Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [60]
No, she is Daisy, and he is in love with her. There is money too, but that is not all; that is not even the point. Fitzgerald does not tell you—he takes you inside the room and re-creates the sensual experience of that hot summer day so many decades ago, and we, the readers, draw our breath along with Tom as we realize what has just happened between Gatsby and Daisy.
“But what use is love in this world we live in?” said a voice from the back of the room.
“What kind of a world do you think is suitable for love?” I asked.
Mr. Nyazi’s hand darted up. “We don’t have time for love right now,” he said. “We are committed to a higher, more sacred love.”
Zarrin turned around and said sardonically, “Why else do you fight a revolution?”
Mr. Nyazi turned very red, bowed his head and after a short pause took up his pen and started to write furiously.
In retrospect it appears strange to me only now, as I write about it, that as I was standing there in that classroom talking about the American dream, we could hear from outside, beneath the window, the loudspeakers broadcasting songs whose refrain was “Marg bar Amrika!”—“Death to America!”
A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.
12
Throughout that year, between the fall of 1979 and the summer of 1980, many events happened that changed the course of the revolution and of our lives. Battles were being fought and lost. One of the most significant of these was over women’s rights: from the very start, the government had waged a war against women, and the most important battles were being fought then.
One day, I think it was in early November, I announced to my students, after the last straggler had drifted in, that they had canceled class many times for their own reasons and I in principle did not agree with this, but on that day I would be forced to go against my own principles and cancel class. I told them I was going to a protest meeting, to oppose the government’s attempts to impose the veil on women and its curtailment of women’s rights. I had missed some of the large demonstrations against the revolutionary government’s policies against women, and I was determined not to miss any more.
Unconsciously, I was developing two different ways of life. Publicly, I was involved in what I considered to be a defense of myself as a person. This was very different from my political activities during my student days, made in behalf of an unknown entity called the “oppressed masses.” This was more personal. At the same time, a more private rebellion began to manifest itself in certain tendencies, like incessant reading, or the Herzog-like passion of writing letters to friends in the States that were never sent. I felt a silent defiance that may also have shaped my public desire to defend a vague and amorphous entity I thought of as myself.
From the beginning of the revolution there had been many aborted attempts to impose the veil on women; these attempts failed because of persistent and militant resistance put up mainly by Iranian women. In many important ways the veil had gained a symbolic significance for the regime. Its reimposition would signify the complete victory of the Islamic aspect of the revolution, which in those first years was not a foregone conclusion. The unveiling of women mandated by Reza Shah in 1936 had been a controversial symbol of modernization, a powerful sign of the reduction of the clergy’s power. It was important for the ruling clerics to reassert that power. All this I can explain now, with the advantage of hindsight, but it was far from clear then.
Mr. Bahri’s body stiffened as he focused on my words. Zarrin kept her usual smile, and Vida