How many people get a chance to paint the colors of their dreams?” Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, asked herself on the first day of the literature course that she organized and teaches in secret after leaving the University of Tehran, due to her refusal to wear the veil.
A passionate professor of English literature, Nafisi in her memoir, brings the reader virtually into the class along with seven female students. Her curriculum focused on “the relation between fiction and reality.” As the course progressed, the line between fiction in class discussions and reality in Iran thickened as the stories’ themes resonated with the students’ lives.
My fascination for Reading Lolita in Tehran lies in Nafisi’s calm prose and rhythmic voice, so still that the tumult around her is almost non-existent. When she uses Lolita to refer to the political unrest, she writes, “What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.” She asserts that out-of-control military and police house searches and arrests of students did not portend an encouraging future for Iran.
Nafisi uses Nabokov’s Lolita, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, James’ Washington Square and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as the primary colors to unfold her life and those of her students. She takes the reader into incidents that capture their gray, prison-like daily routine. In Lolita, she notes, “No fact is more touching than Lolita’s utter helplessness… the whole crux of the matter: she had nowhere else to go…” Like Lolita, she and her students, are forced to hide. In Gatsby, she writes “the dream was not about money but about what he (Gatsby) can become.” It is about available options that become “a means of retrieving a dream.” All eight of them took risks daily but made the choice to exercise the option of participating in the course.
In Washington Square, she points out that the character Catherine Sloper has “the capacity to change and mature” because she stood up to those who shunned, manipulated and rejected her. Further in the text Nafisi writes, “Their reward is not happiness, a word that is central in Austen’s novels but is seldom used in James’ universe. What James’ characters gain is self-respect.” And in Pride and Prejudice, Nafisi compares the story to a dance, where partners depend on one another’s steps to complete a sequence. Throughout the book, Nafisi and her students embodied growing into self-respect as well as performing the flawless dance. They were not caught.
The memoir’s universal themes of helplessness, tenacity, fruition, and resolution are analogous to the stories the class studies. Nafisi writes of personal, political and intellectual freedom that she managed to exercise despite the repression. She goes for walks with a male friend — a total no-no in the Islamic Republic particularly with the Morality Police on the lookout. As such, incarceration could be just a few blocks away. Courageous act – but life takes courage.
How many people can come out of a series of devastating events and remain grounded? Who can emerge unscathed by the poison of war and still have the will to transform the experience into the medicine of learning and sharing? Only the courageous do.
Perhaps the intent of the book is to chronicle history, perhaps its raison d’être is summed up by James’ The Ambassadors:
“Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old – too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. For it was a mistake. Live, Live!”
Books have the power to change readers’ worldviews. Nafisi’s memoir, however, is about choice. It is reminder that colors are available to all, a choice to stay with the somber grey of defeat or go out, dub the brush into buckets of red and blue paints to get the bright purple of victory!
Written by Yoli P. – The Help