Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  We left the meeting with a feeling of jubilance. The committee had clearly been defeated: their responses had been lame, and as the meeting progressed, they became more incoherent and defensive. When we emerged from the assembly hall, Mr. Bahri was waiting for me with a friend. He did not talk to my other colleagues but directed all his comments towards me. He did not understand it: how could I do this? Were we not friends? Yes, we were friends, but this really wasn’t personal—not in that way. Don’t you see, you are unconsciously helping the enemy, the imperialists? he said mournfully. Is it too much to ask you to comply with a few rules to save the revolution? I could have asked him whose revolution, but I didn’t. Farideh, Laleh and I were too euphoric, and we were going out to lunch to celebrate.

  A few months after that, committees were established that led to the purging of some of the best faculty and students. Dr. A would resign and leave for the United States. Farideh would be expelled and later would go to Europe. The bright young professor whom I had met that first day in Dr. A’s office was also expelled in due time—I met him eleven years later, at a conference in Austin, Texas. Of the old group, only Laleh and I would remain, and soon we too would be expelled. The government would make the veil mandatory and put more students and faculty members on trial. I went to one more demonstration, called by the Mujahideen but supported by all the opposition forces, except the Communist Tudeh Party and the Fedayin Organization. By then, the first president of the Republic was in hiding and would soon flee the country. Over half a million participated in what turned out to be one of the bloodiest battles of the revolution. Over a thousand people were arrested, many, including teenagers, executed on the spot. Eight days later, on June 28, the Islamic Republic Party’s headquarters were bombed, and over eighty of its members and top leaders in the government were killed. The government took revenge by executing and arresting individuals almost randomly.

  Oddly, when the university administration began the process of my dismissal, it was not secular colleagues but Mr. Bahri and his friends—former students who almost all got F’s that semester for not attending classes—who defended me and delayed my expulsion for as long as they could.

  The feelings I thought I had left behind returned when, almost nineteen years later, the Islamic regime would once again turn against its students. This time it would open fire on those it had admitted to the universities, those who were its own children, the children of the revolution. Once more my students would go to the hospitals in search of the murdered bodies that were stolen by the guards and vigilantes and try to prevent them from stealing the wounded. Only this time I was walking those grounds in my imagination as I read faxes and e-mails in my office in Washington, D.C., from my former students in Iran, trying to decipher something beyond the hysteria of their words.

  I would like to know where Mr. Bahri is right now, at this moment, and to ask him: how did it all turn out, Mr. Bahri—was this your dream, your dream of the revolution? Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memory? Who will pay for the snapshots of the murdered and the executed that we hid in our shoes and closets as we moved on to other things? Tell me, Mr. Bahri—or, to use that odd expression of Gatsby’s, Tell me, old sport—what shall we do with all these corpses on our hands?

  PART III

  James

  1

  The war came one morning, suddenly and unexpectedly. It was announced on September 23, 1980, the day before the opening of schools and universities: we were in the car returning to Tehran from a trip to the Caspian Sea when we heard about the Iraqi attack on the radio. It all started very simply. The newscaster announced it matter-of-factly, the way people announce a birth or a death, and we accepted it as an irrevocable fact that would permeate all other considerations and gradually insinuate itself into the four corners of our lives. How many events go into that unexpected and decisive moment when you wake up one morning and discover that your life has forever been changed by forces beyond your control?

  What triggered the war? Was it the arrogance of the new Islamic revolutionaries, who kept provoking what they deemed to be reactionary and heretical regimes in the Middle East and inciting the people of those countries to revolutionary uprisings? Was it the fact that the new regime held a special animosity towards Saddam Hussein, who had expelled the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini from Iraq after reportedly making a deal with the Shah? Was it the old hostility between Iraq and Iran and the fact that the Iraqis, with promises of support from a West hostile to Iran’s new revolutionary government, dreamed of a swift and sweet victory?

  In retrospect, when historical events are gathered up, analyzed and categorized into articles and books, their messiness disappears and they gain a certain logic and clarity that one never feels at the time. For me, as for millions of ordinary Iranians, the war came out of nowhere one mild fall morning: unexpected, unwelcome and utterly senseless.

  All through that fall I took long walks around the wide, leafy alleys near our home, surrounded by scented gardens and meandering streams, and thought of my own ambivalence towards the war, for my anger was mixed with feelings of love and a desire to protect my home and country. One September evening—it was that twilight moment between seasons, when for a very short time the air is filled with a mixture of summer and fall—I was diverted from my thoughts by the colors of a magnificent sunset unfolding in front of me. I happened to catch the play of fading light between the thin branches of a creeper on a nearby clump of trees. I stood there watching the diaphanous reflection of the sunset until two passersby, walking from the opposite direction, distracted me and I continued on my way.

  Down the slope of the street, on the wall to my right, in big black letters, was a quotation from Ayatollah Khomeini: THIS WAR IS A GREAT BLESSING FOR US! I registered the slogan in anger. A great blessing for whom?

