Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
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do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
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He advised others that if they wanted to write better, they should fall in love.
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I still find it in my former students’ letters when, despite all their fears and anxieties for a future without jobs or security and a fragile and disloyal present, they write about their search for beauty.
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Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.
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I reminded them of Humbert’s statement that he wished to stop time and keep Lolita forever on “an island of entranced time,” a task undertaken only by Gods and poets.
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We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the things we have to be thankful for! And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.
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Two of them, he thought, could make something of their writings. Shall I bring them to you? Will you meet with them? No, he was trying to get rid of people, not add to his acquaintances.
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These students, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. 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; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never 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, ...more
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I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.
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It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine. I seemed not to notice the unexpected and breathless quality of everyday life that belied every form of stability. After a while even the revolution found its rhythm: the violence, the executions, public confessions to crimes that had never been committed, judges who coolly talked about amputating a thief’s hand or legs and killing political prisoners because there was not enough room for them now in jail.
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I had just returned to my home, where I could speak at last in my mother tongue, and here I was longing to talk to someone who spoke English, preferably with a New York accent, someone who was intelligent and appreciated Gatsby and Häagen-Dazs and knew about Mike Gold’s Lower East Side.
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We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.
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Don’t go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked on to it.
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“We don’t have time for love right now,” he said. “We are committed to a higher, more sacred love.” Zarrin turned around and said sardonically, “Why else do you fight a revolution?”
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A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic—not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so.
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“But this is an Islamic country,” Nyazi shouted vehemently. “And this is the law, and whoever . . .” “The law?” Vida interrupted him. “You guys came in and changed the laws. Is it the law? So was wearing the yellow star in Nazi Germany. Should all the Jews have worn the star because it was the blasted law?” “Oh,” Zarrin said mockingly, “don’t even try to talk to him about that. He would call them all Zionists who deserved what they got.”
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This is an amazing book, she said quietly. It teaches you to value your dreams but to be wary of them also, to look for integrity in unusual places. Anyway, she enjoyed reading it, and that counts too, can’t you see?
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Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them.
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The fear was not of bullets: they were too immediate. I was scared of some lack, as if the future were receding from me.
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In retrospect, when historical events are gathered up, analyzed and categorized into articles and books, their messiness disappears and they gain a certain logic and clarity that one never feels at the time. For me, as for millions of ordinary Iranians, the war came out of nowhere one mild fall morning: unexpected, unwelcome and utterly senseless.
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“You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar, but the door is now metal instead of wood, the walls have been painted a garish pink, the easy chair you loved so much is gone. Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set. This is your house, and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house, to its walls and doors and floors; you are not seen.”
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“Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche had said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
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I wonder at what point in my life, and after how many years, the echo of the red siren—like a screeching violin that plays mercilessly all over one’s body—would cease in my mind.
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This had also become a ritual, to call friends and family to make sure they were safe, knowing that your own relief implied someone else’s death.
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When I think of how their talents were wasted, my resentment grows for a system that either physically eliminated the brightest and most dedicated or forced them to lay waste to the best in themselves, transforming them into ardent revolutionaries, like Farideh, or hermits, like Mina and my magician.
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It is also true that the war that had evoked his horror mesmerized him.
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During the Civil War, when James was discovering his own powers, he wrote in part to compensate for his inability to participate in the war. Now, at the end of his life, he complained about the impotence of words in the face of such inhumanity.
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The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.
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She said she did not wish to write but to teach. She was an inarticulate writer. She said, We envy people like you and we want to be you; we can’t, so we destroy you.
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Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed.
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My generation had tasted individual freedom and lost it; no matter how painful the loss, the recollection was there to protect us from the desert of the present. But what did this new generation have to safeguard them? Like Catherine’s, their desires, their yearnings, their urges to express themselves, were manifested in bizarre ways.
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weeping seemed to be a requirement, as if there was no other way of expressing the magnitude of our grief.
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Khomeini’s death carried its own illuminations. Some, like me, felt like aliens in their homeland. Others, like the taxi driver I came across a few weeks after the funeral, were disillusioned with the whole religious fraud, as he put it. Now I know how fourteen hundred years back they created the imams and prophets, he said—just like this guy. So none of it was true.
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It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
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It was a tribute to the degree of intimacy that had developed among us that we could easily shift from light banter to serious discussions of the novels. What we had with all the writers, but especially with Austen, was fun. Sometimes we even went wild—we became childish and teasing and just plain enjoyed ourselves. How could one read the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice and not grasp that this was what Austen demanded of her readers?
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I am too much of an academic: I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating. Although that is in fact my urge—to narrate, to reinvent myself along with all those others.
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Their inability to dance well is a sign of their inability to adapt themselves to the needs of their partners.
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It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen’s novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.
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She’d make fun of herself and say that she constantly feels . . . Indecisive? I’d ask. Nooo, what’s the word? Suddenly her face would light up. Cantankerous! No, Yassi, that’s not it. Definitely not cantankerous. Yes, well, indecisive as well as inadequate—that I do feel; maybe I also feel cantankerous.
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Times of peace often bring to the surface the extent of the damage, placing in the foreground the gaping craters where houses used to be. It is then that the muted voices, the evil spirits that had been trapped in the bottle, fly out in different directions.
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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.
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Did I not love this country? I asked myself.
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Love was forbidden, banished from the public sphere. How could it be experienced if its expression was illegal?
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We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin’s uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality. These girls, my girls, knew a great deal about Jane Austen, they could discuss Joyce and Woolf intelligently, but they knew next to nothing about their own bodies, about what they should expect of these bodies which, they had been told, were the source of all temptation.
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No matter how much you might disagree with some of these people or think of them as bad writers, compassion will ultimately overtake all other considerations.
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We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?
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Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me—
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It wasn’t courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don’t feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really.
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Taking a sip of water, as we know from novels, is a good way of gaining time.
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There, in jail, we dreamed of just being outside, free, but when I came out, I discovered that I missed the sense of solidarity we had in jail, the sense of purpose, the way we tried to share memories and food. She said, More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to movies. I am twenty-seven. I don’t know what it means to love. I don’t want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is. You’d call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess, she said, smiling.
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