Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is a book by Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi.

Published in 2003, it has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over one hundred weeks and has been translated into thirty-two languages.

Plot

The book is a memoir of the experience of the author who returned to Iran during the revolution (1978-1981) and lived and taught in the Islamic Republic of Iran until her departure in 1997. It narrates her teaching at the University of Tehran after 1979, her refusal to submit to the rule to wear the veil and her subsequent expulsion from the university, life during the Iran-Iraq war, her return to teaching at the University of Allameh Tabatabei (1981), her resignation (1987), the formation of her book club (1995-97), and her decision to emigrate. Events are interlaced with the stories of book club members consisting of seven of her female students, who met weekly at Nafisi's house to discuss controversial works of Western literature and are interpreted through the books they read.

Structure

The book is divided into four sections: "Lolita", "Gatsby", "James", and "Austen".

"Lolita" deals with Nafisi as she resigns from The University of Tehran and starts her private literature class with students Mitra, Nassrin, Azin, Sanaz and Manna. They talk not just about Lolita, but One Thousand and One Nights and Invitation to a Beheading. The main themes are oppression, jailers as revolutionary guards try to assert their authority through certain events such as a vacation gone awry and a runaway convict.

"Gatsby" is set about eleven years before "Lolita" just as the Iranian revolution starts. The reader learns how some Iranians' dreams, including the author's, became shattered through the government's imposition of new rules. Nafisi's student Mr. Nyazi puts the novel on trial, claiming that it condones adultery. Chronologically this is the first part of Nafisi's story. The Great Gatsby and Mike Gold's works are discussed in this part. The reader meets Nassrin.

Nafisi states that the Gatsby chapter is about the American dream, the Iranian dream of revolution and the way it was shattered for her; the James chapter is about ambiguity and the way totalitarian mindsets hate ambiguity; and Austen is about the choice of women, a woman at the center of the novel saying no to the authority of her parents, society, and welcoming a life of dire poverty in order to make her own choice.

"James" takes place right after "Gatsby", when the Iran–Iraq War begins and Nafisi is expelled from the University of Tehran along with a few other professors. The veil becomes mandatory and she states that the government wants to control the liberal-minded professors. Nafisi meets the man she calls her "magician", seemingly a literary academician who had retired from public life at the time of the revolution. Daisy Miller and Washington Square are the main texts. Nassrin reappears after spending several years in prison.

"Austen" succeeds "Lolita" as Nafisi plans to leave Iran and the girls discuss the issue of marriages, men and sex. The only real flashback (not counting historical background) is into how the girls and Nafisi toyed with the idea of creating a Dear Jane society. While Azin deals with an abusive husband and Nassrin plans to leave for England, Nafisi's magician reminds her not to blame all of her problems on the Islamic Republic. Pride and Prejudice, while the main focus, is used more to reinforce themes about blindness and empathy.

Title

The title refers to Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Lolita, a story about a middle aged man who sexually abuses a 12-year-old pubescent girl. This is an indirect reference to the Islamic state, which took power in 1979 and soon afterward lowered the marriage age for boys and girls.

Background

Nafisi's account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In 1980, Nafisi was dismissed from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear a veil; she subsequently pursued an independent writing career, bore two children, and, after a long hiatus from teaching, took a full-time job at Allameh Tabatabaii University where she resumed the teaching of fiction.

The book also discusses issues concerning the politics of Iran during and after the Iranian revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, and the Iranian people in general. Nafisi criticizes Iranian soldiers who served during Iran–Iraq War. She writes: "[The students] were making fun of the dead student and laughing. They joked that his death was a marriage made in heaven - didn’t he and his comrades say that their only beloved was God?"

Nafisi also describes how her freedom was restricted and why she had to leave Tehran University in 1981: "I told her I did not want to wear the veil in the classroom. Did I not wear the veil, she asked, when ever I went out? Did I not wear it in the grocery store and walking down the street? It seemed I constantly had to remind people that the university was not a grocery store." Later making a compromise and accepting the veil, Nafisi came back to academia and resumed her career in Iranian universities until 1995.

The issue of veiling in Iranian society is a running theme in the book. In Nafisi's words: "My constant obsession with the veil had made me buy a very wide black robe with kimonolike sleeves, wide and long. I had gotten to the habit of withdrawing my hands into the sleeves and pretending that I had no hands." Ayatollah Khomeini decreed Iranian women must follow the Islamic dress code on March 7, 1979. In Nafisi’s view, the headscarf was the icon of oppression in the aftermath of the revolution. Nafisi wrote in her book referring to Khomeini's funeral: "The day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution." Ayatollah Khomeini established the new regime after a referendum (March 30 and 31, 1979) in which more than 98% of the Iranian people voted for the creation of the republic.Before the revolution, Iranian women were not obligated to wear the veil for almost fifty years . In fact, women who wore headscarves were banned from most universities and could not work as government employees.

