Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  I tried to ignore the meaningful glances they exchanged among themselves.

  “It is hard for me,” Mahshid said at last, “to read the parts about Lolita’s feelings. All she wants is to be a normal girl. Remember the scene when Avis’s father comes to pick her up and Lolita notices the way the fat little daughter and father cling to each other? All she wants is to live a normal life.”

  “It is interesting,” said Nassrin, “that Nabokov, who is so hard on poshlust, would make us pity the loss of the most conventional forms of life.”

  “Do you think Humbert changes when he sees her in the end,” Yassi interrupted, “broken, pregnant and poor?”

  The time for our break had come and gone, but we were too absorbed in our discussion to notice. Manna, who seemed engrossed by a passage in the book, raised her head. “It’s strange,” she said, “but some critics seem to treat the text the same way Humbert treats Lolita: they only see themselves and what they want to see.” She turned to me and continued: “I mean, the censors, or some of our politicized critics, don’t they do the same thing, cutting up books and re-creating them in their own image? What Ayatollah Khomeini tried to do to our lives, turning us, as you said, into figments of his imagination, he also did to our fiction. Look at Salman Rushdie’s case.”

  Sanaz, playing with her long hair and rolling it around her finger, looked up and said, “Many people feel that Rushdie portrayed their religion in a distorted and irreverent manner. I mean, they don’t object to his writing fiction but to his being offensive.”

  “Is it possible to write a reverent novel,” said Nassrin, “and to have it be good? Besides, the contract with the reader is that this is not reality, it’s an invented world. There must be some blasted space in life,” she added crossly, “where we can be offensive, for God’s sake.”

  Sanaz was a little startled by the vehemence of Nassrin’s retort. Through most of this discussion, Nassrin had been drawing furious lines in her notebook, and after she had delivered her pronouncement, she went on with her drawing.

  “The problem with the censors is that they are not malleable.” We all looked at Yassi. She shrugged as if to say she couldn’t help it, the word appealed to her. “Do you remember how on TV they cut Ophelia from the Russian version of Hamlet?”

  “That would make a good title for a paper,” I said. “ ‘Mourning Ophelia.’ ” Ever since I had started going abroad for talks and conferences in 1991, mainly to the United States and England, every subject immediately took on the shape of a title for a presentation or a paper.

  “Everything is offensive to them,” said Manna. “It’s either politically or sexually incorrect.” Looking at her short but stylish hairdo, her blue sweatshirt and jeans, I thought how misplaced she looked enveloped in the voluminous fabric of her veil.

  Mahshid, who had been quiet until then, suddenly spoke up. “I have a problem with all of this,” she said. “We keep talking about how Humbert is wrong, and I do think he is, but we are not talking about the issue of morality. Some things are offensive to some people.” She paused, startled by her own vehemence. “I mean, my parents are very religious—is that a crime?” she asked, raising her eyes to me. “Do they not have a right to expect me to be like them? Why should I condemn Humbert but not the girl in Loitering with Intent and say it’s okay to have an adulterous relationship? These are serious questions, and they become difficult when we apply them to our own lives,” she said, lowering her gaze, as if looking for a response in the designs on the carpet.

  “I think,” Azin shot back, “that an adulterous woman is much better than a hypocritical one.” Azin was very nervous that day. She had brought her three-year-old daughter (the nursery was closed; there was no one to look after her), and we’d had difficulty convincing her to leave her mother’s side and watch cartoons in the hall with Tahereh Khanoom, who helped us with the housework.

  Mahshid turned to Azin and said with quiet disdain: “No one was talking about making a choice between adultery and hypocrisy. The point is, do we have any morality at all? Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs?”

  “Well, that is the crux of the great novels,” Manna added, “like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, or James’s for that matter—the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.”

  “And what if we say that it is right to do what we want to do and not what society or some authority figure tells us to do?” said Nassrin, this time without bothering to lift her head from her notebook. There was something in the air that day that did not relate directly to the books we had read. Our discussion had plunged us into more personal and private arenas, and my girls found that they could not resolve their own dilemmas quite as neatly as they could in the case of Emma Bovary or Lolita.

  Azin had bent forward, her long gold earrings playing hide-and-seek in the ringlets of her hair. “We need to be honest with ourselves,” she said. “I mean, that is the first condition. As women, do we have the same right as men to enjoy sex? How many of us would say yes, we do have a right, we have an equal right to enjoy sex, and if our husbands don’t satisfy us, then we have a right to seek satisfaction elsewhere.” She tried to make her point as casually as possible, but she had managed to surprise us all.

  Azin is the tallest one in our group, the one with the blond hair and milky skin. She would often bite the corner of her lower lip and launch into tirades about love, sex and men—like a child throwing a big stone into the pool; not just to make a splash, but to wet the adults in the bargain. Azin had been married three times, most recently to a good-looking and rich merchant from a traditional provincial bazaari family. I had seen her husband at many of my conferences and meetings, which were usually attended by my girls. He seemed very proud of her and always treated me with exaggerated deference. At every meeting, he made sure I was comfortable; if there was no water at the podium, he would see to it that the mistake was rectified; if extra chairs were needed, he would boss the staff around. Somehow at these meetings it seemed that he was the gracious host, who had granted us his space, his time, because that was all he had to give.

