Sherry Chandler » Reading Lolita
Reading Lolita
Much has been written about Reading Lolita in Tehran since it was published three years ago, and I really don’t have anything brilliant to add. Reading it was difficult, at times eliciting a nearly primal pain, a silent scream of horror. I knew it would be hard. That’s why I put it off for so long. But reading it was also compelling and I went through it in about 24 hours.
The book is not all about horrors, of course. One value for me is that it showed me some texture to a culture that I have known for thirty years mainly as a cardboard cutout villain. Azar Nafisi is able to bring her kindness and empathy to even the most reactionary of her students. And she shows us why its citizens love Iran.
The book has also clarified for me why I have never been a real activist, though I have strong opinions. True believers are dangerous people, whatever side they’re on. In Iran, the left was as oppressive as the right. I was reminded again of my favorite saying from Robertson Davies: Anything taken to its extreme becomes its opposite.
But perhaps the most valuable thing the book gave me is a new appreciation for my own literature. Reading Lolita in Tehran is, after all, A Memoir in Books, a book of scholarship and explication. To see Fitzgerald, James, and Austin (let alone Nabokov) through the eyes of Iranian students is to rediscover them, to see again what is vital and even subversive about them. I want to go now and re-read all the classics, especially Lolita, which I’ll admit is a book I’ve always had trouble wrapping my head around. I think Ms. Nafisi has made me see what it’s about.
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3 Comments
1. Terry replies at 24th January 2007, 9:45 pm :
During and after the Iranian hostage situation, I had several friends who were Persian students who were overseas when the revolution came. For many reasons, none of them could ever go home again. At the time, I thought I understood. But it wasn’t until I read Reading Lolita that I truly understood just why that was. Tough, intelligent, gifted women who would forever be exiles.
2. sherry replies at 25th January 2007, 11:46 am :
So many thoughts, Terry. When I first read A Handmaid’s Tale, I thought something like that could never happen in the United States. Women are too free to put up with it. But women in Iraq were free, too, before the revolution. Freedoms are never to be taken for granted.
And then there were the women who had chosen to wear the veil for religious reasons who still felt oppressed for being forced to wear the veil. Things we do by choice are changed when they become something we have to do on pain of imprisonment or beating.
And finally, I remember the woman who went to Syria (I think it was) and walked hand-in-hand with her husband on the beach, a thing she had never got to do before. And she was elated by the feel of wind on her skin — a simple thing that we don’t think twice about. But she was also alienated from her husband, who suddenly, in this new relationship, seemed like a stranger.
Odd things happen to folks in such situations.
3. Terry replies at 26th January 2007, 10:58 am :
I’ve found that no matter what the regime, foreign or home grown, if they wish to exert power, they come first for the women.
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