Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [45]
These are my memories of Norman: red earth and fireflies, singing and demonstrating on the Oval, reading Melville, Poe, Lenin and Mao Tse Tung, reading Ovid and Shakespeare on warm spring mornings with a favorite professor, of conservative political leaning, and accompanying another in the afternoons, singing revolutionary songs. At night watching new films by Bergman, Fellini, Godard and Pasolini. As I remember those days, the disparate sights and sounds mix and mingle in my memory: sad stills of Bergman’s women merge into the soothing sound of David, my radical professor, singing on his guitar:
Long-haired preachers come out every night
And they tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
And when you ask them for something to eat
They tell you in voices so sweet:
You will eat by and by, in that glorious place in the sky
Work and pray, live on hay, you will get pie in sky when you die.
That’s a lie!
We would demonstrate in the mornings, taking over the administration building, singing songs on the green in front of the English Department, called South Oval, watching as the occasional streakers ran across the green towards the redbrick building that was the library. I marched while the suffering ROTC students, in those days of protest against the Vietnam War, tried to ignore our presence on the grass. Later I would go to parties with my true love, who introduced me to Nabokov when he gave me Ada, in whose flyleaf he had written: To Azar, my Ada, Ted.
My family had always looked down on politics, with a certain rebellious condescension. They prided themselves on the fact that as far back as eight hundred years ago—fourteen generations, my mother would proudly emphasize—the Nafisis were known for their contributions to literature and science. The men were called hakims, men of knowledge, and later, in this century, the Nafisi women had gone to universities and taught at a time when few women dared leave home. When my father became the mayor of Tehran, instead of celebration there was a sense of unease in the family. My younger uncles, who at the time were university students, refused to acknowledge my father as their brother. Later, when my father fell out of favor, my parents managed to make us feel more proud of his term in jail than we had ever been when he was mayor.
I joined the Iranian student movement reluctantly. My father’s imprisonment and my family’s vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me towards politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist—though in those days there was not much difference between them. One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me. Instead, they held study groups in which we read and discussed Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the seventies, the mood—not just among Iranians, but among American and European students—was revolutionary. There was the Cuban example, and China of course. The revolutionary cant and romantic atmosphere were infectious, and the Iranian students were at the forefront of the struggle. They were active, and even confrontational, going to jail for occupying the Iranian consulate in San Francisco.
The Iranian student group at the University of Oklahoma was a chapter of the World Confederation of Iranian Students, which had members and chapters in most major cities in Europe and the United States. In Oklahoma, it was responsible for the introduction on campus of the RSB, the militant student branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the creation of the Third World Committee Against Imperialism, composed of radical students from different nationalities. The confederation, fashioning itself after Lenin’s democratic centralism, exerted a strong hold over its members’ lifestyles and social activities. As time went by, the more militant and Marxist elements came to dominate the group,