Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  When I first told him about my decision to resign from the university and to create this secret class he had said, How are you going to survive? You have severed your public contacts, your teaching is your last refuge. I said I wanted to teach a class, a literature workshop at home, with only a few select students who really love literature. Will you help me? I will help you, he said, of course, but do you know what this means? What? You will be leaving us soon. You are withdrawing more and more into yourself. You have gradually resigned from all activities. Yes, but what if I have my class? Your class will be at home. You used to talk about writing your next book in Persian. Now all we talk about is what you will be saying at your next conference in the U.S. or in Europe. You are writing for other readers. I said, I have you. He said, I am not a good example. You use me as part of your dreamworld.

  When we parted and I headed back home, my mood had already changed. I was thinking of the new novel I had lately been planning to add to our list—Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December—one that dealt with the ordeals of the East and those of the West. I felt guilty about my complaints to my magician. I had so much wanted him to change everything right there and then, to rub the magic lamp and make the Revolutionary Guards vanish, along with Azin’s husband and Mahshid’s boss. I wanted him to put a stop to all this, and he was telling me not to get so involved. I felt ashamed of myself for refusing to understand him, for acting like a petulant child carelessly punching a beloved parent.

  The sun had already started to set as I returned home; it seemed to withdraw one by one the brilliant specks it had scattered over the snow. When I got home I felt grateful to see a fire blazing in the fireplace. Bijan looked serene in a chair drawn closer to the fire, a small glass of bootleg vodka near him on the table, reading The Long Goodbye. From the window I could see the snow-covered branches and the faded outlines of the mountains, barely discernible behind the haze.

  8

  “They tried to be very modern about it,” Yassi said with a hint of sarcasm, sprawled in her usual place on the couch. Yassi was narrating her latest adventure with a “gentleman caller”—her term. There was a great pressure on her to get married: her best friends and closest cousins were either married or spoken for. “Both his family and mine agreed that we had to get to know each other before coming to any decisions. So we go to this park, and we’re supposed to become intimately acquainted by walking and talking for the next hour,” she said in the same sarcastic tone but with an expression that suggested she was enjoying herself.

  “He and I walk in front, followed by my parents, my older sister and two of his sisters. I can almost hear them as they pretend to talk casually about all kinds of things while the two of us pretend to ignore their presence. I ask him about his field: mechanical engineering. Reading anything interesting? Doesn’t have time to read. I have a feeling he wants to look at me, but he can’t. When he came to my uncle’s house to officially ask for my hand, he had to keep his head down the whole time, and here again it’s impossible to get a good look. So we walk side by side, our eyes glued to the ground. All the time I’m thinking crazy thoughts, like, How would a man know that the woman he was intending to marry was not bald?”

  “That’s easy,” said Nassrin. “In the old days, women from the man’s family used to scrutinize the would-be bride. Even her teeth.”

  “Thank God I have all my teeth! Anyway, we were passing our time in this fashion, until suddenly I got a brilliant idea: I started to walk faster, catching them all by surprise. As they tried to adjust to my pace, I came to a sudden halt, forcing them to almost collide into us. He was genuinely startled but tried to hide it by adjusting to my pace. I made some futile attempts to catch his eyes. Here’s what I was thinking: if he gets it and laughs, I’ll give it a chance. If he doesn’t, that’s it—I won’t waste my time. I knew every one of my uncles would have immediately joined me in the game.” After this, she fell silent.

  Well, what happened? “Oh,” she said as if she’d woken from a trance, “nothing.” Nothing? “No, the idiot didn’t even ask me why I was suddenly walking faster. Out of politeness, he just tried to fall into step with me. After a while I got tired of it and then we said good-bye and I didn’t respond to their inquiries until they stopped asking. I’m sure he’s by now happily married to a girl with less flesh on her,” she said, looking at us merrily. She always loved telling a good story, even when she herself was the butt of the joke.

  It had been an exhausting week for Yassi, what with this new suitor and her uncle’s departure for the States. Every time her uncle visited Iran—and it was not often—he provoked doubts and questions in Yassi, who would be plagued for weeks with vague and uneasy longings that made her yearn, without exactly knowing what for. She knew now that she must go to America, as she had known when she was twelve that she must play the forbidden musical instrument. Her playing of the instrument, her insistence on going to university in Tehran, her choosing to come to this class—all were preparations that led her towards her final goal: to be physically where her uncles were and to get a taste of the tantalizing fruit that had always dangled over the lives of her mother and aunts, beckoning and just out of reach. They, the women, had lacked nothing in intelligence and intellect, but they had lacked freedom. Yassi had no choice but to want to be like her uncles—not necessarily like them, but to be possessed of what seemed to her their inalienable rights.

  I didn’t want her to be married. I wanted her to go through the whole ordeal and conquer the obstacles. The odds were overwhelmingly against her, from family opposition—it was unprecedented for a girl to go abroad to study—to enormous financial difficulties. Then there was the problem of getting accepted to an American college and obtaining a visa. I wanted her to succeed not only for herself but also for the rest of us. I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams.

