Most simply put, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azir Nafisi is about freedom and repression, but like the title itself it contains many contradictions and many subtleties not always easily seen or understood at first glance.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is the controversial and often-banned novel about a stepfather who forces his 12-year-old stepdaughter into a sexual relationship after the death of her mother. The appearance of this book is especially surprising in the Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The juxtaposition of the shocking Lolita and strict Islamic “Tehran” in the title is a fitting metaphor for the life of its author on several levels.

In this memoir, author Azar Nafisi retraces her steps from being an Iranian student protesting in America to being a professor of Western literature in the Islamic Republic of Iran to finally moving back to America. She marries, divorces, and remarries. She teaches and she stops teaching. She refuses to wear the veil, she is forced to wear the veil, and she acquiesces to wear the veil in order to teach again. Is she selling her soul by wearing the veil or is she opting for the higher good—teaching hungry students?

"What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."

—Azar Nafisi

The story, however, does not progress in a simple linear fashion. It too is told in contradictions of time and place. She can abruptly leave on story to retell another or she can stay focused on one incident giving both outside detail and internal struggles. She relates conversations in a paragraph form without punctuation, which can make the speakers melt into each other. It can be slow reading, as she seems to tell her story in a stream of consciousness that can be uneven in keeping the reader's attention. But she wants to keep the reader's attention. She borrows a line from Nabokov when she writes, "I need you, the reader, to imagine us. For we won't really exist if you don't."

On another level this is, as the title suggests, a book about books. It is about reading, and reading Western literature in particular. It is about the ideas of literature and the experience of the literature. She writes on page one, "What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth." In a classroom setting she tells her students, "A novel is not an allegory. . . . It is the sensual experience of another world. . . . This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing."

In the most literal reading of the title the author does indeed read and teach Lolita in a private class of young women students that she holds secretly in her apartment. These young women in Iran identified with the young Lolita of Nabokov's novel. They saw her and themselves as prisoners, as people whose lives were stolen from them by powerful jailers, jailers who force themselves on you in unacceptable, intimate ways.

"Now that the mullas ruled the land, religion was used as an instrument of power and ideology. It was this ideological approach to faith that differentiated those in power from millions of ordinary citizens."

—Azar Nafisi

As one reads the book in 2004 with world events focused on terrorism, war, extremist Muslims, and the Mid-East, it is impossible not to hear the author's call for democracy and freedom. At a time when some push for democratic Islamic countries and others say the two ideologies will never interface, this one woman writes elegantly on exactly the need for the two to come together. She sees democracy as necessary for educational freedom and intellectual honesty. She sees a need for democracy to free ordinary citizens from the heavy club of government that dictates even the minutia of life's choices, or intimate decisions such as marriage. Even religion needs democracy. She writes, "Now that the mullas ruled the land, religion was used as an instrument of power and ideology. It was this ideological approach to faith that differentiated those in power from millions of ordinary citizens, believers like Mahshid, Manna, and Yassi, who found the Islamic Republic their worst enemy."

These three women in her class embraced Islam but not the extreme form of their government. Some women wanted to wear the veil as a sign of their faith, not because a repressive government demanded it of all women. They disagreed with the government turning back the clock so that women could be flogged, fined, or imprisoned for a year just for wearing make-up or nail polish. Women could be put to death for adultery or prostitution. And the marriage age for girls was eventually lowered ti 13 and then to 9—an age, the author points out, that is even younger than the fictional and abused Lolita.

Nafisi even sees democracy in the structure of the novels she teaches. Of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice she talks about "diverse voices" and "confrontation within a cohesive structure" as "one of the best examples of the democractic aspect of the novel." She explains further, saying, "there are speaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist." In her home of Iran, the opposite is true. People feel a need to shut down every voice that does not agree with them and their ideology. This is seen in government actions and in the classroom discussions where strident voices silence those who disagree.

In a section that briefly shows her enduring longing for freedom but her initial misunderstanding of what the revolution would bring, she writes:

When I was growing up, in the 1960s, there was little difference between my rights and rights of women in Western democracies. But it was not the fashion then to think that our culture was not compatible with modern democracy, that there were Western and Islamic versions of democracy and human rights. We all wanted opportunities and freedom. That is why we supported revolutionary change—we were demanding more rights, not fewer.

Other themes woven throughout the book include the lack of personal choice, morality police (literally riding around in Toyotas looking for stray hairs falling outside the veils), the freedom and escape in literature, moral confusion, politics, mob mentality, regrets, and abuses of power. It is also about little personal rebellions. Wearing polished nails under gloves. Hiding satellite dishes. Reading banned Western literature. Meeting in secret book clubs. And holding onto your beliefs.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is about the basic human desire for freedom told through numerous personal vignettes. It is a cry against tyranny. It is a weeping over stolen lives in a country where revolution was not progressive but regressive and repressive. It is a look at liberty through this oppression; and it makes a compelling case for liberty.

Read the original article on page 9 of the Fall 2004 issue of Shalom! Download (PDF, 826k)>

Lois Saylor serves on the Shalom! advisory committee and attends Harrisburg (PA) Brethren in Christ Church. She reviewed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (Random House, 2003).

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