Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
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Read between September 8 - October 7, 2023
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America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost.
Stephanie
because satan is the compeling character in that book
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I had started having nightmares and sometimes woke up screaming, mainly because I felt I would never again be able to leave the country.
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Most revolutionary groups were in agreement with the government on the subject of individual freedoms, which they condescendingly called “bourgeois” and “decadent.”
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beautiful and faithless Daisy
Stephanie
Huh
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so much in love with this beautiful rich girl who betrays him,
Stephanie
Did we read the same bok
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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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it appears strange to me only now, as I write about it, that as I was standing there in that classroom talking about the American dream, we could hear from outside, beneath the window, the loudspeakers broadcasting songs whose refrain was “Marg bar Amrika!”—“Death to America!”
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from the very start, the government had waged a war against women,
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my political activities during my student days, made in behalf of an unknown entity called the “oppressed masses.”
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vague and amorphous entity I thought of as myself.
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The unveiling of women mandated by Reza Shah in 1936 had been a controversial symbol of modernization, a powerful sign of the reduction of the clergy’s power.
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there were two kinds of torture, two kinds of killing—those committed by the enemy and those by the friends of the people.
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sense of utter helplessness, of inarticulate anger tinged with vague but persistent guilt.
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It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them.
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Maybe Mr. Gatsby was all right for the Americans, but not for our revolutionary youth. For some reason the idea that this man could be tempted to become Gatsby-like was very appealing to me.
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And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby.
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It began with “In the Name of God,” words that later became mandatory on all official letterheads and in all public talks.
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“Islam is the only religion in the world that has assigned a special sacred role to literature in guiding man to a godly life,”
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Through the Word you can heal or you can destroy. You can guide or you can corrupt. That is why the Word can belong to Satan or to God.
Stephanie
It has to be one or the other i guess
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“The only sympathetic person here is the cuckolded husband, Mr. Wilson,” Mr. Nyazi boomed. “When he kills Gatsby, it is the hand of God. He is the only victim. He is the genuine symbol of the oppressed, in the land of, of, of the Great Satan!”
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“What about Christian women who don’t believe in wearing veils? Are they all—every single one of them—decadent floozies?”
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they were arguing not over the hostages or the recent demonstrations or Rajavi and Khomeini, but over Gatsby and his alloyed dream.
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The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.
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There is nothing crass here, or the crassness is so mingled with the dream that it becomes very difficult to differentiate between the two.
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It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.
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He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future.
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I had a feeling that day that I was losing something, that I was mourning a death that had not yet occurred.
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all things personal were being crushed like small wildflowers to make way for a more ornate garden, where everything would be tame and organized.
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As I walked those dearly beloved, dearly remembered streets, I felt I was squashing the memories that lay underfoot.
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I had a strange experience: I felt as if my heart had been torn from my body and had landed with a thump in an empty space,
Stephanie
That would be disassociation
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My grandmother had refused to leave the house for three months when she was forced to unveil.
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The new regime had reached far beyond the romantic symbolism more or less prevalent in every political system to inhabit a realm of pure myth, with devastating consequences.
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I sprinkled my walnuts thoughtfully over the coffee-drenched ice cream.
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One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel.
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we had to have more respect for that “piece of cloth” than to force it on reluctant people.
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stern ayatollah, a blind and improbable philosopher-king, had decided to impose his dream on a country and a people and to re-create us in his own myopic vision.
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People like me seemed as irrelevant as Fitzgerald was to Mike Gold, or Nabokov to Stalin’s Soviet Union, or James to the Fabian Society, or Austen to the revolutionaries of her time.
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a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment,
Stephanie
Lol i have never. I am a judgy fuck
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the essential part of their life goes underground.
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made me resent my husband’s peace and happiness, his apparent disregard for what I, as a woman and an academic,
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Being a good architect or dedicated civil engineer did not threaten the regime,
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He was of the opinion that we had to serve our country, regardless of who ruled it.
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Until then I had worried for the safety of my parents, husband, brother and friends, but my anxiety for my children overshadowed all. When my daughter was born I felt I was given a gift, a gift that in some mysterious way preserved my sanity. And so it was with the birth of my son. Yet it was a source of constant regret and sorrow to me that their childhood memories of home, unlike my own, were so tainted.
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add with glee, you are pure Daisy Miller. I don’t know who this Daisy or Maisie or whatever of yours is, she tells me,
Stephanie
I see what u did there
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There were stories about how pregnant women gave birth to crippled children, how their mother’s anxiety had affected the unborn fetus in irremediable ways,
Stephanie
Oh no why
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How could I know that instead of my protecting him, he was coming into the world to protect me?
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But after the invasion, when their books were burned, their places of worship destroyed and their language overtaken, the Persians took revenge by re-creating their burned and plundered history through myth and language.
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In class, I felt I was having an exciting dialogue with my students; in my articles I became a rather dry teacher.
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She is very American—like an American version of Alice in Wonderland. Was this a compliment? Not particularly; it was merely a fact.