Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

Yet I suppose that if I were to go against my own recommendation and choose a work of fiction that would most resonate with our lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it would not be The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or even 1984 but perhaps Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading or better yet, Lolita.

A stern ayatollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land. He had come in the name of a past, a past that, he claimed, had been stolen from him. And he now wanted to re-create us in the image of that illusory past. Was it any consolation, and did we even wish to remember, that what he did to us was what we allowed him to do?

A few weeks ago, while driving down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, my children and I were reminiscing about Iran. I noticed with a sudden misgiving the alien tone they had adopted when talking about their own country. They kept repeating “they,” “they over there.” Over where? Where you buried your dead canary by a rose-bush with your grandfather? Where your grandmother brought you chocolates we had forbidden you to eat? They did not remember many things. Some memories made them sad and nostalgic; others they dismissed. The names of my parents, Bijan’s aunt and uncle, our close friends, they evoked like magic mantras joyfully taking shape and disappearing with each utterance.

Those were crucial days in Iranian history. A battle was being fought on all levels over the shape of the constitution and the soul of the new regime.

I did not want to enter a debate with Mahtab and her friends, whose Marxist organization had tacitly taken sides with the government, denouncing the protesters as deviant, divisive and ultimately acting in the service of the imperialists. Somehow I found myself arguing not with Mr. Bahri but with them, the ostensibly progressive ones. They claimed that there were bigger fish to fry, that the imperialists and their lackeys needed to be dealt with first. Focusing on women’s rights was individualistic and bourgeois and played into their hands. What imperialists, which lackeys?

Arguing with my leftist students, I had a funny feeling that I was talking to a younger version of myself, and the gleam I saw in that familiar stranger’s face frightened me. My students were more respectful, less aggressive than I had been when I argued a point—they were talking to their professor, after all, with whom they sort of sympathized, to a fellow traveler who might be saved.

When he spoke again, it was to say that he felt one single film by Laurel and Hardy was worth more than all their revolutionary tracts, including those of Marx and Lenin. What they called passion was not passion, not even madness; it was some coarse emotion not worthy of true literature. He said that if they changed the curriculum, he would refuse to teach.

But Ayatollah Khomeini and some within the ruling elite refused to sign a truce. They were determined now to capture the holy city of Karballa, in Iraq, the site of martyrdom of Imam Hussein. Any and all methods were used to achieve their purposes, including what became known as “human wave” attacks, where thousands of Iranian soldiers, mainly very young boys ranging in age from ten to sixteen and middle-aged and old men, cleared the minefields by walking over them. The very young were caught up in the government propaganda that offered them a heroic and adventurous life at the front and encouraged them to join the militia, even against their parents’ wishes.

The mullahs would regale us with stories of the unequal battles in which the Shiite saints had been martyred by infidels, while at times breaking into hysterical sobs, whipping their audience into a frenzy, welcoming martyrdom for the sake of God and the Imam. In contrast, the world of the viewers was one of silent defiance, a defiance that was meaningful only in the context of the raucous commitment demanded by the ruling hierarchy, but otherwise permeated, inevitably and historically, by resignation.