ABAW: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

This book was a gift from my sister more than a year ago. I started and stopped reading it once last year because I wanted to give the book more attention and more thought than I had at the time. When I picked it up again this year, it was with the intention not only to finish reading it, but also to read or reread the major texts Nafisi discusses.

Azar Nafisi, a professor of Western literature, writes in this memoir about two years living in the Islamic Republic of Iran. After being expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil, Nafisi gathered a small group of trusted and dedicated students - mostly women - to meet once a week in her home and discuss literature. The events in her life are organized around four major works they discussed during that time: Nabokov’s Lolita, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Henry James’ Daisy Miller, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The danger of the group’s intellectual pursuit is palpable in the text. The fear that they experienced over a stray hair peeking from the veil gives me a shiver. Nafisi’s difficult decision to leave Iran, to leave her home and her students, unfolds like the narratives of the books the women read. By the time Nafisi’s choice is made, there is an inevitability all around her, a sense that the only freedoms for her are in her books and in flight.

Reading the book I felt like I was in a very good Great Books seminar in grad school. I haven’t scribbled so much in the margins of a book in years. I wished more than once to be able to hear a point and add my own ideas to the discussion. Besides finally reading several canonical books, here’s what I learned from Nafisi’s memoir:

—Education and the exchange of ideas finds a way to happen, even in the most repressive regimes, though not without danger.

—People seek to escape repression and injustice in any way they can, if not by literal escape, then sometimes by literary and intellectual escape.

—Empathy is essential for human beings. Nafisi repeatedly makes the point, about the novels and the regime, that without empathy there is only evil. Literature is about empathy. Reading a book is an opportunity to see the world from a different perspective. 

—The danger of literature is not always in the overt ideas portrayed in the pages. Literature is dangerous because it provides an opportunity to build empathy, to shift perspective, to make human connections, to build humanity rather than tearing it down.

—I am so spoiled, and even though I love books, I know that I often take for granted my very open access to books. 

Little did I know, as I wandered through Nafisi’s memoir alongside Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Elizabeth Bennett, and Humbert Humbert that the world would begin to tremor anew with agitation against dictatorships. I wondered as Tunisia exploded, then cheered as Egypt pulled down Mubarak, and I cringed and cried as people died in Bahrain and Nafisi’s own Iran, and I continue to worry about the people in Libya and elsewhere who have undertaken the dread feat of revolution against a bloody tyrant. Nafisi’s memoir expanded my understanding of these uprisings, expanded my fear for the people living them, and built my empathy for those who love their countries and hope to make them better places. I would love dearly to hear what she has to say about events in the Middle East and North Africa right now.