Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [28]
Sanaz was a little startled by the vehemence of Nassrin’s retort. Through most of this discussion, Nassrin had been drawing furious lines in her notebook, and after she had delivered her pronouncement, she went on with her drawing.
“The problem with the censors is that they are not malleable.” We all looked at Yassi. She shrugged as if to say she couldn’t help it, the word appealed to her. “Do you remember how on TV they cut Ophelia from the Russian version of Hamlet?”
“That would make a good title for a paper,” I said. “ ‘Mourning Ophelia.’ ” Ever since I had started going abroad for talks and conferences in 1991, mainly to the United States and England, every subject immediately took on the shape of a title for a presentation or a paper.
“Everything is offensive to them,” said Manna. “It’s either politically or sexually incorrect.” Looking at her short but stylish hairdo, her blue sweatshirt and jeans, I thought how misplaced she looked enveloped in the voluminous fabric of her veil.
Mahshid, who had been quiet until then, suddenly spoke up. “I have a problem with all of this,” she said. “We keep talking about how Humbert is wrong, and I do think he is, but we are not talking about the issue of morality. Some things are offensive to some people.” She paused, startled by her own vehemence. “I mean, my parents are very religious—is that a crime?” she asked, raising her eyes to me. “Do they not have a right to expect me to be like them? Why should I condemn Humbert but not the girl in Loitering with Intent and say it’s okay to have an adulterous relationship? These are serious questions, and they become difficult when we apply them to our own lives,” she said, lowering her gaze, as if looking for a response in the designs on the carpet.
“I think,” Azin shot back, “that an adulterous woman is much better than a hypocritical one.” Azin was very nervous that day. She had brought her three-year-old daughter (the nursery was closed; there was no one to look after her), and we’d had difficulty convincing her to leave her mother’s side and watch cartoons in the hall with Tahereh Khanoom, who helped us with the housework.
Mahshid turned to Azin and said with quiet disdain: “No one was talking about making a choice between adultery and hypocrisy. The point is, do we have any morality at all? Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs?”
“Well, that is the crux of the great novels,” Manna added, “like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, or James’s for that matter—the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.”
“And what if we say that it is right to do what we want to do and not what society or some authority figure tells us to do?” said Nassrin, this time without bothering to lift her head from her notebook. There was something in the air that day that did not relate directly to the books we had read. Our discussion had plunged us into more personal and private arenas, and my girls found that they could not resolve their own dilemmas quite as neatly as they could in the case of Emma Bovary or Lolita.
Azin had bent forward, her long gold earrings playing hide-and-seek in the ringlets of her hair. “We need to be honest with ourselves,” she said. “I mean, that is the first condition. As women, do we have the same right as men to enjoy sex? How many of us would say yes, we do have a right, we have an equal right to enjoy sex, and if our husbands don’t satisfy us, then we have a right to seek satisfaction elsewhere.” She tried to make her point as casually as possible, but she had managed to surprise us all.
Azin is the tallest one in our group, the one with the blond hair and milky skin. She would often bite the corner of her lower lip and launch into tirades about love, sex and men—like a child throwing a big stone into the pool; not just to make a splash, but to wet the adults in the bargain. Azin had been married three times, most recently to a good-looking and rich merchant from a traditional provincial bazaari family. I had