-looking guy who like many of his comrades had dropped out of college to become a full-time revolutionary and who usually sported a cap and coat in imitation of Lenin, he broke down and started crying and asked him in Persian why he had treated him so cruelly. The self-proclaimed Lenin of the Iranian revolution looked at him triumphantly, daring him to “spill” to the FBI. He could not bring himself to expose his tormentors and left with the agents, once more proving the justness of the oppressed masses.

  The following day, there was a short report in The Oklahoma Daily. More than the report, it was the way so many students reacted that frightened me. In the coffee shops, in the student union, even in the sunny streets of Norman, whenever the political Iranian students met they carried on heated discussions. Many quoted Comrade Stalin approvingly, spouting lines from a fashionable book, A Brief History of the Bolshevik Party or some such, about the need to destroy once and for all the Trotskyites, the White Guards, the termites and poisonous rats who were bent on destroying the revolution.

  Sitting in the student union drinking coffee or Coke, our comrades, disturbing the next table’s flirtations, flared up and defended the right of the masses to torture and physically eliminate their oppressors. I still remember one of them, a chubby guy with a soft, boyish face, the outlines of his round belly protruding from under his navy blue woolen sweater. He refused to sit down and, towering over our table, swinging a glass of Coke precariously in one hand, he argued that there were two kinds of torture, two kinds of killing—those committed by the enemy and those by the friends of the people. It was okay to murder enemies.

  I could tell Mr. Bahri, now eternally bending towards me in some urgent argument: listen, be careful what you wish for. Be careful with your dreams; one day they may just come true. I could have told him to learn from Gatsby,
from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flesh and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream. He was killed, left at the bottom of the swimming pool, as lonely in death as in life. I know you most probably have not read the book to the end, you have been so busy with your political activities, but let me tell you the ending anyway—you seem to be in need of knowing. Gatsby is killed. He is killed for a crime Daisy committed, running over Tom’s mistress in Gatsby’s yellow car. Tom fingered Gatsby to the bereaved husband, who killed Gatsby as he lay floating in his swimming pool waiting for Daisy to call. Could my former comrades have predicted that one day they would be tried in a Revolutionary Court, tortured and killed as traitors and spies? Could they, Mr. Bahri? I can tell you with complete confidence that they could not. Not in their wildest dreams.

  14

  I left Mahtab and her friends, but those memories could not easily be left behind: they pursued me like mischievous beggars to the protest meeting. Two distinct and hostile groups had formed among the protesters, eyeing each other suspiciously. The first, smaller group consisted mainly of government workers and housewives. They were there instinctively, because their interests were at stake. They were clearly not used to demonstrations: they stood together in a huddle, uncertain and resentful. Then there were the intellectuals like myself, who did know a thing or two about demonstrations, and the usual hecklers, shouting obscenities and brandishing slogans. Two of them took photographs of the crowd, jumping menacingly from side to side. We covered our faces and shouted back.

  Soon the number of vigilantes increased. They gathered in small groups and began moving towards us. The police fired a few perfunctory shots into the air while men with knives, clubs and stones approached us. Instead of protecting the women, the police started to disperse us, pushing some with the butt of their guns and ordering the “sisters” to make no trouble and go home. There was a feeling of desperate anger in the air, thick with taunting jeers. The meeting continued despite the provocations.

  A few nights later, another protest was convened at the Polytechnic University. A huge crowd had gathered in the auditorium by the time I arrived, laughing and talking. As one of the speakers—a tall, stately woman wearing a long, sturdy skirt, her long hair tied back behind her ears—moved towards the podium, the electricity was turned off. There were murmurs of protest, but no one moved. The speaker stood stiffly and defiantly with the text in front of her and two people held a candle and a flashlight for her to read by. All we could see was her disembodied face and the white paper in her hands, illuminated by the light behind her. Only the cadence of her voice and that light have remained with me. We were not listening to the words: we were there to support and to bear witness to the act, to preserve the image of her flickering in the candlelight.

  That woman and I were destined to meet mainly at public events. The last time I saw her was in the fall of 1999 in New York, when, as Iran’s foremost feminist publisher, she was invited to a talk at Columbia University. After the meeting, we reminisced over coffee. I hadn’t seen her since the Tehran book fair in 1993, when she had invited me to give a talk on the modern novel. The talk was held on the second floor of an open cafeteria in the main building of the book fair. As I spoke, I became more and more excited about my theme and my scarf kept slipping back from my hair. The number of people in the audience grew until there was no room to sit or stand. As soon as the talk ended, this woman was summoned by security and reprimanded for my improper veil and inflammatory talk. The fact that I had spoken about works of fiction was inconsequential to them. After that, her lecture series was banned.