  2

  The war with Iraq began that September and did not end until late July 1988. Everything that happened to us during those eight years of war, and the direction our lives took afterward, was in some way shaped by this conflict. It was not the worst war in the world, although it left over a million dead and injured. At first the war seemed to pull the divided country together: we were all Iranian and the enemy had attacked our homeland. But even in this, many were not allowed to participate fully. From the regime’s point of view, the enemy had attacked not just Iran; it had attacked the Islamic Republic, and it had attacked Islam.

  The polarization created by the regime confused every aspect of life. Not only were the forces of God fighting an emissary of Satan, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, but they were also fighting agents of Satan inside the country. At all times, from the very beginning of the revolution and all through the war and after, the Islamic regime never forgot its holy battle against its internal enemies. All forms of criticism were now considered Iraqi-inspired and dangerous to national security. Those groups and individuals without a sense of loyalty to the regime’s brand of Islam were excluded from the war effort. They could be killed or sent to the front, but they could not voice their social or political preferences. There were only two forces in the world, the army of God and that of Satan.

  Thus every event, every social gesture, also embodied a symbolic allegiance. The new regime had reached far beyond the romantic symbolism more or less prevalent in every political system to inhabit a realm of pure myth, with devastating consequences. The Islamic Republic was not merely modeled on the order established by the Prophet Muhammad during his reign over Arabia; it was the Prophet’s rule itself. Iran’s war with Iraq was the same as the war carried on by the third and most militant imam, Imam Hussein, against the infidels, and the Iranians were going to conquer Karballa, the holy city in Iraq where Imam Hussein’s shrine was located. The Iranian battalions were named after the Prophet or the Twelve Shiite Saints; they were the army of Ali, Hussein and Mahdy, the twelfth imam, whose arrival the Shia Muslims awaited, and the military assaults against Iraq were invariably code-named after Muhammad’s celebrated bat
tles. Ayatollah Khomeini was not a religious or political leader but an imam in his own right.

  In those days, I had become an avid and insatiable collector. I saved pictures of martyrs, young men, some mere children, published in the daily papers beside the wills they had made before going to the front. I cut out Ayatollah Khomeini’s praise of the thirteen-year-old boy who had thrown himself in front of an enemy tank and collected accounts of young men who were given keys to heaven to wear around their neck as they were sent off to the front: they were told that when they were martyred, they would go straight to heaven. What had begun with an impulse to record events in my diary turned gradually into a greedy and feverish act of hoarding, as if through such actions I could place a jinx on forces beyond my control and impose upon them my own rhyme and reason.

  It took us a while to understand what the war really meant, although the radio, television and papers were filled with it. They encouraged people to take advantage of the blackouts and used a system of alarms to instruct us: after the red siren a voice would say, “Attention! Attention! This is the alarm. Please go to your shelters . . .” Shelters? What shelters? Never once during the eight years of war did the government create a cohesive program for the safety and security of its citizens. Shelters meant the basements or the lower levels of apartment houses that sometimes buried you. Yet most of us did not realize our own vulnerability until later, when Tehran was also hit, like the other cities.

  Our ambivalent attitude towards the war mainly stemmed from our ambivalence towards the regime. In those first air raids against Tehran, a house in the affluent part of the city was hit. It was rumored that its basement had been occupied by anti-government guerrillas. Hashemi Rafsanjani, then speaker of the Parliament, in an effort to appease the frightened population, claimed in a Friday prayer ceremony that the bombing so far had done no real harm, as its victims were the “arrogant rich and subversives,” who probably would have been executed sooner or later anyway. He also recommended that women dress properly when sleeping, so that if their houses were hit, they would not be “indecently exposed to strangers’ eyes.”

  3

  “Let’s celebrate!” my friend Laleh cried before sitting down at a table in our favorite restaurant, where I had been waiting for her. This was a few weeks after our encounter with the Committee on the Cultural Revolution, and by now we knew it was only a matter of time before we would either have to comply with the rules or be expelled. Since the government had recently made the veil mandatory at the workplace, I did not see much reason for her exuberance. Celebrate what? I wanted to know. “Today”—she paused and took an excited breath—“after nine years—eight and a half, to be exact—I was formally expelled from the university. I am now officially irrelevant, as you would put it, so lunch is on me! Since we can’t drink publicly to my newly acquired status, let’s eat ourselves to death,” she added in a brave effort to make light of a development that would leave her penniless and, more important, force her to give up a job she loved and was good at. Stiff upper lip, I believe they call it. Well, this stiff upper lip was becoming quite a trend among friends and colleagues.

  She had gone to the university that day to discuss her situation with the head of the Psychology Department, where she had been teaching since her return from Germany a few years earlier, and she had not worn a head scarf, of course. Of course! The guard at the gate had called out to her from inside his cage. As I imagine it now, the guard’s post is literally a cage, a large protrusion of bars, but it may have been more of an outpost; made of metal perhaps? Or cement? With a window and a side door? I could pick up the phone and call Laleh, who two years ago finally moved to the U.S. and now lives in Los Angeles. I could ask her; she, unlike me, has a very precise memory.