  This was a day for gentleman callers; Sanaz, too, was full of stories. After the failure of her engagement, Sanaz went on a spree, going on dates with different suitors and giving us meticulous accounts of the American-educated engineer with a green card—a status symbol—who had picked her out in a family photograph and, on arrival in Tehran, had sought her out and invited her to a Swiss restaurant; the rich merchant who loved the thought of an educated, attractive wife and wanted to buy a whole library for her so that she wouldn’t leave home, and so on. These outings were a matter of binge and purge for Sanaz.

  “Learn from us,” said Azin. “Why do you need to be married?” The flirtatious note had briefly returned to her voice. “Don’t take these people seriously—just go out with them to have fun.”

  My lawyer friend was having a great deal of difficulty in trying to help Azin. At first Azin had been adamant about wanting a divorce. Ten days later she had come to the lawyer’s office with her husband, mother-in-law and sisters-in-law. She thought reconciliation was possible. Soon after that, she barged in without an appointment; she was all bruised, claimed that he had beaten her again and taken their little girl to his mother’s house. Then at night he had knelt by her bedside, weeping and pleading with her not to leave him. When I mentioned this to Azin, she broke into tears again, saying that he would take the child away from her if she went through with the divorce. That girl was her whole life, and you know the courts, child custody always went to the father. She knew the only reason he wanted the child was to hurt her. He would never care for her; most probably he’d send her to his mother’s. Azin had applied for a visa to Canada, but even if her application was accepted, she couldn’t leave the country without her husband’s permission. Only if I take my own life can I act without my husband’s permission, she said, desperately and dramatically.

  Manna agreed with Azin, but it was difficult for her to admit it. “If I were you, I’d get out of this country while I can” had been her advice to Sanaz. “Don’t stay here and don’t marry anyone who’ll have to stay here. You’ll only rot.”

  Mahshid looked at her reproachfu
lly. “This is your country,” she said, pursing her lips. “There’s a lot you can do.”

  “There’s nothing you can do—nothing,” said Manna with a firm finality.

  “You can write and you can teach,” said Mahshid, throwing a passing glance at me. “We need good critics. We need good teachers.”

  “Yes,” said Manna, “like Professor Nafisi. Work your head off for so many years, and then what? The other day Nima was saying he would be making more money if he’d become a street vendor instead of spending all those years getting an M.A. in English lit.”

  “If everybody leaves,” said Mahshid, her eyes glued to the floor, “who will help make something of this country? How can we be so irresponsible?”

  This was a question I asked myself day and night. We can’t all leave this country, Bijan had told me—this is our home. The world is a large place, my magician had said when I went to him with my woes. You can write and teach wherever you are. You will be read more and heard better, in fact, once you are over there. To go or not to go? In the long run, it’s all very personal, my magician reasoned. I always admired your former colleague’s honesty, he said. Which former colleague? Dr. A, the one who said his only reason for leaving was because he liked to drink beer freely. I am getting sick of people who cloak their personal flaws and desires in the guise of patriotic fervor. They stay because they have no means of living anywhere else, because if they leave, they won’t be the big shots they are over here; but they talk about sacrifice for the homeland. And then those who do leave claim they’ve gone in order to criticize and expose the regime. Why all these justifications?

  He had a point, but things were not that simple: I knew Bijan wanted to stay not because he couldn’t find a job or a place in the States—most of his immediate family was there, and he himself had lived there more years than in Iran. I want to stay because I love this country, he told me. We should stay as a form of resistance, to show that we are not out-maneuvered. Our very presence is a thorn in their side. Where else in the world, he asked me, would a talk on Madame Bovary draw such crowds and nearly lead to a riot? We can’t give up and leave; we are needed here. I love this country, he repeated. Did I not love this country? I asked myself.

  Bijan agrees with you, I told Mahshid. He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home, literally building our apartment and our place in the mountains, and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It’s much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else. I guess the point is we all have to make our own choices according to our potentials and limitations, I said, and as I was saying it, I knew how superficial my words must have sounded to them.

  “I have the best excuse for going to America,” said a cheeky Yassi. “It’s because I am so plump. Fat girls, I’m told, have a much better time over there. They say Americans like them with a little meat on their bones.”

  “It depends on the girl,” Mitra offered with a slight jab at Yassi. Mitra, of course, would have no problem anywhere on earth, with her dimples and large brown eyes. She and Hamid had decided to head to Syria for a week to interview for Canadian residency—Canada did not accept immigrant visa applications in Iran. Although she still vacillated between leaving and staying.

  “Over here we have an identity,” she said doubtfully. “We can make something of our lives. Over there, life is unknown.”

  “The ordeal of freedom,” Nassrin said elliptically, echoing my favorite line from Bellow.

  Only Mahshid was silent. She, I knew, was more confident than the rest about what she wanted. She didn’t want to marry. Despite all her traditional beliefs and moral imperatives, Mahshid was less of a marrying type than Sanaz. She disapproved of the regime, but her problems were more practical than existential. Long disappointed about the prospects of marrying her ideal man, and utterly without illusions about her ability to survive abroad, she had set her whole heart and mind on her work. At the moment, her problem was how to surmount the stupidity and ignorance of her bosses, who rewarded her exceptional work with something akin to envy and held her political past over her head like a sword.

