Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Louisiana

Being on Spring Break has its advantages. I can stay up past 10:00; my brain can finally function enough to finish Reading Lolita in Tehran, and I actually have time to devote to a blog posting. Earlier on my page I compared Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evonavich to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Comfortingly simple and highly consumable. I'm not about to make any gastronomic comparisons for Azar Nafisi's novel, but I will say that, like some of the best of both books and food, it requires time to digest.

The nonfiction narrative chronicles Professor Nafisi's life as an academic in the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, unlike most memoirs, her story is presented bibliologically (not a real word--I know) instead of chronologically. It is, as the subtitle suggests, A Memoir in Books. What that means is that Nafisi has structured her novel around her memories of teaching, reading, and responding to various authors, disregarding the constraints of a time line in order to tell a story that, for a reader, is poignantly stirring. The book follows Nafisi as she reads several controversial authors with her classes in the University of Tehran as well as with a small "class" of girls that meets in her home regularly after the Islamic regime has essentially forced Nafisi and so many others out of the university classroom. As she writes about her experiences with each author, the reader learns about the intricacies of a life in a state of constant oppression. (To clarify quickly, this blog is not designed to be and will not become a political soapbox; therefore, I plan on spending very little time discussing one of the central issues of the book--the cruelties of the Republic's regime. Nonetheless, it does merit recognition for the sake of Nafisi and so many others who have been physically, emotionally, spiritually, or metaphorically silenced by the current politico-religious situation.) Nafisi begins with the titular reference to Nabokov's Lolita. And though the title suggests that the entirety of the book is devoted to Nafisi's experiences reading this explosively shocking book in the reactionary state of Iran, the book moves past Lolita and Nabokov. In fact, I think the most moving portion of the narrative, for me at least, was her discussion of reading Austen in Tehran. Austen? Controversial? Pshah...right? But as Nafisi explains, Austen is quietly controversial. She subtly imbibes her prose with a thread of dissent. It's the harsh wit in Elizabeth Bennett's assessment of Mr. Collins. The cold cruelty with which she invites her readers to mock Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliott's self-indulgent philosophies. It's quiet and subdued, but it is there, lurking, waiting to be released by the canny reader. If you're still questioning the idea that Austen is controversial, think of her as going without underwear while wearing a skirt. From the outside, she appears prim, proper, and perfectly appropriate, but every once in a while a gust of wind sneaks up and exposes something no one was expecting.

And while the readerly portion of myself enjoyed the constant references to books, authors, and philosophers that I grew to know and love in school, the human and woman in me connected to Nafisi's distress of living a life of falsehoods, forced piety, and restriction that she neither asked for or welcomed. One of my favorite passages in the book occurs as Nafisi is wandering a quiet garden on a walk through Tehran. She is considering her life in this new Iran, and remembering her schooling in the United States. As she recalls this walk, Nafisi explains
     "I had a feeling that day that I was losing something, that I was mourning a death that had not yet occurred. I felt as if all things personal were being crushed like small wildflowers to make way for a more ornate garden, where everything would be tame and organized. I had never felt this sense of loss when I was a a student in the States. In all those years, my yearning was tied to the certainty that home was mine for the having, that I could go back anytime I wished. It was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile. As I walked those dearly beloved, dearly remembered streets, I felt I was squashing the memories that lay underfoot" (145).
Hearing her Reading her speak about the difficulties of finding/losing her sense of home helped me to understand how difficult living life under that sort of regime could be--not in the overt, obvious problems like having to wear the veil or losing your rights as a woman and academic. I think anyone could easily see how difficult those problems would be to overcome. But losing that sense of security and comfort of place that most of us associate with the image "home," that would be trying beyond any dress code.

It took me a very long time to read this book. It was difficult. It was dense. At times I felt as if I were trudging through a quagmire of emotion and memory that Nafisi herself could not quite sort out to her liking. But it was worth it. Sometimes we as readers need to be challenged. We need to put down the peanut butter and jelly, reach out, and overwhelm our senses. We need to experience life beyond comfort, equality, and home, if for no other reason than to enjoy and appreciate that which surrounds us daily. We need to experience something that is painful so that we can remember how good comfort is. And we need to read something that is overwhelmingly about a lack of empathy, something Nafisi explains is "to [her] mind the central sin of the regime, from with all the others flowed," in order to remember just how similar we all are in this world (224). And I think that experience is exactly what we look for and need in our reading. It is what makes reading so vitally important--a richness of experience. We have the opportunity to travel and reach far beyond out native land because we, as readers, have the capacity to experience life outside of ourselves. It is this idea, the ability to reach outside of oneself that constitutes what I consider to be Nafisi's most poignant expression of hope and possibility in the book:
     "I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts, and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and the private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?" (339).