  We were smiling over these memories, sitting in a dark corner of a restaurant, secure in the busy indifference of a mild New York evening. For a moment I felt that she had not changed at all since she had given that talk years earlier: she was still wearing a long, sturdy skirt, and her long hair was still gathered behind her ears. Only her smile had changed: it was a smile of desperation. A few months later she was arrested with a number of prominent activists, journalists, writers and student leaders. These arrests were part of a new wave of repression, during which over twenty-five publications were closed down and many dissenters arrested or jailed. Hearing the news as I sat in my office in Washington, D.C., a feeling I had not experienced for a long time came over me: a sense of utter helplessness, of inarticulate anger tinged with vague but persistent guilt.

  15

  It was around this time, mid-fall, that I spoke again with Mr. Bahri. He said, Well, Professor, they most probably deserve it: the students are very angry. We were talking about three faculty members who were being threatened with expulsion, one of whom had been singled out mainly because he was Armenian. The other was my colleague who described himself as Little Great Gatsby: both had been accused of using obscene language in class. A third was accused of being a CIA agent. Dr. A, who was still head of the department, had refused to accept their expulsion.

  Dr. A himself was rapidly falling out of favor. In the early days of the revolution, he had been put on trial by the students at Tehran University for defending a prison guard. Eighteen years after the event, I read about it in an homage that one of his former students, herself a well-known translator, paid him in a magazine. She described how one day she had been watching the trial of a secret-police agent on television when a familiar voice, Dr. A’s, attracted her attention. He had come to testify in favor of his former student, whom he believed to be a compassionate individual, a man who often helped out his less fortunate classmates. Dr. A told the Revolutionary Court: “I believe it is my duty as a human being to acquaint you with this aspect of the accused’s personality.” Such an action, during those initial black-and-white days of the revolution, was unheard of and very dangerous.

  The accused, who had been enrolled in the university’s night classes, was a prison guard who had apparently been charged with beating and torturing political prisoners. It was said that mainly because of Dr. A’s testimony in his favor, he got off easy, with only a two-year jail sentence. None of my friends and acquaintances knew what happened to him later.

  Dr. A’s student regrets in her account that she participated in his trial without voicing a protest. She goes on to conclude that Dr. A’s action was a manifestation of the principles he had taught in his literature classes. “Such an act,” she explains, “can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality. . . . Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual’s personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them. . . . If we had learned this one lesson from Dr. A our society would have been in a much better shape today.”

  The threats of expulsion were an extension of the purges that continued throughout that year, and have never really ceased, up to this day. After a meeting with Dr. A and two other colleagues about this matter, I stormed down the hall and came across Mr. Bahri. He was standing at the corner of the long corridor talking to the president of the Islamic Association of University Staff. The two were leaning towards each other in the attitude of men who are involved in deeply serious matters, matters of life and death. I called Mr. Bahri, who walked towards me with respect, gracefully dissimulating any irritation he might have felt at this disruption. I questioned him about trying the faculty members and dismissing them illegally.

  His expression changed into one of alarm mixed with determination. He explained that I had to understand that things had changed. What does this mean, I said, that things have changed? It means that morality is important to our students; it means that the faculty is answerable to the students. Did this make it all right, then, to p
ut a responsible and dedicated teacher like Dr. A on trial?

  Mr. Bahri said that he himself had not participated in that trial. Of course Dr. A is too Western in his attitudes, he added. He is flirtatious and loose.

  So is this our new definition of the word Western, I shot back—are we now officially living in the Soviet Union or China? And should Dr. A now be tried for his flirtations? No, but he should understand certain things. You cannot go and support a spy, a lackey, someone who is responsible for the deaths of so many. He went on to tell me that he thought there were far more important people than Dr. A to be tried. There were CIA spies, such as our own Professor Z, who were free to come and go as they pleased.

  I told him they had no proof that the gentleman in question was a CIA agent, and in any case I doubted the CIA would be foolish enough to employ someone like him. But even those whom he called the functionaries of the old regime, regardless of their guilt, shouldn’t be treated this way. I could not understand why the Islamic government had to gloat over these people’s deaths, brandishing their photographs after they had been tortured and executed. Why did they show us these pictures? Why did our students every day shout slogans demanding new death sentences?

  Mr. Bahri did not respond at first. He stood still, his head bent, his hands linked in front of him. Then he started to speak, slowly and with tense precision. Well, they have to pay, he said. They are on trial for their past deeds. The Iranian nation will not tolerate their crimes. And these new crimes? I asked as soon as he had uttered his last word. Should they be tolerated in silence? Everyone nowadays is an enemy of God—former ministers and educators, prostitutes, leftist revolutionaries: they are murdered daily. What had these people done to deserve such treatment?