  Have you come across that new guard? she asked me, a limp captive lettuce leaf dangling from the end of her fork. The clumsy one with a mournful countenance. The very big one . . . She was trying to avoid using the word fat. No, I had not had the pleasure of meeting the aforementioned guard. Anyhow, he is of Oliver Hardy dimensions. Bigger, she said, chewing now on her lettuce with ferocious determination. But the resemblance ends there. I mean, this guy was flabby but not jovial, one of those dour, mirthless overweight men who don’t even enjoy their food—you know the type.

  Could you please lay off the guard of the mournful countenance, I pleaded with her, and get on with your story? She attacked a small cherry tomato that kept slipping from under her fork and did not begin again until she had finally speared it. He came out of his cage, Laleh at last continued, and said, Ma’am, your I.D. please. So I took out my I.D. and waved it in his face and started walking, but then he called me again. Ma’am, you know you can’t go in like this? I said, I’ve been going in through this gate like this for the past eight years. No, ma’am, you have to have a head cover—new orders. That’s my problem, I said, not yours. But he wouldn’t let it rest. I am authorized to stop any woman who—at this point I interrupted him. I am not any woman! I said with all the authority I could muster.

  It’s right here, he protested, a written order signed by the president himself, that no girl, he corrected himself—no woman—is to pass in your condition. He said in your condition? I asked. Yep, that’s what he said. I took another step; he blocked my way. I took a step to the right; he took a step to the right. I stopped; he stopped. For a few seconds we stood there looking at each other, and then he said, If you go through in that condition I will be held responsible. In what condition? I asked him. The last time I checked, I was the only person responsible for my condition, so don’t you go around claiming responsibility for me. I don’t know what perversion made me argue with this poor guy, said Laleh, her hand now trembling in excitement, and to tell him things he couldn’t possibly understand. For a few minutes we just stood there, and then, on a sudden impulse, I looked over his shoulder to the left and, as he turned around, I ducked and started to run. To run? Yes, I ran.

  At this point we were served our veal scallopini and mashed potatoes. Laleh began to search for some hidden treasure in her potatoes, making investigative circles with her inquisitive fork. I thought he’d give up, she said at last. I mean, all he had to do was take the bloody phone and call the higher authorities. But no, not him. I stopped for a second to look back to see if he had fallen off, but there he was, and I swear, he pulled his belt up and swung his hips from side to side. He swung his hips? Honestly, he did. She made a swinging movement with her fork inside the mashed potatoes. And then he started to run after me, she said.

  Laleh and the fat guard had sprinted across the wide, leafy avenues of the university. Every once in a while Laleh would look back to see if he was still at it, but she swore that every time she stopped, rather than trying to catch up with her, he’d come to a halt, as if pushing invisible brakes to a sudden stop, then he’d pull his belt up, do the thing with his hips, and continue the chase. He reminded me, she said, of a panting, clumsy giant fish.

  Laleh ran by three startled students, made it down the short steps leading to the Faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature, nearly toppled herself as her heel caught in a crack, passed the wide open area in front of the building, ran up past the open door into the cool, dark hall and up the wide flights of stairs to the second floor, where she came to a sudden halt at the entrance to the Department of Psychology and nearly fell into the arms of her department head, who was standing in the doorway talking to a colleague. He tried to cover his embarrassment by exclaiming, What’s the matter, Professor Nassri, has there been an uprising? A few moments later the dutiful guard, sweat trickling down his cheeks like tears of desperation, his cap in his hand, came to a grinding halt by the door. There he made his explanations and the department head, not knowing whether to laugh or frown, dismissed him, promising to make a proper report to the proper authorities. An hour later Laleh had emerged from the door of the department, walked back to the entrance gate and, without so much as glancing at the guard, had
marched out, a free woman.

  A free woman? Yes, I was given a choice, to immediately comply with the rules or be sacked. I chose not to comply, so now I am a free woman. What will you do? I asked, as if I were not myself in exactly the same position. I don’t know. She shrugged. I guess I will go back to sewing or baking cakes.

  This was the astonishing thing about Laleh. She looked like the last person in the world to bake a cake, but she was an accomplished tailor, and a fantastic cook. The first time I met her, she struck me as everything that I was not: tidy and rather dry, the kind of person you would call correct. Her German education added to this illusion. I used to tease her that the word immaculate had been created for her. When I got to know her better, I came to see that all this orderliness was a camouflage for a passionate nature matched by insatiable desires.

  Her hair was thick and obstinately unmanageable: it would not succumb to comb, brush, gels, even perms. Yet she tamed it through hours of painstaking straightening and styling, giving her the appearance of an exacting and foreboding matron. I have to either shave my head or do it this way, she would tell me, her voice tainted with exasperation. Only her big black eyes, flickering with mischievous designs, belied her otherwise conservative appearance. Later, when she would climb the trees with my three-year-old daughter, I could see the amount of discipline it must have taken for her to control her wayward longings.

  As it happened, she was forced to make a living from her sewing for almost two years. She was not granted a license to practice child psychology, her specialty, and she had refused to teach with the veil. So she took up sewing, a task she abhorred, and for a while I and our other friends would go around wearing pretty chintz skirts with beautiful flower patterns, until a friend asked her to work at her school.