Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  But this same person, the new Supreme Leader—who now held the highest religious and political title in the country, demanding the greatest respect—was a fake. He knew it, we knew it and, what was worse, his own colleagues and fellow clerics, who had chosen him, knew it. The media and government propaganda had omitted the fact that this man had been raised overnight to the rank of ayatollah; such a position had to be earned before it could be bestowed, and his elevation was a clear violation of the clerical rules and regulations. Khamenei chose to join the side of the most reactionary. It was not just his religious beliefs that guided his decision; he did it out of necessity, for political support and protection, to compensate for the lack of respect from his own peers. From a tepid liberal he turned overnight into an irredeemable hard-liner. In a moment of rare candor Mrs. Rezvan had said, I know these people better than you; they change their words more often than their clothes. Islam has become a business, she went on, like oil for Texaco. These people who deal in Islam—each one tries to package it better than the next. And we are stuck with them. You don’t think they’d ever admit that we could live better without oil, do you? Can they say Islam is not needed for good government? No, but the reformers are shrewder; they will give you the oil a little cheaper, and promise to make it cleaner.

  Our president, the powerful former speaker of the house, Hojatol-Islam Rafsanjani, the first to earn the title of reformist, was the new hope, but he who called himself the general of reconstruction and was nicknamed Ayatollah Gorbachev was notorious for financial and political corruption and for his involvement in terrorizing dissidents both at home and abroad. He did talk about some liberalization of the laws—again, as Manna reminded us, these reforms meant that you could be a little Islamic, you could cheat around the edges, show a bit of hair from under your scarf. It was like saying you could be a little fascist, a moderate fascist or communist, I added. Or a little pregnant, Nima laughingly concluded.

  The result of such moderation was that Sanaz and Mitra were not afraid to wear their scarves more daringly, show a bit of hair, but the morality police also had the right to arrest them. When they reminded the police of the president’s words, the Revolutionary Guards would immediately arrest and jail them, hurling insults against the president, his mother and any other son of a . . . who issued such orders in the land of Islam. But the president’s liberalism, as would later be the case with his successor, President Khatami, stopped there. Those who took his reforms seriously paid a heavy price, sometimes with their lives, while their captors went free and unpunished. When the dissident writer Saidi Sirjani, who had the illusion of presidential support, was jailed, tortured and finally murdered, no one came to his assistance—another example of the constant struggle between the Islamic Republic of words and deeds, one that continues to this day. Their own interests precede everything, Mrs. Rezvan was fond of reminding me. No matter how liberal they claim to be, they never give up the Islamic façade: that’s their trademark. Who would need Mr. Rafsanjani in a democratic Iran?

  This was a period of hope, true, but we harbor the illusion that times of hope are devoid of tensions and conflicts when, in my experience, they are the most dangerous. Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power—the ones who had taken it away—become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive. In many ways these times of hope, of greater leniency, were as disquieting as before. Life had acquired the texture of fiction written by a bad writer who cannot impose order and logic on his characters as they run amok. It was a time of peace, a time for reconstruction, for the ordinary rhyme and rhythm of life to take over again, and instead a cacophony of voices overwhelmed us and came to supersede the somber sounds of war.

  The war with Iraq had ended, but the government continued its war against internal enemies, against those it considered to be representatives of cultural decadence and Western influence. Rather than weakening these enemies and eliminating them, this campaign of oppression had in some ways strengthened them. Political parties and political enemies were in jail and banned, but in the field of culture—literature, music, art and philosophy—the dominant trend was with the secular forces; the Islamic elite had failed to gain ascendancy in any of these areas. The battle over culture became more central as more radical Muslim youths, intellectuals, journalists and academics defected to the other side. Disillusioned with the Islamic Revolution and confronted by the ideological void that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had nowhere to turn but to the Western democracies they had once so vehemently opposed. Those whom the regime had tried to destroy or silence by accusing them of being Westernized could not be silenced or eliminated; they were as much a part of Iranian culture as these others, its self-appointed guardians. But what most frightened the Islamic elite was that these very elements had now become models for the increasingly disenchanted former revolutionaries, as well as for the youth—the so-called children of the revolution.

  Many in the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance started taking sides with the writers and artists, allowing books that previously would have been deemed un-Islamic to be published. My book on Nabokov was published in 1994 with the support of some of the enlightened elements in that ministry. Experienced directors whose films had been banned after the revolution were allowed to show their work thanks to the progressive head of the Farabi Film Foundation, who would later be opposed and impeached by the reactionaries within the regime. The ministry itself became a battleground between different factions, what we would now call the hard-liners and the reformists. Many former revolutionaries were reading and interpreting works of Western thinkers and philosophers and questioning their own orthodox approaches. It was a sign of hope, if an ironic one, that they were being transformed by the very ideas and systems they had once set out to destroy.