  I was sure that Azin’s assault had been partly directed against Mahshid, and perhaps indirectly against Manna, too. Their clashes were not only the result of their different backgrounds. Azin’s outbursts, her seeming frankness about her personal life and desires, made Manna and Mahshid, both reserved by temperament, deeply uncomfortable. They disapproved of her, and Azin sensed that. Her efforts at friendship were rejected as hypocritical.

  Mahshid’s response, as usual, was silence. She drew into herself and refused to fill the void that Azin’s question had left behind. Her silence extended to the others, and was broken finally by a short giggle from Yassi. I thought this was a good time for a break and went to the kitchen to bring in the tea.

  When I returned, I heard Yassi laughing. Trying to lighten the mood, she was saying, “How could God be so cruel as to create a Muslim woman with so much flesh and so little sex appeal?” She turned towards Mahshid and stared at her in mock horror.

  Mahshid look down and then shyly and royally lifted her head, her slanted eyes widening in an indulgent smile. “You don’t need sex appeal,” she told Yassi.

  But Yassi would not give up. “Laugh, please, laugh,” she implored Mahshid. “Dr. Nafisi, please command her to laugh.” And Mahshid’s attempt at laughter was drowned out by the others’ less guarded hilarity.

  There was a pause and a silence as I placed the tray of tea on the table. Nassrin suddenly said: “I know what it means to be caught between tradition and change. I’ve been in the middle of it all my life.”

  She seated herself on the arm of Mahshid’s chair, while Mahshid did her best to drink her tea and keep it from coming into collision with Nassrin, whose expressive hands, moving in all directions, came precariously close to knocking the teacup over several times.

  “I know it firsthand,” Nassrin
said. “My mother came from a wealthy, secular and modern family. She was the only daughter, had two brothers, both of whom had chosen a diplomatic career. My grandfather was very liberal and he wanted her to finish her education and go to college. He sent her to the American school.” “The American school?” echoed Sanaz, her hand lovingly playing with her hair. “Yes, in those days most girls didn’t even finish high school, never mind going to the American school, and my mother could speak English and French.” Nassrin sounded rather pleased and proud of this fact.

  “But then what did she do? She fell in love with my father, her tutor. She was terrible in math and science. It is ironic,” said Nassrin, again lifting her left hand dangerously close to Mahshid’s cup. “They thought my father, coming from a religious background, would be safe with a young girl like my mother, and anyway, who would have thought that a modern young woman like her would be interested in a stern young man who seldom smiled, never looked her in the eyes, and whose sisters and mother all wore the chador? But she fell for him, perhaps because he was so different, perhaps because for her, wearing the chador and caring for him seemed more romantic than going to some college and becoming a lady doctor or whatever.

  “She said she never regretted it, her marriage, but she always talked about her American school, her old high school friends, whom she never saw again after her marriage. And she taught me English. When I was a kid she used to teach me the ABCs and then she bought me English books. I never had trouble with English, thanks to her. Nor did my sister, who was much older than me, by nine years. Rather strange for a Muslim woman—I mean, she should have taught us Arabic, but she never learned the language. My sister married someone quote, unquote”—Nassrin made a large quotation mark with her hands—“’modern’ and went to live in England. We only see them when they come home for vacations.”

  The time for break was over, but Nassrin’s story had drawn us in, and even Azin and Mahshid seemed to have come to a temporary truce. When Mahshid stretched her hand to pick a cream puff, Azin handed the dish over to her with a friendly smile, forcing a gracious thank-you.

  “My mother remained faithful to my dad. She changed her whole life for him, and never really complained,” Nassrin continued. “His only concession was that he let her make us weird food, fancy French food my father would call it—all fancy food for him was French. Although we were brought up according to my dad’s dictates, my mother’s family and her past were always in the shadows, hinting at another way of life. It wasn’t just that my mother could never get along with my father’s family, who considered her uppity and an outsider. She’s very lonely, my mother is. Sometimes I think I wish she would commit adultery or something.”

  Mahshid looked up at her, startled, and Nassrin got up and laughed. “Well,” she said, “or something.”

  Nassrin’s story, and the confrontation between Azin and Mahshid, had changed our mood too much for us to return to our class discussion. We ended up making desultory conversation, mainly gossiping about our experiences at the university, until we broke up.

  When the girls left that afternoon, they left behind the aura of their unsolved problems and dilemmas. I felt exhausted. I chose the only way I knew to cope with problems: I went to the refrigerator, scooped up the coffee ice cream, poured some cold coffee over it, looked for walnuts, discovered we had none left, went after almonds, crushed them with my teeth and sprinkled them over my concoction.

