Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

Switzerland had somehow become a byword for Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un-Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland.

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

But, she added, everyday life does not have fewer horrors than prison.

Nabokov’s claim that “readers were born free and ought to remain free.”

In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.

The chief film censor in Iran, up until 1994, was blind. Well, nearly blind.

Could she ever live the life of someone like me, live on her own, take long walks holding hands with someone she loved, even have a little dog perhaps? She did not know. It was like this veil that meant nothing to her anymore yet without which she would be lost. She had always worn the veil. Did she want to wear it or not? She did not know.

but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita . . . having no will, no consciousness—indeed no real life of her own.”

Like my students, Lolita’s past comes to her not so much as a loss but as a lack, and like my students, she becomes a figment in someone else’s dream.

Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life through her prison bars.

Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such, she becomes a double victim: not only her life but also her life story is taken from her.

“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”

Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

In Iran a strange distance informed our relation to these daily experiences of brutality and humiliation. There, we spoke as if the events did not belong to us; like schizophrenic patients, we tried to keep ourselves away from that other self, at once intimate and alien.

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes.

The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

My experiences, especially my teaching experiences, in Iran have been framed by the feel and touch of that aborted handshake, as much as by that first approach and the glow of our naÏve, excited conversation. The image of my student’s oblique smile has remained, brilliant yet opaque, while the room, the walls, the chairs and the long conference table have been covered over by layers and layers of what usually in works of fiction is called dust.

Later women were banned from singing, because a woman’s voice, like her hair, was sexually provocative and should be kept hidden.

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.

I read to them Fitzgerald’s favorite passage from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” about how 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.”

This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

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.

A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil

What mattered was that the university should not be closed at all, that it should be allowed to function as a university and not become a battleground for different political forces.

it was not that piece of cloth that I rejected, it was the transformation being imposed upon me that made me look in the mirror and hate the stranger I had become.

I had not realized how far the routines of one’s life create the illusion of stability. Now that I could not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, I felt light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe.

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.”

“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.”

Somehow these shabby posters and their slogans interfered with my work; they made me forget that I was at the university to teach literature. There were reprimands posted about the color of our uniforms, codes of conduct, but never a notice about a talk, a film or a book.

“People are afraid to talk. This is a controversial subject. If we tell the truth, we’re afraid he will report us. If we say what he wants to hear, we are afraid of you. We all appreciate your class.” Yes, I thought as I walked home that evening and, long after that, whenever this conversation returned to mind. You appreciate the class, but do you appreciate Daisy Miller? Well, do you?

people like Ghomi always attack, because they are afraid of what they don’t understand. What they say is we don’t need James, but what they really mean is we are afraid of this fellow James—he baffles us, he confuses us, he makes us a little uneasy.

but you are not fictional, or are you? And he said, Well, right now I seem to be a figment of your imagination.

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution.

I understood then that this resignation was perhaps, under the circumstances, the only form of dignified resistance to tyranny. We could not openly articulate what we wished, but we could by our silence show our indifference to the regime’s demands.

If I were not privileged, she said with rancor, if I were not blessed with a father who shared their faith, God knows where I would be now—in hell with all the other molested virgins or with those who put a gun to someone’s head to prove their loyalty to Islam.

I 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.

It seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the personal or private.

the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him.

I bought a copy of the slim volume and carried it with me to America, along with the leaflets, relics from a time whose reality seems so fragile at times that I need such hard evidence to prove its fugitive existence.

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.

This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.

I know these people better than you; they change their words more often than their clothes.

Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.

We should stay as a form of resistance, to show that we are not out-maneuvered. Our very presence is a thorn in their side. Where else in the world, he asked me, would a talk on Madame Bovary draw such crowds and nearly lead to a riot? We can’t give up and leave; we are needed here. I love this country, he repeated. Did I not love this country? I asked myself.

As I sat there in that packed house, I decided that the only way the night could possibly be turned into an entertainment was if I pretended to be an outside observer who had come not to have fun but to report on a night out in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?

We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.

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.