The book and the reply

[Betty]

Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir by Azar Nafisi, reflects upon her experiences as an university English teacher of Western literature (Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen) in Tehran, and upon her feelings about everyday Iranian life during the postevolution in the 1980s to 1990s and during the Iran-Iraq war 1980-88 until her departure to the U.S. in 1997.

[Lindsey]

I'm looking forward to reading it - finally.

[Betty]

I read parts every few pages, getting its idea; hope reading the whole book happens!
:)

[Betty]

Now, we come to Fatemeh Keshavarz's response, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran to RLT. Like Nafisi, she also is an Iranian author/scholar who moved to the West. I for one would be interested in her comments about the poet Furugh Farrukhzad and the novelist Shahrnush Parsi'pur.

[Betty]

Returning to Nafisi's memoir RLT, I see its first chapter is all about her private class (about eight) of Iranian university students reading and discussing Nabokov's Lolita and a bit of The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights at Nafisi's home--

"to read, discuss, and respond to works of fiction."

One of the themes is their being shaped by someone else's dream instead of as each imagines her/himself--

"the confiscation of one individual's life by another."

Another theme is being

"...caught between tradition and change. I've been in the middle of it all my life."

The Nabokov chapter ends with the recommendation to

"...find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other."

[Betty]

The The Great Gatsby chapter of RLT shows great insight into Fitzgerald's novel and Gatsby's dream of love. Nafisi's university classroom puts on trial this book because of its questionable morality. A question posed about it is whether readers model their lives on fictional characters? And, is a writer's task morally didactic? or, a reader's task greater sensitivity "to others' problems and pains"?

"I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes."

Interspersed with discussion of that controversial novel is Nafisi's eyewitness account of university protests and her involvement in them.

[Marieke]

I read nafisi's book when it first came out. I enjoyed it but also felt like I wasn't well-read enough in the classics. I'm really curious about this response from Keshavarz.

[Betty]

So am I, Marieke. Wikipedia has some material about Fatemeh Keshavarz which might possibly be interesting.

[Betty]

A comparison of women's depiction in those two memoirs might be helpful!

[Betty]

Coming to Nafisi's final section, the Austen novel; eager to see how Keshavarz responds, the point of reading both books.

[Betty]

The Austen section of RLT partly is about Pride and Prejudice and marriage--how/why the young women marry and what are their marriages like--the ones in Austen's book and in Nafisi's classroom. The latter is the private side of Nafisi's students' lives, which is juxtaposed with their public lives, where the curtailment of personal freedom in choice and expression requires accommodation without succumbing to victimization.

"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."

"...the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience."

"...refusing to give up their right to pursue happiness..."

Nafisi mentions that her students came from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs.

[Betty]

In my reading further, I notice that Nafisi clarifies Austen's approach to marriage as more the backdrop of her characters' lives.

"It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the institution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony. This is apparent from all of the mismatched marriages in her novels...Like Scheherazade in her tales, one finds an infinite variety of good and bad marriages, good and bad men and women."

This final section of the memoir--she left Iran in 1997--portrays her feelings about making that decision and her students' whereabouts several years later.

[Betty]

Marieke wrote: "I read nafisi's book when it first came out. I enjoyed it but also felt like I wasn't well-read enough in the classics. I'm really curious about this response from Keshavarz."

I am at the beginning of Keshavarz's response to RLT now. She opens with "This has indeed been a delightful journey in writing." Then, her purposes are stated: first, to understand literary narrative like Nafisi's RLT which she calls New Orientalist narrative in its point of view, and, second, to inform persons unfamiliar with Iranian culture about it by bringing to the fore examples of Iranian female authors, of classic Sufi stories, and of personal eyewitness through visits.

[Betty]

The title Jasmine and Stars derives from the author's childhood memories of Shiraz summer nights during the 1960s--canopy of stars sleeping outdoors and fragrant jasmine being brought indoors--good memories along with disliked dark clouds of green grasshoppers.

People memorized medieval Persian poetry of Hāfez, Rumi, and Sa'di, quoting applicable lines in their daily, modern lives.

[Betty]

"The Eternal Forough..."/"The Eternal Light"

فروغ فرخزاد, Forough Farrokhzad, a widely known poet ("the main move is to cross the inner borders and access the core of life itself"), who died early. She possessed great self-assurance and personal independence, both contrasting with the media-driven image of submissive, "sensationalized" Muslim women as well as defining the archetype for the real Iranian woman. Nonetheless, Keshavarz recognizes from personal experience the expectations--"virginity", "distinct gender roles", "stigma of divorce"--of a traditional culture towards single, divorced females.

[Betty]

The Jasmine and Stars chapter "My Uncle the Painter" supports Keshavarz's thesis of contemporary Iran's being culturally alive as in pre-Islamic days. Further, every Iranian male does not portray the dour men in Reading Lolita. K's other criticism pertains to critics of Iran's religion. She turns to Sufi poets and to medieval philosophy of religion in Abu Hamid Mohammad Ghazali to describe the mystery, rationality, and love in its tenets.

[Betty]

Jasmine and Stars, Chapter 4 'Women without Men: Fireworks of the Imagination"

Discusses Shahrnush Parsipur's somewhat magic realist fiction Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran, a contemporary Persian novel. She asks, "...how can women break out of it and get on the road?", a question to be literally taken and a theme in this story of several women who courageously set out alone and inadvertently meet in a Tehran garden:

"Discovering the world is not for sissies. It means losing the protection of home, or abandoning it because it has never really provided much protection. It means taking responsibility for yourself."

"If learning means travel, and travel implies danger, so be it."

"The women are safe and their basic needs met. They can now think about life beyond the walls of the garden."

Very interesting imo is the flowering woman Tree watered with human milk.

[Betty]

Jasmine and Stars chapter 5 The Good, the Missing and the Faceless What is Wrong with RLT

After a summary of Jasmine and Stars thus far, Keshavarz goes on to point contemporary Iran's multidisciplinary, cultural stars out and show how RLT consistently approves westernized views, people, and actions not so unlike the Iranian ones N criticizes or doesn't notice.

[Betty]

Jasmine and Stars's concluding chapter 6 Tea with My Father and the Saints is charming. The author introduces more male family members to her uncle the painter--her father Baba and Amu Vazin. She describes the life-relevant ideas of Sufi mystics Bayazid, Junayd of Baghdad, and Rumi and retells the eight-hundred-year-old story of Shirin and Khusrau.