Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [41]
On the third day, their anxious parents in Tehran, unable to locate them, were told by the concierge at their villa that their children might have been killed in a recent car accident. They set off at once to the resort town in search of their daughters, and finally found them. The girls were then given a summary trial, forced to sign a document confessing to sins they had not committed and subjected to twenty-five lashes.
Sanaz, who is very thin, was wearing a T-shirt under her robe. Her jailers jokingly suggested that since she was wearing an extra garment, she might not feel the pain, so they gave her more. For her, the physical pain had been more bearable than the indignity of the virginity tests and her self-loathing at having signed a forced confession. In some perverse way, the physical punishment was a source of satisfaction to her, a compensation for having yielded to those other humiliations.
When they were finally released and taken home by their parents, Sanaz had to deal with another indignity: her brother’s admonitions. What did they expect? How could they let six unruly girls go on a trip without male supervision? Would nobody ever listen to him, just because he was a few years younger than his scatterbrained sister, who should have been married by now? Sanaz’s parents, although sympathetic to her and her ordeal, did have to agree that perhaps it had not been such a good idea to let her go on the trip; not that they did not trust her, but conditions in the country were unsuitable for such indiscretions. On top of everything else, I am now the guilty party, she said. I’ve been deprived of the use of my car and am being chaperoned by my wise younger brother.
I cannot leave Sanaz and her story alone. Time and again I have gone back to it—I still do—re-creating it bit by bit: the garden fence, the six girls and one boy sitting on the veranda, perhaps telling jokes and laughing. And then “they” come. I remember this incident just as I remember so many others from my own life in Iran; I even remember the events people have written or told me about since I left. Strangely, they too have become my own memories.
Perhaps it is only now and from this distance, when I am able to speak of these experiences openly and without fear, that I can begin to understand them and overcome my own terrible sense of helplessness. In Iran a strange distance informed our relation to these daily experiences of brutality and humiliation. There, we spoke as if the events did not belong to us; like schizophrenic patients, we tried to keep ourselves away from that other self, at once intimate and alien.
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In his memoir, Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes a watercolor that hung above his bed when he was a young child. It is a landscape, an image of a narrow path disappearing into a forest full of trees. His mother read a story to him about a boy who disappeared one day into the painting above his bed and this became young Vladimir’s wish as he prayed every night. As you imagine us in that room, you must also understand our desire for this dangerous vanishing act. The more we withdrew into our sanctuary, the more we became alienated from our day-to-day life. When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, Are these my people, is this my hometown, am I who I am?
Neither Humbert nor the blind censor ever possesses his victims; they always elude him, just as objects of fantasy are always simultaneously within reach and inaccessible. No matter how they may be broken, the victims will not be forced into submission.
All this was on my mind one Thursday evening after class as I was looking at the diaries my girls had left behind, with their new essays and poems. At the