Although Nafisi criticizes the Iranian regime, she also calls for self-criticism. In her speech at the 2004 National Book Festival, Nafisi said: "It is wrong to put all the blame on the Islamic regime or...on the Islamic fundamentalists. It is important to probe and see what...you [did] wrong to create this situation."

Despite its success in attracting many in the west, Reading Lolita in Tehran has not been able to attract many Iranians who believe she unjustly caricatures the country. However, Nafisi states in the New York Times, "People from my country have said the book was successful because of a Zionist conspiracy and US imperialism, and others have criticized me for washing our dirty laundry in front of the enemy."

Criticism

Nafisi's book has earned some criticism by Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi, who sees the book as basically being propaganda for the Bush administration to attack countries like Iran and Iraq. (The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2006) Dabashi wrote a critical essay in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English weekly Al-Ahram. In it, he used the late literary scholar Edward Said's work on Orientalism to critique Nafisi's memoir as evidenced in this quote: "By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: 'We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.' Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project."

Literature professor Fatemeh Keshavarz wrote a book entitled Jasmines and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran. She believes that Nafisi's book presents "many damaging misrepresentations" of Iran and its people, relying more on stereotype and easy comparison than on an accurate portrayal of the country and its people. The truth, Keshavarz contends, is that Iranian women are vibrant, teeming with intellectual curiosity and expression, and that the Iranian people are living not in fear but in hope.

In a critical article published in Comparative American Studies titled 'Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran', University of Tehran literature professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi too states that "Nafisi constantly confirms what orientalist representations have regularly claimed". He also points out that she "has produced gross misrepresentations of Iranian society and Islam and that she uses quotes and references which are inaccurate, misleading, or even wholly invented."

Cover of the book

The critique of the cover of this book was first made by Hamid Dabashi in his essay "Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire" -- and subsequently reverberated by Fatemeh Keshavarz. Dabashi states that "the immediate and intriguing aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran is its cover, which shows two female students bending their heads forward in an obvious gesture of reading something." Dabashi reveals that the picture on which this cover is based is from a news report during the Iranian parliamentary election of February 2000. In the original, the two young women are shown to be reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat as seen here. He suggests that "the denoted message here seems quite obvious: these two young women are reading 'Lolita' in Tehran--they are reading ('Lolita'), and they are in Tehran (they look Iranian and they have scarves on their head). The connoted message is equally self-evident: Imagine that--illicit sex with teenagers in an Islamic Republic! How about that, the cover suggestively proposes and asks, can you imagine reading Lolita in Tehran? Look at these two Oriental Lolitas! The racist implication of the suggestion--as with astonishment asking, 'can you even imagine reading that novel in that country?'--competes with its overtly Orientalised pedophilia and confounds the transparency of a marketing strategy that appeals to the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war....equally evident in this cover is the whole genre of colonial picture postcards of young Algerian women--staged, produced and bought by the French colonial officers. Malek Alloula has studied these pictures in The Colonial Harem (1995)."

Cited Books

In the endpapers is a list of books that are discussed throughout the book. They are, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

• Baghdad Diaries by Nuha al-Radi
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• Emma, Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Dean's December and More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
• Shamela and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
• The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James
• In the Penal Colony and The Trial by Franz Kafka
• The Confidence Man by Herman Melville
• Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading and Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
• My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad
• The Language Police by Diane Ravitch
• The Net of Dreams by Julie Salamon
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
• A Thousand and One Nights by Scheherazade
• The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
• The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
• The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky
• Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
• Address Unknown by Katherine Kressman Taylor
• A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe by Anne Tyler
• Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

References

• Mahnaz Kousha, Voices from Iran: The Changing Lives of Iranian Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 227-228.
• Richard Byrne, (2006). "A Collision of Prose and Politics." The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 13, 2006.
• Mitra Rastegar, "Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism, and "Liberating" Iranian Women," Women's Studies Quarterly 34:1&2 (Spring/Summer 2006), pp.108-128.
• Liora Hendelman-Baavur, "Guardians of New Spaces: "Home" and "Exile" in Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis Series and Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad," HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities, vol.8:1 (Summer 2008), pp.45-62.

External links

• Lolita and Beyond Interview with Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (as of 8/2006), on the subject of Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran.
• Review of RLT by Margaret Atwood in Writing with Intent, accessed 09-02-2008
• About Iranian memoirs
• Sorry, Wrong Chador
• Lust for life by Azar Nafisi
• Azar Nafisi speaks at the National Book Festival in 2004 (requires RealMedia or equivalent)
• Some excerpts from Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Lipstick Jihadists: Books That Will Misguide You, Hamid Dabashi, Publio.
• Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran: An Interview with Fatemeh Keshavarz
• Man With a Country [1]