Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [157]
I worried about Mahshid and the solitary path she had chosen for herself. And about Yassi and her irrepressible fantasies about that never-never land where her uncles lived. I worried about Sanaz and her broken heart and about Nassrin and her memories and about Azin. I worried about them all, but I worried most about Manna. She had one of these honest, demanding intelligences that is hardest on itself. Everything in her present situation offended her, from the fact that she and her husband were still financially dependent on her family to the mediocre state of intellectuals and the everyday cruelties of the Islamic regime. Nima, sharing the same feelings and desires, reinforced her imposed isolation. Yet unlike Yassi, Manna obstinately refused to do anything about her situation. She seemed to take an almost gleeful satisfaction from the knowledge that her powers were going to waste. She, like my magician, was determined to be harder on herself than on the world around her. They both blamed themselves for the fact that such inferior people had control of their lives.
“How is it that we keep coming back to marriage,” Mitra said, “when we’re supposed to be here to talk about books?”
“What we need,” I said with a laugh, “is for Mr. Nahvi to remind us how trivial we are to read Austen and talk about marriage.” Mr. Nahvi, with his dusty suit, buttoned-up shirt, layered hair and squishy eyes was every once in a while resurrected as an easy target of our jokes. He earned my eternal contempt the day he announced that the protagonist in Gorky’s Mother was a far finer specimen of womanhood than all the flighty young ladies in Jane Austen’s novels.
9
Olga was silent.
“Ah,” cried Vladimir, “Why can’t you love me as I love you.”
“I love my country,” she said.
“So do I,” he exclaimed.
“And there is something I love even more strongly,” Olga continued, disengaging herself from the young man’s embrace.
“And that is?” he queried.
Olga let her limpid blue eyes rest on him, and answered quickly: “It is the Party.”
Every great book we read became a challenge to the ruling ideology. It became a potential threat and menace not so much because of what it said but how it said it, the attitude it took towards life and fiction. Nowhere was this challenge more apparent than in the case of Jane Austen.
I had spent a great deal of time in my classes at Allameh contrasting Flaubert, Austen and James to the ideological works like Gorky’s Mother, Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and some of the so-called realistic fiction coming out of Iran. The above passage, quoted by Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature, caused a great deal of mirth in one of my classes at Allameh. What happens, I asked my students, when we deny our characters the smallest speck of individuality? Who is more realized in her humanity, Emma Bovary or Olga of the limpid blue eyes?
One day after class, Mr. Nahvi followed me to my office. He tried to tell me that Austen was not only anti-Islamic but that she was guilty of another sin: she was a colonial writer. I was surprised to hear this from the mouth of someone who until then had mainly quoted and misquoted the Koran. He told me that Mansfield Park was a book that condoned slavery, that even in the West they had now seen the error of their ways. What confounded me was that I was almost certain Mr. Nahvi had not read Mansfield Park.
It was only later, on a trip to the States, that I found out where Mr. Nahvi was getting his ideas from when I bought a copy of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. It was ironic that a Muslim fundamentalist should quote Said against Austen. It was just as ironic that the most reactionary elements in Iran had come to identify with and co-opt the work and theories of those considered revolutionary in the West.
Mr. Nahvi kept following me to my office and spouting these pearls of wisdom. He seldom brought them up in class; there, he usually kept