Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [156]
“You can write and you can teach,” said Mahshid, throwing a passing glance at me. “We need good critics. We need good teachers.”
“Yes,” said Manna, “like Professor Nafisi. Work your head off for so many years, and then what? The other day Nima was saying he would be making more money if he’d become a street vendor instead of spending all those years getting an M.A. in English lit.”
“If everybody leaves,” said Mahshid, her eyes glued to the floor, “who will help make something of this country? How can we be so irresponsible?”
This was a question I asked myself day and night. We can’t all leave this country, Bijan had told me—this is our home. The world is a large place, my magician had said when I went to him with my woes. You can write and teach wherever you are. You will be read more and heard better, in fact, once you are over there. To go or not to go? In the long run, it’s all very personal, my magician reasoned. I always admired your former colleague’s honesty, he said. Which former colleague? Dr. A, the one who said his only reason for leaving was because he liked to drink beer freely. I am getting sick of people who cloak their personal flaws and desires in the guise of patriotic fervor. They stay because they have no means of living anywhere else, because if they leave, they won’t be the big shots they are over here; but they talk about sacrifice for the homeland. And then those who do leave claim they’ve gone in order to criticize and expose the regime. Why all these justifications?
He had a point, but things were not that simple: I knew Bijan wanted to stay not because he couldn’t find a job or a place in the States—most of his immediate family was there, and he himself had lived there more years than in Iran. I want to stay because I love this country, he told me. We should stay as a form of resistance, to show that we are not out-maneuvered. Our very presence is a thorn in their side. Where else in the world, he asked me, would a talk on Madame Bovary draw such crowds and nearly lead to a riot? We can’t give up and leave; we are needed here. I love this country, he repeated. Did I not love this country? I asked myself.
Bijan agrees with you, I told Mahshid. He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home, literally building our apartment and our place in the mountains, and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It’s much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else. I guess the point is we all have to make our own choices according to our potentials and limitations, I said, and as I was saying it, I knew how superficial my words must have sounded to them.
“I have the best excuse for going to America,” said a cheeky Yassi. “It’s because I am so plump. Fat girls, I’m told, have a much better time over there. They say Americans like them with a little meat on their bones.”
“It depends on the girl,” Mitra offered with a slight jab at Yassi. Mitra, of course, would have no problem anywhere on earth, with her dimples and large brown eyes. She and Hamid had decided to head to Syria for a week to interview for Canadian residency—Canada did not accept immigrant visa applications in Iran. Although she still vacillated between leaving and staying.
“Over here we have an identity,” she said doubtfully. “We can make something of our lives. Over there, life is unknown.”
“The ordeal of freedom,” Nassrin said elliptically, echoing my favorite line from Bellow.
Only Mahshid was silent. She, I knew, was more confident than the rest about what she wanted. She didn’t want to marry. Despite all her traditional beliefs and moral imperatives, Mahshid was less of a marrying type than Sanaz. She disapproved of the regime, but her problems were more practical than existential. Long disappointed about the prospects of marrying her ideal man, and utterly without illusions about her ability to survive abroad, she had set her whole heart and mind on her work. At the moment, her problem was how to surmount the stupidity and ignorance