  I knew that Azin’s outrageousness was partly defensive, that it was her way of overcoming Mahshid’s and Manna’s defenses. Mahshid thought Azin was dismissive of her traditional background, her thick, dark scarves, her old-maidenish ways; she didn’t know how effective her own contemptuous silences could be. Small and dainty, with her cameo brooches—she did actually wear cameo brooches—her small earrings, pale blue blouses buttoned up to the neck and her pale smiles, Mahshid was a formidable enemy. Did she and Manna know how their obstinate silences, their cold, immaculate disapproval, affected Azin, made her defenseless?

  In one of their confrontations, during the break, I had heard Mahshid telling Azin, “Yes, you have your sexual experiences and your admirers. You are not an old maid like me. Yes, old maid—I don’t have a rich husband and I don’t drive a car, but still you have no right, no right to disrespect me.” When Azin complained, “But how? How was I disrespectful?”, Mahshid had turned around and left her there, with a smile like cold leftovers. No amount of talk and discussion on my part, both in class and with each of them in private, had helped matters between them. Their only concession had been to try and leave each other alone inside the class. Not very malleable, as Yassi might say.

  16

  Is this how it all started? Was it the day we were sitting at his dining room table, greedily biting into our forbidden ham-and-cheese sandwich and calling it a croque monsieur? At some point we must have caught the same expression of ravenous, unadulterated pleasure in each other’s eyes, because we started to laugh simultaneously. I raised my glass of water to him and said, Who would have thought that such a simple meal would appear to us like a kingly feast? and he said, We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the things we have to be thankful for! And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.

  We sometimes met on a corner of the wide, leafy boulevard leading to the mountains for our afternoon walks. I used to wonder what the Revolutionary Committee would think of these meetings. Would they suspect us of political conspiracy or of a lovers’ rendezvous? It was encouraging in a strange way that they would perhaps never guess the real purpose of our encounters. Was not life exciting when every simple act acquired the complexity of a dangerous secret mission? We always had something to exchange—books, articles, tapes, boxes of chocolates he received from Switzerland—for chocolates were expensive, especially ones from Switzerland. He brought me videos of rare films, which my children and I, and later my students and I, would watch: A Night at the Opera, Casablanca, The Pirate, Johnny Guitar.

  My magician used to say he could tell a great deal about people from their photographs, especially the angle of their noses. After some hesitation, I brought him some photographs of my girls, anxiously awaiting his pronouncement. He would hold one in his hand, scrutinize it from different perspectives and issue a short statement.

  I wanted him to read their writings and to look at their drawings, right there and then: I wanted to know what he thought. They are fine people, he said, looking at me with the ironic smile of an indulgent father. Fine? Fine people? I wanted him to say that they were geniuses, although I was glad to be assured of their fineness. Two of them, he thought, could make something of their writings. Shall I bring them to you? Will you meet with them? No, he was trying to get rid of people, not add to his acquaintances.

  17

  Cincinnatus C., the hero of Invitation to a Beheading, talks of a “rare kind of time . . . the pause, hiatus, when the heart is like a feather . . . part of my thoughts is always crowding around the invisible umbilical cord that joins this world to something—to what I shall not say yet.” Cincinnatus’s release by his jailers depends on his discovery of this invisible cord deep inside himself that joins him to another world, so that he can finally escape the staged and fake world of his executioners. In his preface to Bend Sinister, Nabokov describes a similar link to another world, a puddle that appears to Krug, his fictional hero, at various points in the novel: “a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and beauty.”

  I think in some ways our readings and discussions of the novels in that class became our moment of pause, our link to that other world of “tenderness, brightness and beauty.” Only eventually, we were compel
led to return.

  During the break one morning, while we were enjoying our coffee and pastries, Mitra began to tell us how she felt as she climbed up the stairs every Thursday morning. She said that step by step she could feel herself gradually leaving reality behind her, leaving the dark, dank cell she lived in to surface for a few hours into open air and sunshine. Then, when it was over, she returned to her cell. At the time, I felt this was a point against the class, as if it should somehow guarantee open air and sunshine beyond its confines. Mitra’s confession led to a debate about how we needed this pause from real life, in order to return to it refreshed and ready to confront it. Yet Mitra’s point stayed with me: what about after the pause? Whether we wished it or not, our lives outside that living room made their claims.

  But it was the fairy-tale atmosphere Mitra had alluded to that made it possible for all eight of us to share confidences and to share so much of our secret life with one another. This aura of magical affinity made it possible for Mahshid and Manna to find a way to peacefully coexist with Azin for a few hours every Thursday morning. It allowed us to defy the repressive reality outside the room—not only that, but to avenge ourselves on those who controlled our lives. For those few precious hours we felt free to discuss our pains and our joys, our personal hang-ups and weaknesses; for that suspended time we abdicated our responsibilities to our parents, relatives and friends, and to the Islamic Republic. We articulated all that happened to us in our own words and saw ourselves, for once, in our own image.

  Our discussion of Madame Bovary continued way past the hour. It had happened before, but this time no one wanted to leave. The description of the dining table, the wind in Emma’s hair, the face she sees before she dies—these details kept us going for hours. Initially our class hours were from nine to twelve, but gradually they were prolonged into the afternoon. I suggested that day that we continue with our discussion and that everyone stay for lunch. I think this is how we established lunches.