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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN August 7, 2005 Issue 
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi Random House, 2003 
The Courage to Read Forbidden Literature "Reading Lolita in Tehran, a Memoir in Books" by Azar Nafisi is one of the hottest books currently. Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, author Nafisi had been a professor of literature at the University of Tehran from which she was expelled for refusing to wear the veil. Finding herself isolated from her profession, she decided to teach a literature class clandestinely in her home to seven courageous, young Iranian women (and sometimes, one young man). For two years they gathered in Nafisi's house every Thursday morning to talk about forbidden books. The first and perhaps most significant book the secret class discussed, was Nabokov's "Lolita." In a remarkable departure from the standard interpretation of the novel by male scholars, Nafisi leads the readers into discovering a different Lolita - a victim somewhat akin to the way Iranian women were being victimized by Islamic laws. "Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story," writes the author. "Reading Lolita in Tehran" shows how courageous people can use literature as a subversive weapon against oppression. All totalitarian governments fear the most the ideas that people get from books, ideas that could undermine and threaten their power. All totalitarian governments know that censorship is the only way to exercise control over the life of the mind of their subjects and that once people acquire that forbidden knowledge, there is nothing the oppressor can do to take it away. This book is also a vehicle for the author to tell us about her greatest love - literature. There are chapters on "The Great Gatsby," on the works of Henry James (with special focus on "Daisy Miller") and on Jane Austen. Nafisi entwines these novels and writers with the political events during the Islamic Revolution and with life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. She traces the development of her own political consciousness back to her days as a student at the university in Norman, Oklahoma. She describes the growth of an Iranian student revolutionary movement in the U.S. against the tyranny of the Shah and the takeover of the Revolution by the fanatical Islamists. "The unveiling of women mandated by Reza Shah in 1936 had been a powerful sign of the reduction of the clergy's power," writes the author. After the Revolution, "it was important for the ruling clerics to reassert that power." Through the eyes of Nafisi, who returns to Iran with great hopes for the Revolution, we witness the clerics taking power and curtailing civil liberties. First, Western literature began to disappear from the bookstores. Next came the rhetoric - "death to the imperialists and their lackeys," "women's rights are individualistic and bourgeois and therefore counterrevolutionary" and "individual freedoms are bourgeois and decadent, and therefore counterrevolutionary." Then came the executions, in the dead of night, in secret, frequently without trials and on the whim of whoever happened to be in power. Nafisi's former school principal and later Iran's minister of education was accused of "corruption on earth," "sexual offenses" and "violation of decency and morality." Then she was put in a sack and was either shot or stoned to death. And then life in the Islamic Republic of Iran settled into daily scenes like this: the Blood of God patrols roaming the streets of cities with their guns, "making sure that women wear their veils properly, do not wear makeup, do not walk in public with men who are not their fathers, brothers or husbands," picking up any young women they believe have disobeyed the rules, taking them to jail where they are given virginity tests, flogged, fined, "forced to wash the toilets and humiliated." "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is a cathartic journey we take with the author. The courage of the young women in this book, who risk everything for the sake of reading, is formidable. It underscores all to poignantly that those of us who have the freedom to read frequently take that freedom for granted or worse, do not heed the warning signs that it too can disappear if we allow the special interest groups demanding censorship to force their will upon us. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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