Reading Lolita in Tehran - a review
The 1979 revolution in Iran would be more accurately termed a reactionary
and ultra-conservative movement. Like so many revolutions in history, it started
by opposing social injustice but was then followed by fratricide amongst the
revolutionaries and ultimately won by those led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
who opposed Westernization and secularisation and introduced a return to strict
Sharia law. As Christopher Hitchens explained in an excellent article
in Vanity Fair, this notion of Sharia,
[…] is based, in theory and in practice, on a Muslim
concept known as velayat-e
faqih, or
“guardianship of the jurist.” In its original phrasing, this can mean that the
clergy assumes responsibility for orphans, for the insane, and for (aha!)
abandoned or untenanted property. Here is the reason Ayatollah Khomeini became
world-famous: in a treatise written while he was in exile in Najaf, in Iraq, in
1970, he argued that the velayat could and
should be extended to the whole of society. A supreme religious authority
should act as proxy father for everyone.
What this translated to was that, whereas before the ‘revolution’
women in Iran were able to dress in colourful skirts and stockings, they were
forced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and other paramilitary zealots, to
cover their hair with the hijab or chador. There were protests
from angry women that were quashed, most famous being one held on International
Women’s day in 1979 where more than 100,000
women marched against the imposition. This protest continues to this day. A
young woman named Masih
Alinejad, who started a movement of posting photos of themselves without
covering called #MyStealthyFreedom now lives in exile in the US. In modern day Iran,
women are routinely
jailed for offences such as showing their hair, or disfigured
by acid for the crime of seeking a divorce.
Prior to 1979, the liberalisation was a noticeable trend in Iran, despite
many problems, under the Shah. For example, in 1967, the Family Protection Law
(qanun-I himaya-I khanivada) was introduced that departed from the traditional
Islamic sharia, abolishing the husband’s rights to divorce his wife simply by
exclaiming ‘I divorce you’ three times, and his right to polygamy. It also
increased the age of marriage to 15 for females, which was subsequently increased
to 18 in 1975. After 1979, the Family Protection Law was annulled and replaced
by the Special Civil Court Act, making laws compatible with Shiite Sharia laws
of the Twelvers, the sect that Khomeini belonged, and the marriage age for
girls was reverted back to 9.
Among other things, alcohol was banned as well as the broadcast of
most Western movies and non-religious music on the television or radio. Of
course, the suppression of political opposition, often fatally, was imposed,
with thousands executed in 1988 alone, mostly from leftist groups.
Imagine living through this transition as an educated woman, a
professor of English literature in fact. Imagine if the rights you’ve enjoyed and
perhaps taken for granted were suddenly snatched away from you. This is the
experience recounted by Azar Nafisi, the author of the autobiographic Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Nafisi, born in 1948, had lived in the West, including in America,
where she earned her PhD in literature. She returned to Tehran in 1979, just
after the revolution and taught at University of Tehran, the Free Islamic
University and the University of Allameh Tabatabai. She emigrated to the US in
1997.
In this book, she recounts her experiences through intimate
portraits and episodes, most of which are with various students as they talk
about literature, life, politics and love. For reasons of security, all her students are given pseudonyms. Hence my inclusion of the quotation from Nabokov at the beginning of this piece. Life in Tehran was reflected in many vignettes, for example, she reflects that one
of her students, Manna:
[…] had once written about a pair of pink socks for which she was
reprimanded by the Muslim Students’ Association. When she complained to a
favourite professor, he started teasing her about how she had already ensnared
and trapped her man, Nima, and did not need pink socks to entrap him further.
Nafisi then pondered on the one fundamental difference between her
students and herself:
My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was
created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country.
Yet we had a past to compare with the present […]. But my girls spoke
constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had
neer felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a
half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their
sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave
their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.
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| Women protesting against the forced wearing of hijab |
Nafisi taught English literature with a clear passion for the
likes of Nabokov, Austen, Fitzgerald and Henry James. Through the contemplation
of literature, she and her bright, eclectic mix of students, who would go to
her house to discuss these banned books, discovered ironies, questions, dissonances
within their own lives that galvanised and fuelled their desires for liberty. She
herself described “living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone
you loathe”. In explaining the power and universalism of literature, she read
to her students Fitzgerald’s favourite passage from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” where
Conrad wrote that the artist,
[…] appeals to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense
of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain…and
to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the
loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in
sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each
other, which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the
living to the unborn.
