Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [165]
“So,” said Nassrin, who had been quiet until then, “when your husband beats you, you can pretend it’s all in your mind, since he’s just an empty vessel to fill up your fantasies. And it’s not just Azin,” she said. “The rest of you are basically saying the same thing.”
“What about you and Nima?” Mitra asked Manna. “You seem to have a balanced relationship.”
“I like him because there is no one in the world I can talk to like Nima,” Manna said with a shrug.
“Poor Nima,” said Yassi.
“He’s not so poor.” Manna was feeling savage that day. “He too has no one else to talk to. Misery loves company—and can be as strong a force as love.”
“You all disappoint me,” Yassi said. “I was hoping you’d tell me how physical attraction does matter, how love isn’t just spiritual and intellectual. I was hoping you’d tell me that I’d learn to love physically and see that I was wrong. I’m utterly flabbergasted,” she said, sinking deeper into the couch. “In fact, I’m discombobulated,” she concluded with a triumphant smile.
Ouch! I shouted. Bijan glanced up from the TV and said, “Nothing wrong, is there?” No, I just cut myself. I was slicing cucumbers to go with Bijan’s famous chicken kebab. He went to the bathroom and returned with a Band-Aid, which he carefully put on my finger. Without saying a word, smiling indulgently, he then went to the cabinet, poured a measure of homemade vodka into the small glass, put it on the side table beside a dish of pistachio nuts and settled back in front of the BBC. I went in and out of the kitchen, grumbling to myself. No wonder he enjoys life; this is what he’d do if we lived in the States. It’s hard on me, I grumbled, pleading with some unknown interlocutor, who always questioned and mocked my every complaint. It’s really hard on me, I repeated one more time, ignoring the guilty knowledge that Bijan bore his hardships without much complaint and should not be begrudged his vodka and his BBC.
By the time I had chopped the cucumbers and the herbs, adding them to the yogurt, I had come to a conclusion: our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it. It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key. We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin’s uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality. These girls, my girls, knew a great deal about Jane Austen, they could discuss Joyce and Woolf intelligently, but they knew next to nothing about their own bodies, about what they should expect of these bodies which, they had been told, were the source of all temptation.
How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love? By the time I added the salt and pepper to my dish, I had come up with an answer to this question. I went to the next session armed with a copy of Pride and Prejudice in one hand and Our Bodies, Ourselves—the only book I had available on sexuality—in the other.
14
Charlotte Brontë did not like Jane Austen. “The Passions are perfectly unknown to her,” she complained to a friend, “ . . . even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would but ruffle the elegance of her progress.” Knowing Charlotte Brontë and her proclivities, one can understand how one perfectly good novelist could dislike another as much as Brontë disliked Austen. She was