Thoughts on Reading Lolita in Tehran

Currently in English, we're reading a memoir entitled Reading Lolita in Tehran written by an Iranian writer and former professor named Azar Nafisi. While the memoir does discuss Nafisi's experiences before and during the disillusioning cultural and social changes that the 1979 Revolution wrought in Iran, the text focuses primarily on the development of an intimate literature group of seven intelligent female students that Nafisi secretly formed after her voluntary expulsion from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil. In discussing many books, such as Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the members of the group had the intention of creating fictional havens in which they could escape the reality of Iranian society's oppression on women. Indeed, many of the books included characters and plots that focused around themes akin to oppression, the risks of attempting to actualize dreams, and the duality between privacy and public arena, which are all topics that resonate with Nafisi and her students. Although Nafisi did not want her students' outside lives to intrude on the group's book discussions, it was sometimes impossible to ignore the problems that they constantly faced. 

Besides the discussion group's conversations, one major theme presented in Reading Lolita in Tehran is Nafisi's attempt to patch up the sudden schism between a culturally rich Iran in which women had as many rights as the women in western nations and a theocratic Iran whose mission seems to be to destroy any vestige of the former Iranian society. Nafisi's sentiments about her disillusionment can be found in the beginning parts of the Gatsby section: when Nafisi returned from her schooling in England with feelings of hope and nostalgia, the revolution had already taken place, and she found portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and enormous posters reading "AMERICA IS OUR NUMBER-ONE ENEMY!" What's even more tragic is that while in England, Nafisi tried to transform her landscapes and learning environments into something that was similar to her understanding of "Iran." Most of her memories about her stay in Europe were directly related to what reminded her of "home." And yet, her concept of "home" or "Iran" vanished with the passing of the revolution. Because her memories of Europe were based off her past "Iran," were they essentially meaningless?

In the end, Azar Nafisi and several of her students left Iran for the United States, Europe, and other places, perhaps out of their frustration with how Iranian society has been based mostly on fundamentalist ideology and uncompromising condemnation of westernization rather than on the actual development of Islamic ideals that stray from the "corruption" that many revolutionaries believed were tied into the pre-revolution Iranian regime. Indeed, as this article from PBS states, the only freedom that the pre-revolution regime prevented the Iranians from having was political freedom, and the original revolution was centered around attaining that. However, in the process, most of the people's freedoms were stripped from them. With the scary internet and literary censorship that the Iranian government currently implements on society, it's hard to determine the true opinions of people about the changes that the shift in regimes has brought about. It'd be interesting to note what memories the Iranians still have about the past and if such recollections are better, in any way, than what they are currently experiencing.