All totalitarian regimes attempt to control
thought and one way to do so is to control its writers, to control how people are
allowed to think. The so-called Chain
Murders (ghatl-haye
zanjireh-i) of Iran in
1988-89 were a series of covert or open murders that killed more than 80 prominent
dissident intellectuals including authors, poets and translators. Nafisi relates
meeting students after many years only to find out that they have been in jail
for their political activities, and finding out from them that others she
taught had been executed.
This terror even extended overseas, when, in
1989, Khomeini announced a fatwa, or openly soliciting murder, with the offer
of monetary reward, of the writer Salman Rushdie, for his supposedly
blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses.
This resulted in book burnings, smashing of shops, the murder of Rushdie’s
Japanese translator and attempted murders of his Italian translator, who was
stabbed, and his Norwegian publisher, who was shot. Attempts were carried out
to kill Rushdie and he was forced to live with permanent security for many
years. I outlined some details in a former
article.
Into this already rather putrid mixture is
thrown in the Iran-Iraq war – 8 years in which millions died and Tehran was
almost continuously bombed. Nafisi describes her own mental state as
oscillating between anger, frustration, defeat and hope. She debates with
herself and her friends and students on whether to continue to teach in an
institution altered by the new regime. She wrote about a debate she led in
class about the morality of The Great Gatsby, where the ultra-orthodox and unironic
was faced with the liberal and witty. She wrote about the conflict of choices,
the constipation of thought and a society increasingly costive with the
implementation from up on high an unfamiliar and alien version of her own
culture. She wrote of finding an index card in Washington, years later, on
which she wrote a quotation from Henry James that she had meant to show a
student. It was from a letter that James wrote to a friend who had lost her
husband in the First World War. James wrote:
I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel, because I
have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable
of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and
even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live
in this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these
admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.
Indeed, the book is suffused with feelings. It partly succeeds and
partly fails on that score. While there are a lot that is moving and
thought-provoking, there are portions that is too suffused with emotions, verging
on the histrionic, which disengages the readers emotional gear and detracts
from the important points that she is making. Contrasting with that, certain
sections, like her literary analysis, reads much better for the reason of
objectivity, ironic observations and a degree of self-removal. Had Nafisi taken
a more even tone more towards that of Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, say, it may have achieved even
greater emotional impact.
While the Iranian government stands by its atavistic social
attitudes such as making homosexualisty illegal, often punishable by the death
penalty, and sponsors
Hezbollah and Hamas,
the state of Iran is precariously balanced. As Hitchens wrote in the
above-mentioned piece:
Iran today exists in a state of
dual power and split personality. The huge billboards and murals proclaim it an
Islamic republic, under the eternal guidance of the immortal memory of
Ayatollah Khomeini. A large force of Revolutionary Guards and a pervasive religious
police stand ready to make good on this grim pledge. But directly underneath
these forbidding posters and right under the noses of the morals enforcers,
Iranians are buying and selling videos, making and consuming alcohol, tuning in
to satellite TV stations, producing subversive films and plays and books, and
defying the dress code. I found a bootlegger on my arrival at
Tehran’s airport and was offered alcohol on principle in every home I
entered—Khomeini’s excepted—even by people who did not drink. Almost every
Iranian has a relative overseas and is in regular touch with foreign news and
trends.
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| Satellite dishes are illegal in Iran |
Because it and its people had tasted so recently the flavours of relative
freedom, the memory of it, or as Nafisi described of her young students, a past
coloured by their desires, have kept aflame a revolutionary spirit. One might
recall the 2009 mass protests across Iran against the dubious presidential
election results. As recent as December 2017 and carrying over into 2018, in a
country where protests are not usually allowed, a series of protests broke out
in Iran against the economic policies and the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Up
to 25 people died and more than 4,000 were arrested. More recently, teachers
and retirees have come out in protest against low pay and meagre
pensions.
Lenin described a revolutionary situation as when the old order
cannot go on in the old way, and the people do not wish to go on in the old way. Or as Brecht wrote "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." While the heads of the state seek to quash imagination and the instinct for liberty, Iran, with its very long and proud history, preceding Islam, its very young
population, and its dissonance between the leaders and its
people, seem to be poised for such a revolution. Revolutions are often terrible
events and more often than not lead to regimes that are as terrible, if not
more so than the system they sought to destroy. We can only hope that the next
revolution is infused with some of the spirit Nafisi’s students showed during
their time growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran and yearning for a different future, where there are books, laughter and room for dreams.
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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