I just remembered a book that’s influenced the way I think about literature and women’s rights as much, if not more, than Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own — Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.
From amazon:
An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people’s lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and “shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color.” Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of “morality guards,” the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became “essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity,” she writes.
Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: “There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom,” she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive. –Shawn Carkonen
I remember the first time I picked up this book. I read the entire thing one spring afternoon, while procrastinating on my homework. It made me realize how much I was taking for granted. Nafisi, like Woolf, demonstrates the importance and almost revolutionary quality of being able to read freely, of being able to express oneself freely.
She’s one of the reasons I’ve read (and people always make fun of me when I admit this) pretty much every word of my homework assignments since I’ve been at Reed. Does that make me a nerd? Probably a little bit. At the same time, though, I really cannot imagine having limits on what I am allowed to say, limits on what I am allowed to read.
One of the most beautiful parts of her story, I think, is how literature became, as Nabokov says, ” a violin in the void.” The power of books to free, to help us grow, is amazing to me. It could very well be that I’m just a silly dramatic bibliophile, but I really do feel like language is one of our saving graces, as human beings. Imagination — just as in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading – is what keeps our souls from being imprisoned. I’m reminded of stories of how soldiers survived years in prison camps — men who held on to sanity by composing or reciting poetry in their heads, by designing their future houses, by teaching each other through taps how to do complicated things like fix TVs or cars. It is really, as Cincinnatus C. discovers, one of the only ways we can truly liberate ourselves.
Some things worth reading:
Azar Nafisi on Nabokov
Interview on Reading Lolita In Tehran
Nafisi on her new autobiography, Things I’ve Been Silent About:
-Lucy
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