  Unable to decipher or understand complications or irregularities, angered by what they considered betrayals in their own ranks, the officials were forced to impose their simple formulas on fiction as they did on life. Just as they censored the colors and tones of reality to suit their black-and-white world, they censored any form of interiority in fiction; ironically, for them as for their ideological opponents, works of imagination that did not carry a political message were deemed dangerous. Thus, in a writer such as Austen, for example, whether they knew it or not, they found a natural adversary.

  7

  “You should stop blaming the Islamic Republic for all our problems,” said my magician. I frowned, digging into the snow with the tip of my boots. We had woken up to a snowy, sunny morning, the best part of a Tehran winter. The smooth blanket covering the trees and piling up high on the sidewalks appeared to shine with millions of tiny suns.

  It was the kind of day that made you feel exhilarated and childlike despite your protests against the pollution and the less tangible but more important complaints you carried in your heart and mind. Even as I tried to air my grievances, the pale memory of my mother’s homemade cherry syrup, which she used to mix with fresh snow, rebelled against my expressions of gloom. But I was not one to give way easily; I was overburdened with thoughts of Azin’s husband and Sanaz’s young man. For the past fifteen minutes, I had been trying to convey my girls’ trials and tribulations to my magician, peppering my account with justified and unjustified accusations against the root cause of all our woes: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  Her first week back after her trip, Sanaz had returned to class in a mood of becomingly restrained elation. Photographs were spread out on the glass-topped table: the family in the hotel lobby; Sanaz and a young man with dark brown hair and gentle brown eyes, in jeans and a blue shirt, leaning against a balustrade; the engagement party; Sanaz, in a red dress, her magnificent hair caressing her bare shoulders, looking up at this personable young man in his dark suit and pale blue shirt, and he gazing into her eyes with tender affection—or there he was, slipping an engagement ring on her finger, she looking at i
t wistfully (it’s a shame his parents had bought the ring without consulting us, she said later). And here is the renegade aunt, and the depressed mother, and the obnoxious brother. Before she knew it, he had to return to London and she to Tehran. (There was so little Ali and I said to each other, Sanaz would tell us with some frustration—we were always surrounded by family.)

  Two weeks later, she was subdued throughout the class discussion. During the break, a woeful Sanaz, apologizing for taking up class time with her personal stories, her eyes brimming with tears and her right hand pushing an absent strand of hair from her forehead, announced that everything was off, the marriage was off. She had been jilted. A phone call again: he just couldn’t see how he could make her happy. He was still a student; how could he support her? How long would it take before they could actually live together? It wasn’t fair, he kept saying, not fair to her; he was making up all sorts of excuses. I can see his point, she said, I’d shared the same worries, but still, I wish he didn’t feel he had to be so goddamn fair! He would always love her, he pleaded. What else could he say? Sanaz had asked us. Bloody coward, I thought.

  Everyone as a result was being was extra nice to Sanaz. His family was very angry with him. He had been corrupted by the years he’d spent among the cold and unfeeling English, his mother said. They—Westerners—don’t have personal feelings like we do. He’ll change his mind, his father said with conviction; just give him time. None of them had seen that perhaps their own meddling and pressure had forced him into taking a step he was not sure of.

  It was all so intolerable to Sanaz, all this commiseration. Even her brother had been sympathetic. There were rumors of another woman—there always are, Azin chimed in; that’s men for you. No, Sanaz said in response to Mahshid’s questions, she wasn’t Persian, not that it mattered. Some said Swedish, others English. Of course! A foreign girl: always a catch—who had said that? Sanaz was made even more desperate by the silent, funereal way her family and friends walked around her. If only her brother would throw a tantrum, she said, forcing a smile through her tears—confiscate her car or something. Today was the first time she’d had a chance to get away from them, and already she felt better.

  Men are always more likable, more desirable, when they’re unavailable, Manna said in a surprisingly bitter tone. After a pause, she added enigmatically, And I’m not saying this to be nice to Sanaz.

  Men! Nassrin said angrily. Men! echoed Azin. Yassi, who seemed to have suddenly shrunk to her normal size, sat up straight with her hands locked in her lap. Only the aunt was happy, Sanaz informed us. “Thank God, he saved you from your own folly” had been her first words. What do you expect? Only a fool would think it normal that a boy his age, or any age, could live alone for five years without having affairs. I did, Sanaz told her. Well, you were a fool.

  Sanaz’s reaction on the whole had been calm and collected. She was almost relieved. In the back of her mind, she had always thought it couldn’t work, not in this way. But the hurt remained: why had he rejected her? Had she become too provincial for him in comparison with other girls, say, a fine English girl, not coy, not afraid of staying the night? Heartbreak is heartbreak, I reasoned. Even English or American girls are jilted by their lovers. We had read some fine stories—“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” remember? And then of course there was “A Rose for Miss Emily.” Sanaz later joked that she was thinking of making herself more memorable by imitating Miss Havisham, her heroine of the moment. Only she had not even bought a wedding dress, she added wistfully.

