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Reading Lolita in Tehran

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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. [1]

Plot

Template:Spoiler The book narrates the personal and intellectual events of a private literature class Nafisi started in Tehran after leaving her teaching post at the University of Allameh Tabatabei. The class consisted of seven of her best female students, who met at Nafisi's house every Thursday morning from 1995 to 1997, discussing forbidden works of Western literature.[2]

In this private class, they also discussed the situation in Iran shortly after revolution (1978-1981). One girl was arrested for displaying "Western attitudes", subjected to a virginity test, and raped multiple times by guards.[3]

Structure

The book is divided into four sections: "Lolita", "Gatsby", "James", and "Austen". Nafisi states that the James chapter is about ambiguity and the way totalitarian mindsets hate ambiguity; Gatsby is about the American dream, the Iranian dream of revolution and the way it was shattered; Austen is about the choice of women, a woman at the centre 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.

Title

The title refers to Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Lolita, a story about a middle aged man who becomes sexually obsessed with a 12 year old pubescent girl. This is an indirect reference to the Islamic regime, which took power in 1979, and who soon afterwards lowered the marriage age for girls to nine years old.[4]

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 Tabatabai University where she resumed the teaching of fiction.[5]

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. Some critics believe that the memoir is fictitious or, at the very least, highly exaggerated; scenarios are portrayed as autobiographical accounts of oppression, persecution, and personal suffering. [6]

Nafisi indirectly 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 carrier in Iranian universities until 1995.[7]

The issue of veiling in Iranian society is a running theme in the book.[8] 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 7th, 1979. In Nafisi’s view, this was the icon of oppression in the aftermath of the revolution.[citation needed] 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.[9] Before the revolution, Iranian women were not obligated to wear the veil for almost fifty years.[10]

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."[11]

Despite its success in attracting many from all over the world, Reading Lolita in Tehran has not been able to attract many Iranians. As Nafisi herself told 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."[12]

Criticisms

Recently, 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 an attack 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 literatureas the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolitaa 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."

References

  • Mahnaz Kousha, Voices from Iran: The Changing Lives of Iranian Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 227-228.
  • Byrne, Richard (2006). "A Collision of Prose and Politics." The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 13, 2006.
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