Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [121]
She was a slight girl, slight and dark. Her seriousness must have been a burden to her fragile frame. Even so, she was not frail; how a person this fragile looking could give an impression of such solidity I do not know. Razieh. I don’t remember her last name, but her first name I can use without having to worry about security, because she is dead. It seems ironic that I should only be able to use the real names of dead people. She had the respect of her classmates and, in those deeply ideological times, was listened to by girls from both ideological extremes. She was an active member of the Mujahideen, but this didn’t keep her from being suspicious of their cant. She had no father, and her mother earned her living as a cleaning woman. Both Razieh and her mother were deeply religious, and it was her religious belief that attracted her to the Mujahideen: she felt contempt for the Islamists who had usurped power.
Razieh had an amazing capacity for beauty. She said, You know, all my life I have lived in poverty. I had to steal books and sneak into movie houses—but, God, I loved those books! I don’t think any rich kid has ever cherished Rebecca or Gone with the Wind the way I did when I borrowed the translations from houses where my mother worked. But James—he is so different from any other writer I have ever read. I think I am in love, she added, laughing.
Razieh was such a strange mixture of contradictory passions. She was bitter and determined, stern and tough, and yet she loved novels and writing with a real passion. She said she did not wish to write but to teach. She was an inarticulate writer. She said, We envy people like you and we want to be you; we can’t, so we destroy you. After I left that college, I saw her only once. I think she felt that by leaving their small college to teach at the University of Tehran I had abandoned them. I asked her to come to my classes, to keep in touch. But she never did.
A few months after the bloody demonstration in the summer of 1981, I was walking down a wide, sunny street near the University of Tehran when, coming from the opposite direction, I saw a figure wrapped in a black chador, a small figure. The only reason I paid attention to her at all was that she paused for a second, startled. It was Razieh. She did not say hello, and in her look I could see a denial, a plea not to be recognized. We glanced at each other and passed. I will never forget that glance on that day, and her so very thin small body, her narrow face and large eyes, like an owl’s, or an imp’s in some invented tale.
26
In memory of my student Razieh, I will now digress and talk about her favorite book. I shall consider this an in memoriam.
What was it about Washington Square that had so intrigued Razieh? True, there had been identification—she did see something of herself in its hapless heroine—but it was not that simple.
Washington Square seems straightforward enough, yet the characters cheat you: they act contrary to expectation, beginning with Catherine Sloper, the heroine. Catherine is trapped by her clever and materially successful father, who ignores her with contempt. He never forgives his devoted and shy daughter for the loss of his beloved wife, who died in childbirth. Moreover, he cannot get over his disappointment at Catherine’s failure to be brilliant and beautiful. Catherine is also entrapped by her love of Morris Townsend, the “beautiful” (her word) young spendthrift who woos and courts her for her money. Mrs. Penniman, her shallow, sentimental and meddling widowed aunt, who tries to appease Catherine’s romantic aspirations by proxy through matchmaking, completes the evil triumvirate.
Catherine is an exceptional heroine, even for James. She is the inverse of our ideas of what a heroine should be: hefty, healthy, plain, dull, literal and honest. She is squeezed in between three colorful, clever, egocentric characters, who abuse