From: Sandy P. Klein

 

 

The Last Word: Azar Nafisi

Finding Fact Through Fiction

NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

May 5 issue ≈ For two years in the 1990s, Azar Nafisi taught Western novels frowned on by the Iranian regime to a group of six women students in Tehran. From this experience, Nafisi, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., drew the inspiration for ⌠Reading Lolita in Tehran,■ an account of the secret home-schooling sessions during which the group discussed Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov and others.

 

 BOTH AN INTIMATE portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran and an exploration of the act of reading as rebellion, Nafisi▓s book is a moving tribute to the power of fiction in the face of fascism. She spoke to NEWSWEEK▓s Carla Power last week about reading, repression and Iran under the mullahs. Excerpts:
       
        NEWSWEEK: Why was ⌠Lolita,■ in particular, such a crucial book for your class?
        NAFISI: Of all the novels we read, ⌠Lolita■ was the most metaphorical of the situation in Iran. I felt the regime was imposing its dream on us. As women, it confiscated our reality. It said, ⌠Don▓t be like this, be the way we think you should be.■ In Humbert▓s mind, Lolita had a precedent, a girl he meets when he▓s younger≈Annabel Leigh. Every girl he sees, he imposes his dream of Anna- bel on the reality of Lolita. The poignancy is that, as Humbert says, ⌠Every night she had to run back to my arms, because she had nowhere else to go.■ My girls, in the Islamic Republic, where else did they have to go?
       
        There▓s that great description by one of your students of feeling that she was leaving her cell of reality behind as she approached your door. Can you talk a bit about what fiction meant to you in Iran?
        The everyday things≈things that you think of as real or concrete≈are taken away from you. The way you dress and the way you walk out of the door, all this becomes public. The way we dressed was to put on a face≈as Eliot says, ⌠To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.■ And you do things indoors that in other places you would ordinarily do out of doors: you take off your makeup to go out, and you come inside to put your makeup on. Reality≈everyday living≈had become unreal. Fiction became real.
       
        How can fiction and the imagination assert order under a totalitarian regime?
        When a revolution happens, you lose control of reality. Everything you take for granted is taken away from you. Through fiction, you reassert your control over reality. You tell it your way. Everyone talks about the political repression of the Islamic Republic. But for me, the confiscation of ordinary life was what mattered. When they come into your bedroom, when they tell you how to hold hands, what to watch, what lipstick to wear, you become obsessed with the people intruding into your life. You go back more and more to the sense of uniqueness and the individuality that▓s in each of us. Fiction reasserts that individuality.
       
        One of the things you hear most here in the West about young people in Iran is that they▓re caught between two traditions≈between East and West. Can fiction help bridge this gap?
        One of the problems with the regime is that its control is so total≈it even controls the discourses that are used to describe it! [What holds sway in Iran today] are not ⌠Eastern■ traditions. It▓s rather crude and insulting to say that our traditions were stoning women, or reducing the age of marriage for women from 18 to 9. Just as in the West, ⌠tradition■ isn▓t merely witch hunting and slavery and Hitler.
       
        If the authorities use the concept of tradition this way, how do they use religion?
        In the Islamic Republic, they use religion as an ideology, and Islam is the first victim. These people use the issue of religion the same way that Marxists use Marxism: to legitimize their rule. My grandmother was forced not to wear the veil during the brief period that Reza Shah forced women to appear publicly unveiled. Then, under the Islamic Republic, I was forced to put it on. Now the veil has a political role: it▓s an issue of choice, not of being Islamic vs. being un-Islamic.
       

How did you get your Iranian students to empathize with Fitzgerald▓s American millionaire Jay Gatsby?
        Some of my Muslim students were absolutely disgusted by him, thinking he represented everything decadent about America. Great works of fiction always go against the prejudices of their own author. Fitzgerald may have loved the rich, and may have ruined his life in courting them. But in the book, Tom and Daisy Buchanan are, as Fitzgerald says, careless people. And this points up the similarities to the Islamic Republic: tyrants become careless people. They become people who don▓t see others.
       
        You▓ve said in the past that you▓re grateful to the regime. Why?
        That▓s partly ironic, of course. [ Laughs ] The Islamic Republic took away everything I▓d taken for granted. It made me appreciate the feel of the wind on my skin. How lovely the sun feels on your hair. How free you feel when you can lick ice cream in the streets. And a lot of my women students, when they went abroad and came back, said the same thing.