  How had we digressed from Sanaz’s predicaments to life in the Islamic Republic? We had somehow managed to end our discussions with anecdotes about the regime: the number of clerics and high-ranking officials with green cards, the ruling elite’s inferiority complex, burning the American flag on the one hand and being obsequious to Westerners, especially American journalists, on the other. And then there was Faezeh Rafsanjani, the president’s daughter, with her blue jeans and Reeboks and her bleached hair peeking out from under her chador.

  I had explained all this in detail to my magician, drawing for him vivid and heartrending pictures of Sanaz’s heartbreak and Azin’s grief. I had concluded, dramatically, that this regime had so penetrated our hearts and minds, insinuating itself into our homes, spying on us in our bedrooms, that it had come to shape us against our own will. How could we, under such scrutiny, separate our personal woes from the political ones? It felt good to know where to put the blame, one of the few compensations of victimhood—“and suffering is another bad habit,” as Bellow had said in Herzog.

  There was a raising of the right eyebrow, followed by a quizzical ironic look. “Tell me,” he said sardonically. “How exactly does the jilting of a beautiful girl relate to the Islamic Republic? Do you mean to say that in other parts of the world women are not abused by their husbands, that they are not jilted?” I felt too petulant and perhaps too helpless to react reasonably, although I could see the logic of his argument; so I kept my silence.

  “Because the regime won’t leave you alone, do you intend to conspire with it and give it complete control over your life?” he continued, never one not to drive his point home. “Of course you are right,” he said a little later. “This regime has managed to such an extent to colonize our every moment that we can no longer think of our lives as separate from its existence. It’s become so omnipotent that perhaps it isn’t so far-fetched to hold it responsible for the success or failure of our love affairs. Let me remind you of Mr. Bellow, your latest beau.” He paused on the word beau for a few seconds. “Remember that sentence you were quoting from him—one of the many we have been regaled with in the past two weeks—’first these people murdered you, then they forced you to brood over their crimes.’

  “Are you listening?” he said, bringing his quizzical eyes closer to my face. “Where have you wandered off to?”

  “Oh, I’m here all right,” I said. “I was just thinking.”

  “Right,” he said, remembering his British training.

  “Really, I was listening,” I said. “You’ve just clarified something for me, something I’d been thinking of a lot lately.” He waited for me to continue. “I was thinking about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, about the fact that my girls are not happy. What I mean is that they feel doomed to be unhappy.”

  “And how do you propose to go about making them understand that it is their right?” he asked. “Surely not by encouraging them to act like victims. They have to learn to fight for their happiness.”

  I continued to dig my boots deeper into the snow, struggling to keep pace with him at the same time. “But so long as we fail to grasp this, and keep fighting for political freedom without understanding its dependence on individual freedoms, on the fact that your Sanaz shouldn’t have to go all the way to Turkey to be courted, we don’t deserve those rights.”

  Having listened to his lecture and not finding anything in it to contradict, I allowed myself my own train of thought. We walked for some time in silence. “But don’t you see that in trying to make them understand this, I might be doing these girls more harm than good?” I said, perhaps rather dramatically. “You know, being with me, hearing about my past experiences, they keep creating this uncritical, glowing picture of that other world, of the West. . . . I’ve, I don’t know, I think I’ve . . .”

  “You mean you’ve been helping them create a parallel fantasy,” he said, “one that runs against the fantasy that the Islamic Republic has made of their lives.”

  “Yes, yes!” I said excitedly.

  “Well, first of all, it’s not all your fault. None of us can live in and survive this fantasy world—we all need to create a paradise to escape into. Besides,” he said, “there is something you can do about it.”

  “There is?” I said eagerly, still dejected and dying for once to be told what to do. “Yes, there is, and you are in fact doing it in this class, if you don’t spoil it. Do what all poets do with their philosopher-
kings. You don’t need to create a parallel fantasy of the West. Give them the best of what that other world can offer: give them pure fiction—give them back their imagination!” he ended triumphantly, and looked at me as if he expected hurrahs and the clapping of hands for his wise advice. “You know it might do you some good if you practiced what you preached for a change. Take the example of one Jane Austen,” he said with what appeared to me a patronizing munificence.

  “You used to preach to us all that she ignored politics, not because she didn’t know any better but because she didn’t allow her work, her imagination, to be swallowed up by the society around her. At a time when the world was engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars, she created her own independent world, a world that you, two centuries later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, teach as the fictional ideal of democracy. Remember all that talk of yours about how the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience?” he continued patiently. “You keep talking about democratic spaces, about the need for personal and creative spaces. Well, go and create them, woman! Stop nagging and focusing your energy on what the Islamic Republic does or says and start focusing on your Austen.”

  I knew he was right, although I was too frustrated and too angry with myself to admit it. Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires. He was right. I was not listening, otherwise I would have had to admit that my girls, like millions of other citizens, by refusing to give up their right to pursue happiness, had created a dent in the Islamic Republic’s stern fantasy world.

  When he resumed, his voice seemed to come from afar and to reach me through a fog. “When you were talking of creating this secret class of yours, I thought it might be a good idea,” he was saying, “partly because it would divert your attention from politics. But I see it’s done the opposite—it has involved you even more.”