HBHSBI afisi FROM READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN AZAR NAFISI (b. 1950) was raised in Tehran, Iran, and educated in England and the United States. Having returned to Iran in the 1970s to teach English literature, she experienced firsthand the revolution and its aftermath, when strict Islamic religious codes were imposed; the harshest restrictions were placed on women. Nafisi has said that "before the revolution I had an image of myself as a woman, as a writer, as an academician, as a person with a set of val­ ues." Afterward, even the smallest public gestures were forbidden, from kissing her husband in public to shaking hands with a colleague. Fear- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ing she would "become someone who was a "I think if a civilization or a stranger to herself," Nafisi resigned her univer­ culture does not take its own sity position in 1995 and for two years took a group of her best students "underground" for works of literature seriously weekly discussions of Western authors, includ­ it goes downhill. You need ing Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita and imagination in order to imagine a the subject of Nafisi's scholarly work. Reading future that doesn't exist." Lolita in Tehran (2003), the book she wrote S- about her experiences, has been translated into thirty-two languages, won multiple awards, and spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. "Unfortunately you have to be deprived of something in order to understand its worth," Nafisi told an interviewer. "I think if a civilization or a culture does not take its own works of literature seriously it goes downhill. You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist." Nafisi left Iran with her family in 1997. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the director of the Dialogue Project, an education and policy initiative for the development of democracy and human rights in the Muslim world. This essay, adapted from Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She has since published a second memoir, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter (2008), which focuses on her family. 499 From Reading Lolita in Tehran • Nafisi 5 01 SOO PART 2 • EXPOSITORY WRITING ,1,1111111111 mi i urn i iiiiiiiiiiiiiii i in minim i illiniu11111111MII1111111111111U111111111m M 111M 111II1111111111II11111II111111111111iIM ltllllllllllllllll«lllllllllllllllllllllllllllll»lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllfllll| explained that she was late because the female guards at the door, finding a IN THE FALL OF 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I blush in her bag, had tried to send her home with a reprimand. ••P decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best Why did I stop teaching so suddenly? I had asked myself this ques­ and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every tion many times. Was it the declining quality of the university? The ever- Thursday morning to discuss literature. They were all women—to teach a increasing indifference among the remaining faculty members and stu­ mixed class in the privacy of my home was too risky, even if we were dis­ dents? The daily struggle against arbitrary rules and restrictions? cussing harmless works of fiction. I often went over in my mind the reaction of the university officials to For nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they my letter of resignation. They had harassed and limited me in all manner of came to my house, and almost every time, I could not get over the shock of ways, monitoring my visitors, controlling my actions, refusing my long-over­ seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. When due tenure; and when I resigned, they infuriated me by suddenly commiser­ my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and ating and by refusing to accept my resignation. The students had threatened robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her to boycott classes, and it was of some satisfaction to me to find out later that own inimitable self. Our world in that living room with its window fram­ despite threats of reprisals, they in fact did boycott my replacement. Every­ ing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our self-contained one thought I would break down and eventually return. It took two more universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that years before they finally accepted my resignation. sprawled below. Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation, was subservi­ The theme of the class was the relationship between fiction and real­ ent to politics and subject to arbitrary rules. Always, the joy of teaching was ity. We would read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own marred by diversions and considerations forced on us by the regime—how lady of fiction, Scheherazade, from A Thousand and One Nights, along with well could one teach when the main concern of university officials was not Western classics—Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Daisy Miller, The the quality of one's work but the color of one's lips, the subversive poten­ Dean's December, and Lolita, the work of fiction that perhaps most reso­ tial of a single strand of hair? Could one really concentrate on one's job nated with our lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the first time in many when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word "wine" from years, I felt a sense of anticipation that was not marred by tension: I would a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Bronte because she not need to go through the tortuous rituals that had marked my days when I appeared to condone adultery? taught at the university—rituals governing what I was forced to wear, how I was expected to act, the gestures I had to remember to control. In selecting students for study in my home, I did not take into consid­ Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, 10 eration their ideological or religious backgrounds. Later, I would count it as when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and the class's great achievement that such a mixed group, with different and storms. It was unpredictable: The regime would go through cycles of some at times conflicting backgrounds, personal as well as religious and social, tolerance, followed by a crackdown. Now, in the mid-1990s, after a period remained so loyal to its goals and ideals. One reason for my choice of these of relative calm and so-called liberalization, we had again entered a time particular girls was the peculiar mixture of fragility and courage I sensed of hardships. Universities had once more become the targets of attack by in them. They were what you would call loners, who did not belong to any the cultural purists, who were busy imposing stricter sets of laws, going so particular group or sect. I admired their ability to survive not despite but in far as to segregate men and women in classes and punishing disobedient some ways because of their solitary lives. professors. One of the first books we read was Nabokov's Invitation to a Behead­ The University of Allameh Tabatabai, where I had been teaching since 5 ing. Nabokov creates for us in this novel not the actual physical pain and 1987, had been singled out as the most liberal university in Iran. It was torture of a totalitarian regime but the nightmarish quality of living in an rumored that someone in the Ministry of Higher Education had asked, rhe­ atmosphere of perpetual dread. Cincinnatus C. is frail, he is passive, he is a torically, if the faculty at Allameh thought they lived in Switzerland. Swit­ hero without knowing or acknowledging it: He fights with his instincts, and zerland had somehow become a byword for Western laxity. Any program his acts of writing are his means of escape. He is a hero because he refuses or action that was deemed un-Islamic was reproached with a mocking to become like all the rest. reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland. We formed a special bond with Nabokov despite the difficulty of his The pressure was hardest on the students. I felt helpless as I listened to prose. This went deeper than our identification with his themes. His novels their endless tales of woe. Female students were being penalized for run­ are shaped around invisible trapdoors, sudden gaps that constantly pull the ning up the stairs when they were late for classes, for laughing in the hall­ carpet from under the reader's feet. They are filled with mistrust of what we ways, for talking to members of the opposite sex. One day Sanaz had barged call everyday reality, an acute sense of that reality's fickleness and frailty. into class near the end of the session, crying. In between bursts of tears, she 502 PART 2 • EXPOSITORY WRITING From Reading Lolita in Tehran • Nafisi50 3 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111 11111111 I .afiiiiiiiiii*11 iiiifIIJ•• • • • • • • iiIIIIIIiiiilliiiiiiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiaiiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiifiiiiiiifltti There was something, both in his fiction and in his life, that we instinctively to distance her mind as much as possible from her surroundings. Perhaps related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all she is thinking of her distant boyfriend and the time when she will meet him options are taken away.