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paperback $15.00
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Reading 'Lolita' in Tehran
hardback £14.95
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ALSO SEE
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More reviews by Douglas Crets
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Reading 'Lolita' in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
At first glance, a book about seven Iranian women and their professor secretly reading Nabokov's Lolita may not seem to have much to do with life here in East Asia.
The claim implicit in AZAR NAFISI's READING 'LOLITA' IN TEHRAN, however, is that Western literature not just embodies universal values but that literature can help liberate the minds from whatever forms of political and social oppression they may be under. Iran (like other Asian countries) is not without a literary tradition of its own, yet Nafisi elected to use Nabokov and other Western classics.
Nafisi is a professor of Western literature, but that's is not the whole story. She earned her degree at the University of Oklahoma in the United States, returning home -- a bit unwillingly -- for her father's funeral, to an Iran plastered with propaganda posters and crawling with violently confusing political demonstrations.
Bewildered, but still excited from her American education, she accepts a post at the prestigious University of Tehran, in the Department of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature, but within months, the Islamic Revolution tears the fabric of her (and her students') country, their education and finally, their hope and imagination. Fed up with the totalitarian paranoia -- in one case, The Great Gatsby was put on mock trial for its sub-narrative of adultery -- she gives teaching while students pursue claims that Western literature is one of many examples of "the sinister assaults on the roots of [Iranian] culture."
She reads all day in her home, a refugee in her own country.
Tired of loneliness, and heeding the insistent pleas from former students, Nafisi tries teaching at other universities, but ultimately settles on inviting a group of women to her home every week to discuss Lolita. It is at these meetings that the heart of the story is revealed: Western literature exposes these readers to freedoms unimaginable in their own society:
- [M]y girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.
These women, and by extension, Nafisi would have us believe, Iranian women in general, lacked a sense of self. Reading fiction demonstrated, painfully, this hole in their lives -- but then provided a way for them to find, and define, themselves. Trapped by a regime that refused the possibility of a private world of moral complexities, these ideas could come from no other source than Western literature.
By why Lolita? Extreme situations call for extreme solutions.
If Nafisi is right about the effects -- and power -- of Western literature, her prescription applies not just to Iran but to any oppressive society, of which Asia has its fair share. She implies that Western literature embodies a deeper truth that other literatures, but also that these deeper "truths" (which in turn embody Western values) are in fact true, a point of view that many leaders in East Asia would dispute, as would leaders in Iran.
But is Nafisi right? She is, after all, the product of a Western education herself and, in the end, returned to America.
We read of singers who have their songs censored in China because they are "decadent" and "harmful to children." But for Nafisi, that's where truth lies, found in uncomfortable topics, such as the controversial sections of Lolita. Her students readily see themselves in the main character, a young girl stolen away, kept from her past and repeatedly violated by a sadistic and confused man. Nafisi readily selects controversial works of literature, from Flaubert's Madame Bovary and its adultery, to the greed and jealousy of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Nafisi's memoir is not a simple tourist guide to a tyrannical regime but an autobiographical treatise, a defense of "self" and Western literature's power to change lives. It's a literary sparkplug to start one rethinking the nature of human freedoms and the power of Western thought in places where it is not usually found. It questions the validity of any political leadership which perpetuates its power by creating myths about ethnic groups and religious affilitions and their place in the political system.
Nafisi's storytelling is enchanting, her memory prodigious. It is, quite simply, an amazing book, and one not bound by geography or culture.
Douglas Crets
19/11/2003
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Douglas Crets is the director of The Writing Life Project, a workshop series dedicated to offering intensive editing and creative writing experiences for secondary school students in Hong Kong. |
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