Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

In almost all of his novels the struggle for power is central to the way the plot moves and is resolved.

he insisted on the most important of all human attributes—feeling—and railed against “the paralysis of my own powers to do anything but increasingly and inordinately 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 at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.” In letters to friends, again and again he urges

One of the peculiarities of James’s reaction to the war was the fact that his feelings and emotions were not aroused for patriotic reasons.

He wrote to a friend, Lilly Perry, that “the immediate presence of the Enemy transforms it from head to foot when one’s own nationality does nothing for one that keeps pace with transformation.”

He described himself as living under “the funeral spell of our murdered civilization.”

Nassrin had also called herself lucky; my students had developed a strange concept of fortune.

confess that I have no philosophy, nor piety, nor patience, no art of reflection,” he wrote, “no theory of compensation to meet things so hideous, so cruel, and so mad, they are just unspeakably horrible and irremediable to me and I stare at them with angry and almost blighted eyes.”

everything their teachers said and gave it back to them without changing a word. At the next class after that exam, I was furious. It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were expected and understood. I remember I told them it would have been better if they had cheated—at least cheating required a certain ingenuity—but to repeat my lecture word for word, to include not so much as a glimmer of themselves in their response . . . I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends.

stayed behind to plead their case. They were docile even

they had been told to memorize. They had been told that their own opinions counted for nothing.

“It isn’t their fault,” she said. “I mean, it is in a way, but I always thought you were one of those who cared.” The echo of reproach in her voice startled me.

“But you must think about where we are coming from. Most of these girls have never had anyone praise them for anything. They have never been told that they are any good or that they should think independently. Now you come in and confront them, accusing them of betraying principles they have never been taught to value. You should’ve known better.”

don’t know why people who are better off always think that those less fortunate than themselves don’t want to have the good things—that they don’t want to listen to good music, eat good food or read Henry James.

movie houses—but, God, I loved those books! I don’t think any rich kid has ever cherished Rebecca or Gone with the Wind the way I did when I borrowed the translations from houses where my mother worked. But James—he is so different from any other writer I have ever read. I think I am in love, she added, laughing.

He passed the entrance exam with a first, only to be denied a place because he admitted to being a Baha’i. During the Shah’s reign, the Baha’is were protected and flourished—one sin for which the Shah was never forgiven.

He was currently working at a pharmacy, the nearest he would ever come to being a doctor. I had never met him, but I’d heard of him, of his devastating good looks, his love for a Muslim girl, who would soon forsake him to marry a rich older man and would

At the start of the revolution, the revolutionary prosecutor bulldozed Reza Shah’s grave, destroying the monument and creating a public toilet in its place—which he inaugurated by pissing in it. I interrupted their conversation and asked if they wanted coffee. I brought out three mismatched mugs and set them on the table with a pot of boiling water and some instant coffee. He got up, went to the refrigerator and brought us a box of chocolates; always the perfect gentleman.

Can you imagine feeling guilty about trying to bury your grandmother, to give her any kind of burial, never mind a decent one?

Mogambo.

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.

but the most courageous characters here are those with imagination, those who, through their imaginative faculty, can empathize with others. When you lack this kind of courage, you remain ignorant of others’ feelings and needs.

It gave them a sense of community and purpose and power. He lost all that as soon as he returned from the front. His privilege and power meant nothing to him now, and his fellow Islamic students had already moved on. What

One did not have to agree with him or approve of him to understand his position. He had returned from a war where he belonged to a university he had never been a part of. No one wanted to hear his stories.

“My mother could choose whom she wanted to marry. I had less choice, and my younger sister has even less,” she concluded gloomily.

were unavailable, or unable, to satisfy them. A man could enter into such a contract for as short a period as ten minutes or as long as ninety-nine years.

“Some men, even the most educated,” Nassrin continued fiercely, “think of this as progressive. I had to argue with a friend—a male friend—that the only way he could convince me this was progressive was if the law gave women the same rights as men. You want to know how open-minded these men are? I’m not talking about the religious guys—no, the secular ones,” she said, tossing another orange peel into the fire. “Just ask them about marriage. Talk about hypocrisy!”

truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.” And

(without asking her first, I noted in passing).

