Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [148]
These forays into the personal were not supposed to be part of the class, but they infiltrated our discussions, bringing with them further incursions. Starting with abstractions, we wandered into the realm of our own experiences. We talked about different instances in which the physical and mental abuse of women had been considered insufficient grounds for divorce by the ruling judge. We discussed cases in which the judge not only refused the wife’s request for divorce but tried to blame her for her husband’s beatings, ordering her to reflect on the wrongs she had committed to bring on his displeasure. We joked about the judge who used to regularly beat his own wife. In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.
6
It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing. The realm of imagination is a bridge between them, constantly refashioning one in terms of the other. Plato’s philosopher-king knew this and so did the blind censor, so it was perhaps not surprising that the Islamic Republic’s first task had been to blur the lines and boundaries between the personal and the political, thereby destroying both.
When I am asked about life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I cannot separate the most personal and private aspects of our existence from the gaze of the blind censor. I think of my girls, who came from very different backgrounds. Their dilemmas, regardless of their backgrounds and beliefs, were shared, and stemmed from the confiscation of their most intimate moments and private aspirations by the regime. This conflict lay at the heart of the paradox created by Islamic rule. Now that the mullahs ruled the land, religion was used as an instrument of power, an 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. People like me hated the oppression, but these others had to deal with the betrayal. Yet even for them, the contradictions and inhibitions in their personal lives involved them more directly than the great matters of war and revolution. I lived in the Islamic Republic for eighteen years, yet I did not fully grasp this truth during the first years of upheaval, in the midst of the public executions and bloody demonstrations or over the eight years of war, when the red and white sirens mixed with the sounds of rockets and bombs. It became clear to me only after the war and after Khomeini’s death, the two factors that had kept the country forcibly united, preventing the discordant voices and contradictions from surfacing.
Wait, you will say—discord, contradictions? Was this not the time of hope, of reform and peace? Were we not told how Mr. Ghomi’s star was descending and that of Mr. Forsati was in ascension? You will remind me of the end of the previous section, where the choices for the radical revolutionaries appeared to be either to set fire to themselves or to change with the times. As for Mahshid, Nassrin and Manna, you will say, They survived—they were given a second chance. Are you not overdramatizing a bit, you will inquire, for the narrative effect of your story?
No, I am not overdramatizing. Life in the Islamic Republic was always too explosive, too dramatic and chaotic, to shape into the desired order required for a narrative effect. Times of peace often bring to the surface the extent of the damage, placing in the foreground the gaping craters where houses used to be. It is then that the muted voices, the evil spirits that had been trapped in the bottle, fly out in different directions.
Manna used to say that