The covered woman has become for Western audiences a symbol of the oppression Muslim theocracies can visit upon their own citizens. Clothed in a burqa, a veil, or a robe with a head covering, she stares at us from newspaper clippings and magazine photos. Often, she seems distant; sometimes she clutches a dead or dying child and weeps.
From our outside view, she seems a victim, restricted, brutalized and humiliated at every turn. We know that she is often denied education. We have heard that she is not allowed to speak with men, other than her father, brother or husband. She can be imprisoned and punished for an errant lock of hair or for the crime of wearing nail polish. Her husband can legally leave her by saying "I Divorce You" three times. She has her ears, her nose cut off or acid thrown in her face during acts of vengeance. In some particularly strict societies, she can be stoned to death for even perceived infidelity.
But Azar Nafisi's book Reading and Lolita in Tehran explores covered women as women, not just symbols. Its basic premise is to record an account of the private literature classes Nafisi held in the mid-90s in her apartment with a group of women after she left the University of Tehran. Iran's theocratic government would never allow the unbiased discussion of such risqué texts as Lolita and The Great Gatsby in its classes.
But the book becomes something entirely separate from a class-by-class account in its execution. Nafisi explores how she and her students, Manna, Mashid, Yassi, Azin, Mitra, Sanaz and Nassrin, struggle with the bindings of their society, how they shrug their dark robes off every day before class to expose the bright outfits underneath. And how reading literature that challenges the reader to examine the world around him can be more revolutionary to desperate minds than any other form of protest.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a combination of things that never settles in to one genre. It's partly literary criticism and discussion, partly political and social commentary. But it also contains autobiographical elements and the perspective of living in a country that's hostile to you simply because of your sex. Early in the text, however, Nafisi makes clear what Reading Lolita is not: an analogy.
Nafisi - Iranian by birth but raised and educated in America - writes "[W]e were not Lolita, the Ayatolla was not Humbert and this republic was not what Humbert called called his pricedom by the sea. Lolita was not a critique of the Islamic Republic, but it went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives." She compares Iranian women to Lolita because the ayatollahs and Islamic fundamentalists have projected their own ideas of a woman's place in the universe on them, similar to the way Humbert Humbert shaped Nabokov's titular adolescent character into a sultry pixie-vixen. She adds, though, that Nabokov didn't write Lolita with her in mind. Instead of merely identifying with Lolita, Nafisi's students use the book, and the others Nafisi covers, as lenses through which they can view their own situations.
When Nafisi writes of Nabokov and Lolita, her two favorite literary subjects despite the fact that she also covers Fitzgerald, Joyce, Ausen and a handful of other Western authors, her enthusiasm for the Russian author shines through, and is reflected in her writing style. Parts of Reading Lolita in Tehran come off as the same sort of jumbled, complicated art that characterized Nabokov's work. She dismisses with quotation marks and any feeling of responsibility for narrative flow.
But in keeping with Nabokov's form, what seems at first like a stream of unregulated thoughts turns out to be a carefully ordered stack that progresses through emotion, rather than chronology. Curiously, her devotion to Nabokov and use of his written characteristics would almost seem to indicate that Nafisi could be attempting to play his elaborate games with language. If she does toy with that notion, it doesn't show. Thankfully, the book's integrity as a serious work remains intact.
While it can be seen as an indictment of Iran's society or an examination of the empowering nature of literature, Reading Lolita in Tehran is best read as Nafisi's exploration of the impacts of both Iranian laws and Western literature on a group of inquisitive women. And, in the end, it really is Nafisi's tale. For just as Lolita changed the perspectives of her students, the experiences of Manna, Mashid, Yassi, Azin, Mitra, Sanaz and Nassrin in class make the author reexamine her own roles as a woman, a scholar, and an Iranian.