At the start of the twentieth century, the age of marriage in Iran—nine, according to sharia laws—was changed to thirteen and then later to eighteen. My

But it was not the fashion then to think that our culture was not compatible with modern democracy, that there were Western and Islamic versions of democracy and human rights. We all wanted opportunities and freedom. That is why we supported revolutionary change—we were demanding more rights, not fewer.

and women, under law, were considered to have half the worth of men. Sharia law replaced the existing

Our society was far more advanced than its new rulers, and women, regardless of their religious and ideological beliefs, had come out onto the streets to protest the new laws. They had tasted power and were not about to give it up without a fight. It

Now, as you touch hands, look into each other’s eyes; okay, let’s see how much of a conversation you can hold. Say something to each other. They can barely keep their faces straight. Mojgan says, The trouble is we all want to be Elizabeth and Darcy. I don’t mind being Jane, says Nassrin—I always wanted to be the most beautiful.

In Austen’s novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space—not just space but a necessity—for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change. We needed no message, no outright call for plurality, to prove our point. All we needed was to read and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. This was where Austen’s danger lay.

incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy. Later, in Nabokov, this incapacity takes on monstrous forms in characters such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita and Kinbote in Pale Fire.

We talked about different instances in which the physical and mental abuse of women had been considered insufficient grounds for divorce by the ruling judge. We discussed cases in which the judge not only refused the wife’s request for divorce but tried to blame her for her husband’s beatings, ordering her to reflect on the wrongs she had committed to bring on his displeasure. We joked about the judge who used to regularly beat his own wife. In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.

At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing. The realm of imagination is a bridge between them, constantly refashioning one in terms of the other. Plato’s philosopher-king knew this and so did the blind censor, so it was perhaps not surprising that the Islamic Republic’s first task had been to blur the lines and boundaries between the personal and the political, thereby destroying

both.

Life in the Islamic Republic was always too explosive, too dramatic and chaotic, to shape into the desired order required for a narrative effect. 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.

was not just his religious beliefs that guided his decision; he did it out of necessity, for political support and protection, to compensate for the lack of respect

When the dissident writer Saidi Sirjani, who had the illusion of presidential support, was jailed, tortured and finally murdered, no one came to his assistance—another example of the constant struggle between the Islamic Republic of words and deeds, one that continues to this day. Their

Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power—the ones who had taken it away—become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive. In many ways these times of hope, of greater leniency, were as disquieting as before. Life had acquired the texture of fiction written by a bad writer who cannot impose order and logic on his characters as they run amok. It was a time of peace, a time for reconstruction, for the ordinary rhyme and rhythm of life to take over again, and instead a cacophony of voices overwhelmed us and came to supersede the somber sounds of war.

Political parties and political enemies were in jail and banned, but in the field of culture—literature, music, art and philosophy—the dominant trend was with the secular forces; the Islamic elite had failed to gain ascendancy in

The battle over culture became more central as more radical Muslim youths, intellectuals, journalists and academics defected to the other side. Disillusioned with the Islamic Revolution and confronted by the ideological void that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had nowhere to turn but to the Western democracies

they had once so vehement...

My book on Nabokov was published in 1994 with the support of some of the enlightened elements in that ministry. Experienced directors whose films had been banned after the revolution were allowed to show their work thanks to the progressive head of the Farabi Film Foundation, who would later be opposed and impeached by the reactionaries within the regime. The ministry itself became a battleground between different factions, what we would now call the hard-liners and the reformists. Many former revolutionaries were reading and interpreting works of Western thinkers and philosophers and questioning their own orthodox approaches. It was a sign of hope, if an ironic one, that they were being transformed by the very ideas and systems they had once set out to destroy.

Men are always more likable, more desirable, when they’re unavailable, Manna said in a surprisingly bitter tone.

It felt good to know where to put the blame, one of the few compensations of victimhood—“and suffering is another bad habit,” as Bellow had said in Herzog.