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Azar Nafisi found ways of using the likes of Nabokov ... in Iran
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From: Sandy P. Klein
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Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 12:26 PM
Subject: found ways of using the likes of Nabokov ...
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http://www.dailystar.com.lb/features/03_02_04_a.asp
Features DS 03/02/04
Nafisi takes on Khomeini▓s Iran with Western fiction
Iranian teacher shows female students a world beyond their restrictive society
Tobias Axel
Special to The Daily Star
Azar Nafisi is the best kind of teacher: resourceful, imaginative, and committed. While teaching English and American literature at the University of Tehran in the early years of the Islamic Republic, she found ways of using the likes of Nabokov and Henry James, Austen and Scott Fitzgerald to challenge her students into questioning the narrow ethics that were threatening to outlaw independent thought in Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran, which Nafisi describes as a ⌠memoir in books,■ is part biography, part literary criticism and part sociological study. Above all, however, it is a vital testament to the very purpose of fiction: to assault the rigidity of belief with the dynamism of imagination.
Following the Shah of Iran▓s exile and demise, and the rise to power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini▓s regime, Iran itself rapidly became a place of fictions: in Nafisi▓s phrase, ⌠a fragile unreality.■ In the name of virtue innumerable men and women were incarcerated and executed,! the legal age for girls to marry was lowered from 18 to 9 years old, roving morality squads would summarily arrest and torture women for manifesting signs of Western decadence - wearing nail polish, or pink socks - while new laws were introduced legalizing ⌠temporary marriages■ which could last as briefly as ten minutes: a way of disguising sexual abuses under a veil of decency and legalising prostitution.
After being expelled from three universities for refusing to wear the veil or compromise in her teaching, Nafisi finally set up a private class of handpicked women students to discuss the forbidden works of her favorite Western authors. These classes became an escape from the unreality of the everyday into a world of fiction in which morality was not built on slogans, in which choice was not limited by harsh doctrine, and in which identities were not dictated by the imposition of force. In Nafisi▓s classroom and later in the safe-haven of her living room wher! e she would host her weekly meetings, reading became a political act. In the closed world of Khomeini▓s Iran, the inflexible dogma of totalitarian rule dissolved individual identity by outlawing debate and question. Quoting Nabokov, Nafisi describes curiosity as ⌠insubordination in its purest form.■ By nurturing her students▓ the curiosity and encouraging them to risk their opinions, Nafisi trained her students to be freedom fighters in a battle for the imagination, waged through its very exercise. In fiction, Nafisi found the arms to fight her captors.
While still teaching at the university, Nafisi put The Great Gatsby on trial in response to fierce protestations by a morally outraged student and to parody the contemporary zeal for show-trials. Choosing the student in question as the prosecutor, and two others to perform the roles of defense and judge, she herself accepted the role of defendant: of Gatsby itself. The result was not an outright win - an actual vote would have been too risky - but the hour-long trial did succeed in ! showing that the success of a work of fiction lies not in the morality of its characters, - ⌠Is a novel good because the heroine is virtuous?■ asks Zarrin, the defense - but in its capacity to confront the cherished absolutes and received ideas of the reader. Responding to the prosecutor▓s rebukes that F. Scott Fitzgerald preached materialism, the defense asserted: ⌠He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms.■ By encouraging her students to ⌠read a novel on its own terms,■ Nafisi▓s trial placed the fictional works at the center of the debate, thus requiring ideology to serve argument rather than dictate it.
Faithful to her teaching, Nafisi never resorts to boorish indictment or generalization; by allowing her stories to speak for themselves, she offers a devastating account of the climate in Iran. One such story of a bigoted male student, who succeeds in having one of his female classmates expelled from the university for! ⌠sexually provoking him■ is particularly resonant.
The girl▓s hea dscarf was loosely tied and revealed a small patch of skin on her neck. As Nafisi shows, it is a fragile and fearful morality, not to mention masculinity, that is threatened by a few centimetres of skin. By simply showing the inconsistencies and abuses of an arbitrary and intellectually stultifying ideology, she demonstrates the deep insecurity at the heart of the regime itself.
When asked to describe themselves in the first of Nafisi▓s private classes, many of the women attending had no idea where to begin, as though pinning down identity itself was a transgression that none could afford. Manna, one of the girls, describes herself as fog; another, Yassi (the youngest) says that she is a figment; Sanaz, a third, abandons words in favor of a black and white drawing of a naked girl curled up in a ball, hovering in a bubble.
These are portraits of fragmented ghosts haunting a home that has become unfamiliar: By eradicating choice, and forbidding critique, the Islamic Re! public effectively made exiles of its citizens. Attempting to turn this imposed exile to her advantage, Nafisi quotes Adorno to justify her endeavour: ⌠The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one▓s own home.■
Books such as Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, or Pride and Prejudice made it possible for Nafisi▓s students to find an alternative world - literal as well as metaphorical, moral as well as pragmatic - in which to learn and grow.
It is testament to Nafisi▓s courage as well as to her gifts as a teacher that she chose the densely complex world of Lolita for study in the tense climate of totalitarian Iran. The absence of a coherent moral ideology in the work of many of Nafisi▓s chosen authors is precisely the reason why they were so savagely condemned; it is also exactly what made them of such value for the students. While Nafisi has the humour to thank the Islamic Republic for teaching her to truly enjoy the small pleasures of transg! ression - alcohol, music, literature, nail polish - her decisi on to tackle Lolita cannot be regarded simply as an act of defiance for its own sake. Nor is she naive about the metaphorical applications of Lolita to the Islamic regime. Certainly, the fantasy that Humbert Humbert imposes on Dolores Haze echoes the fantasy of a new Iran under clerical rule, but Nafisi insists that such parallels are not her primary concern.
⌠I want to emphasise once more that we were not Lolita, the Ayatollah was not Humbert and this republic was not what Humbert called his princedom by the sea,■ she says.
Beyond the superficial metaphor, Nafisi seeks through a study of Lolita to explore the implications of ⌠the confiscation of one individual▓s life by another■ and to confer on her students what was stolen from Dolores herself: the right to determine her own narrative and identity by developing the confidence to make her own choices.
One of Nafisi▓s students writes, by way of epilogue to Reading Lolita in Tehran, ⌠Hardly anything has changed in! the nonstop sameness of our everyday life. But somewhere else I have changed. Each morning ┘ as I wake up and put on my veil ┘ to go out and become part of what is called reality, I also know of another ⌠I■ that has become naked on the pages of a book: in a fictional world, I have become fixed like a Rodin statue. And so I will remain as long as you keep me in your eyes, dear readers.■
Manna▓s comments are proof that independence is perpetually asserted in the creative imagination and that the greatest threat to freedom is manufactured belief.
Azar Nafisi▓s book comes at a time when Iranian women are more in the Western public eye than ever before. With the awarding this year of the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi and the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival to Samira Makhmalbaf, and the huge critical and commercial success of Marjane Satrapi▓s comic-book Persepolis, it is clear that an Iranian feminine voice of dissent is emerging, and its most prominent featu! res are eloquence, humour, and humanity. Collectively, these women sho w that creative insubordination must be the most successful means of achieving liberation.
Tobias Axel is a writer, director and producer. He is currently working on a short film and a feature screenplay
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