Nafisi takes on
Khomeini’s Iran with Western fiction
Iranian
teacher shows female students a world beyond their restrictive
society
Tobias Axel
Special to The Daily Star
Azar Nafisi is the best kind of teacher: resourceful,
imaginative, and committed. While teaching English and American
literature at the University of Tehran in the early years of the
Islamic Republic, she found ways of using the likes of Nabokov and
Henry James, Austen and Scott Fitzgerald to challenge her students
into questioning the narrow ethics that were threatening to outlaw
independent thought in Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran, which Nafisi
describes as a “memoir in books,” is part biography, part literary
criticism and part sociological study. Above all, however, it is a
vital testament to the very purpose of fiction: to assault the
rigidity of belief with the dynamism of imagination.
Following
the Shah of Iran’s exile and demise, and the rise to power of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime, Iran itself rapidly became a
place of fictions: in Nafisi’s phrase, “a fragile unreality.” In the
name of virtue innumerable men and women were incarcerated and
executed,! the legal age for girls to marry was lowered from 18 to 9
years old, roving morality squads would summarily arrest and torture
women for manifesting signs of Western decadence wearing nail
polish, or pink socks while new laws were introduced
legalizing “temporary marriages” which could last as briefly as ten
minutes: a way of disguising sexual abuses under a veil of decency
and legalising prostitution.
After being expelled from three
universities for refusing to wear the veil or compromise in her
teaching, Nafisi finally set up a private class of handpicked women
students to discuss the forbidden works of her favorite Western
authors. These classes became an escape from the unreality of the
everyday into a world of fiction in which morality was not built on
slogans, in which choice was not limited by harsh doctrine, and in
which identities were not dictated by the imposition of force. In
Nafisi’s classroom and later in the safe-haven of her living room
wher! e she would host her weekly meetings, reading became a
political act. In the closed world of Khomeini’s Iran, the
inflexible dogma of totalitarian rule dissolved individual identity
by outlawing debate and question. Quoting Nabokov, Nafisi describes
curiosity as “insubordination in its purest form.” By nurturing her
students’ the curiosity and encouraging them to risk their opinions,
Nafisi trained her students to be freedom fighters in a battle for
the imagination, waged through its very exercise. In fiction, Nafisi
found the arms to fight her captors.
While still teaching at the
university, Nafisi put The Great Gatsby on trial in response to
fierce protestations by a morally outraged student and to parody the
contemporary zeal for show-trials. Choosing the student in question
as the prosecutor, and two others to perform the roles of defense
and judge, she herself accepted the role of defendant: of Gatsby
itself. The result was not an outright win an actual vote
would have been too risky but the hour-long trial did succeed
in ! showing that the success of a work of fiction lies not in the
morality of its characters, “Is a novel good because the
heroine is virtuous?” asks Zarrin, the defense but in its
capacity to confront the cherished absolutes and received ideas of
the reader. Responding to the prosecutor’s rebukes that F. Scott
Fitzgerald preached materialism, the defense asserted: “He has
demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its
own terms.” By encouraging her students to “read a novel on its own
terms,” Nafisi’s trial placed the fictional works at the center of
the debate, thus requiring ideology to serve argument rather than
dictate it.
Faithful to her teaching, Nafisi never resorts to
boorish indictment or generalization; by allowing her stories to
speak for themselves, she offers a devastating account of the
climate in Iran. One such story of a bigoted male student, who
succeeds in having one of his female classmates expelled from the
university for! “sexually provoking him” is particularly resonant.
The girl’s hea dscarf was loosely tied and revealed a small
patch of skin on her neck. As Nafisi shows, it is a fragile and
fearful morality, not to mention masculinity, that is threatened by
a few centimetres of skin. By simply showing the inconsistencies and
abuses of an arbitrary and intellectually stultifying ideology, she
demonstrates the deep insecurity at the heart of the regime itself.
When asked to describe themselves in the first of Nafisi’s
private classes, many of the women attending had no idea where to
begin, as though pinning down identity itself was a transgression
that none could afford. Manna, one of the girls, describes herself
as fog; another, Yassi (the youngest) says that she is a figment;
Sanaz, a third, abandons words in favor of a black and white drawing
of a naked girl curled up in a ball, hovering in a bubble.
These
are portraits of fragmented ghosts haunting a home that has become
unfamiliar: By eradicating choice, and forbidding critique, the
Islamic Re! public effectively made exiles of its citizens.
Attempting to turn this imposed exile to her advantage, Nafisi
quotes Adorno to justify her endeavour: “The highest form of
morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.”
Books such
as Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, or Pride and Prejudice
made it possible for Nafisi’s students to find an alternative world
literal as well as metaphorical, moral as well as pragmatic
in which to learn and grow.
It is testament to Nafisi’s
courage as well as to her gifts as a teacher that she chose the
densely complex world of Lolita for study in the tense climate of
totalitarian Iran. The absence of a coherent moral ideology in the
work of many of Nafisi’s chosen authors is precisely the reason why
they were so savagely condemned; it is also exactly what made them
of such value for the students. While Nafisi has the humour to thank
the Islamic Republic for teaching her to truly enjoy the small
pleasures of transg! ression alcohol, music, literature, nail
polish her decisi on to tackle Lolita cannot be regarded
simply as an act of defiance for its own sake. Nor is she naive
about the metaphorical applications of Lolita to the Islamic regime.
Certainly, the fantasy that Humbert Humbert imposes on Dolores Haze
echoes the fantasy of a new Iran under clerical rule, but Nafisi
insists that such parallels are not her primary concern.
“I want
to emphasise once more that we were not Lolita, the Ayatollah was
not Humbert and this republic was not what Humbert called his
princedom by the sea,” she says.
Beyond the superficial
metaphor, Nafisi seeks through a study of Lolita to explore the
implications of “the confiscation of one individual’s life by
another” and to confer on her students what was stolen from Dolores
herself: the right to determine her own narrative and identity by
developing the confidence to make her own choices.
One of
Nafisi’s students writes, by way of epilogue to Reading Lolita in
Tehran, “Hardly anything has changed in! the nonstop sameness of our
everyday life. But somewhere else I have changed. Each morning … as
I wake up and put on my veil … to go out and become part of what is
called reality, I also know of another “I” that has become naked on
the pages of a book: in a fictional world, I have become fixed like
a Rodin statue. And so I will remain as long as you keep me in your
eyes, dear readers.”
Manna’s comments are proof that
independence is perpetually asserted in the creative imagination and
that the greatest threat to freedom is manufactured belief.
Azar
Nafisi’s book comes at a time when Iranian women are more in the
Western public eye than ever before. With the awarding this year of
the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi and the Jury Prize at the
Cannes Film Festival to Samira Makhmalbaf, and the huge critical and
commercial success of Marjane Satrapi’s comic-book Persepolis, it is
clear that an Iranian feminine voice of dissent is emerging, and its
most prominent featu! res are eloquence, humour, and humanity.
Collectively, these women sho w that creative insubordination must
be the most successful means of achieving liberation.
Tobias Axel is a writer, director and producer. He is
currently working on a short film and a feature screenplay
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