  I worried about Mahshid and the solitary path she had chosen for herself. And about Yassi and her irrepressible fantasies about that never-never land where her uncles lived. I worried about Sanaz and her broken heart and about Nassrin and her memories and about Azin. I worried about them all, but I worried most about Manna. She had one of these honest, demanding intelligences that is hardest on itself. Everything in her present situation offended her, from the fact that she and her husband were still financially dependent on her family to the mediocre state of intellectuals and the everyday cruelties of the Islamic regime. Nima, sharing the same feelings and desires, reinforced her imposed isolation. Yet unlike Yassi, Manna obstinately refused to do anything about her situation. She seemed to take an almost gleeful satisfaction from the knowledge that her powers were going to waste. She, like my magician, was determined to be harder on herself than on the world around her. They both blamed themselves for the fact that such inferior people had control of their lives.

  “How is it that we keep coming back to marriage,” Mitra said, “when we’re supposed to be here to talk about books?”

  “What we need,” I said with a laugh, “is for Mr. Nahvi to remind us how trivial we are to read Austen and talk about marriage.” Mr. Nahvi, with his dusty suit, buttoned-up shirt, layered hair and squishy eyes was every once in a while resurrected as an easy target of our jokes. He earned my eternal contempt the day he announced that the protagonist in Gorky’s Mother was a far finer specimen of womanhood than all the flighty young ladies in Jane Austen’s novels.

  9

  Olga was silent.

  “Ah,” cried Vladimir, “Why can’t you love me as I love you.”

  “I love my country,” she said.

  “So do I,” he exclaimed.

  “And there is something I love even more strongly,” Olga continued, disengaging herself from the young man’s embrace.

  “And that is?” he queried.

  Olga let her limpid blue eyes rest on him, and answered quickly: “It is the Party.”

  Every great book we read became a challenge to the ruling ideology. It became a potential threat and menace not so much because of what it said but how it said it, the attitude it took towards life and fiction. Nowhere was this challenge more apparent than in the case of Jane Austen.

  I had spent a great deal of time in my classes at Allameh contrasting Flaubert, Austen and James to the ideological works like Gorky’s Mother, Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and some of the so-called realistic fiction coming out of Iran. The above passage, quoted by Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature, caused a great deal of mirth in one of my classes at Allameh. What happens, I asked my students, when we deny our characters the smallest speck of individuality? Who is more realized in her humanity, Emma Bovary or Olga of the limpid blue eyes?

  One day after class, Mr. Nahvi followed me to my office. He tried to tell me that Austen was not only anti-Islamic but that she was guilty of another sin: she was a colonial writer. I was surprised to hear this from the mouth of someone who until then had mainly quoted and misquoted the Koran. He told me that Mansfield Park was a book that condoned slavery, that even in the West they had now seen the error of their ways. What confounded me was that I was almost certain Mr. Nahvi had not read Mansfield Park.

  It was only later, on a trip to the States, that I found out where Mr. Nahvi was getting his ideas from when I bought a copy of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. It was ironic that a Muslim fundamentalist should quote Said against Austen. It was just as ironic that the most reactionary elements in Iran had come to identify with and co-opt the work and theories of those considered revolutionary in the West.

  Mr. Nahvi kept following me to my office and spouting these pearls of wisdom. He seldom brought them up in class; there, he usually kept silent, preserving a
placid and detached expression, as if he had agreed to remain in class as a favor to us. Mr. Nahvi was one of the few students in whom I was unable to find a single redeeming quality. I could say, like Eliza Bennet, that he was not a sensible man. One day, after a really exhausting argument, I told him, Mr. Nahvi, I want to remind you of something: I am not comparing you to Elizabeth Bennet. There is nothing of her in you, to be sure—you are as different as man and mouse. But remember how she is obsessed with Darcy, constantly trying to find fault with him, almost cross-examining every new acquaintance to confirm that he is as bad as she thinks? Remember her relations with Wickham? How the basis for her sympathy is not so much her feelings for him as his antipathy for Darcy? Look at how you speak about what you call the West. You can never talk about it without giving it an adjective or an attribute—decadent, vile, corrupt, imperial. Beware of what happened to Elizabeth!

  I still remember the look on his face as I said this and, for once, used my privilege as his teacher to have the last word.

  Mr. Nahvi exercised a great deal of influence in our university, and he once reported Nassrin to the disciplinary committee. His eagle eyes had detected her running up the stairs one day when she was late for a class. Nassrin at first refused to sign a retraction stating that she would promise never again to run on the university premises, even when she was late for class. She had finally conceded, persuaded by Mrs. Rezvan, who had reasoned with her that her obstinate resistance was not worth expulsion from the university.

  During our reminiscences about Mr. Nahvi, I noticed Mitra and Sanaz whispering and giggling. When I asked them to share with us the source of their mirth, Sanaz encouraged a blushing Mitra to tell her story. She confessed that among their friends, they called Mr. Nahvi the Mr. Collins of Tabatabai University, after Jane Austen’s pompous clergyman.