To date, this is the best Nafisi interview I've seen:
Atlantic Unbound | May 7, 2003
Interviews
--> The Fiction of Life -->
Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, on the dangers of using religion as an ideology, and the freedoms that literature can bring
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Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi Random House 288 pages, $23.95 |
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1979, Azar Nafisi returned to her native Iran after a seventeen-year absence.
From the moment she stepped off the plane, she found herself in a place that was
dark and unfamiliar. The cheerful and cosmopolitan Tehran airport that she
remembered from her youth, with its terraced restaurant and stylishly dressed
women, now seemed barren except for giant posters of the ayatollahs tagged with
menacing slogans in black and red: "DEATH TO AMERICA! DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM
& Z! IONISM! A MERICA IS OUR NUMBER-ONE ENEMY!" As a customs official
searched her bags, he picked up her books?most of them modern American
novels?with particular disdain, as though handling dirty laundry. "But he did
not confiscate them?not then," Nafisi recalls forebodingly in her memoir,
Reading Lolita in Tehran. "That would come sometime later."While revolution was brewing in Iran, Nafisi was at the University of Oklahoma, immersed in English literature and leftist politics?the former with great conviction, the latter with some ambivalence. When the worldwide Iranian student movement?a diverse league of Marxists and anti-imperialists?reached Oklahoma, Nafisi joined it and entered what she calls a "schizophrenic period." She would deliver rabble-rousing speeches denouncing American imperialism, while toting books by "counterrevolutionary" authors such as T. S. Eliot, Nabokov, and Jane Austen. Her image of Iran was similarly divided?her country was both the enc! hanted place of her childhood memories and the object of the student m ovement's increasingly militant fantasies.
Nafisi pulls no punches in her condemnation of political Islam?at one point she astonishes her husband by comparing life in the Islamic Republic to "sex with someone you loathe." But looking back now from her new home in Washington, D.C., she feels a wry sense of gratitude toward the regime. By its confiscations, it taught her "to love Austen and James and ice cream and f! reedom" in a way that she could not have experienced elsewhere.
I spoke with Nafisi by phone on April 23.
?Elizabeth Wasserman
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| Azar
Nafisi |
Interestingly enough, when I talk about how the ayatollahs, by imposing their dreams on us, turning us into a figment of their imagination, did basically the same thing that Humbert did to Lolita, it seems to resonate with a lot of my American readers. And my students in Iran connected with Nabokov more than with any other writer. It's because of the kind of universe he created, in Lolita and in other books, in which the free individual always had to fend for herself or himse! lf, and t he biggest crime was confiscation of another person's reality. That was something that they connected with immediately.
In one passage you actually compare life in Iran to a piece of bad fiction. Is that in a way what makes a tyranny so difficult to overcome, that it is so incoherent?
People always think that living in a tyranny is a cohesive experience. But living under! a tyranny?and Nabokov does an amazing job of illustrating this in Invitation to a Beheading?you don't suffer just from physical oppression. You suffer because the regime is so arbitrary. Living in the U.S., when you wake up in the morning you know accidents could happen to you, but you sort of know what might happen when you go out into the street and go to work. In Iran, when you leave home you literally don't know what could happen to you. They might be very nice, very reasonable, or they might take you to jail. They live on that arbitrariness. They are not coherent, they only have the guns. And they are very scared of you. I try to make my American friends understand that when the fundamentalists fle w into the World Trade Center, it was not merely because of their fear of the U.S., it was because of their fear of their own people wanting to become more democratic.
When we in the free world think of totalitarianism, we normally think in terms of the suppression of dissidents, of the right to speak out and act out against ! the regime. Your description of the Islamic Republic shows how much deeper the repression went, that the regime dictated not just opinions, but emotions in every aspect of life?when and how you could express love or fear or grief. Can literature provide readers with a kind of substitute emotional life?
There's a sentence by Nabokov, "Readers are born free and they ought to remain free." I wanted this book to be not just about authors, and freedoms of speech for authors, but about the freedom to read for readers, the freedom for readers to communicate with their authors, with the books that they choose to read.
The most important less on that we learned from the Islamic Republic, which connects directly to Nabokov and almost every single novel that he has written, is that freedom means nothing without first giving the individual the choice to fulfill himself or herself to the fullest of his or her potential. My generation didn't understand that. We were gi! ven this freedom. We didn't think about it. My daughter's generation h as been going to jail for wearing lipstick in the streets. They have been flogged seventy-six lashes for not wearing the veil properly. They have been deprived of holding hands in public with the man they love. So love, personal emotions, personal choices, right now are at the center of the struggle for Iran. And one of the ways that we realized this, that we fought with our own inarticulateness, was through reading these books.
Austen told us that a woman has the right to choose the man she wants to marry, against all authority. Nabokov taught us that people have a right to retrieve th e reality that totalitarian mindsets have taken away from them. That is why works of imagination, especially fiction, have become so vital today in Iran. And I wish that Americans would understand that. Their gifts to us have been Lolita and Gatsby. Our gift to them has been reasserting those values that they now take for granted, reminding them that life, liberty, and p! ursuit of happiness belong to everyone.
Was there ever a time, when you were living in Iran, when you would have welcomed the idea of a regime change implemented by foreign forces?
Some Iranians were so desperate that they would have wanted the foreign powers to come in, but I didn't feel that way. Each country is different. When you live in a totalitarian society, international support is integral to the blossoming of movements for democracy, because you are completely helpless and you feel lonely and that support gives you courage, gives you hope. But in Iran, I don't think that we needed foreign intervention at any point. Iran from the very first was a vibrant society. It never took this revolution lying down. From the very moment I first stepped into the Tehran airport in 1979, I remember, there was oppression and there was a movement agai! nst oppression. And we needed to go throu gh a process of understandin g democracy.
What we did need from abroad, and what we are not properly getting, is genuine support for democratic movements in that country, even just in terms of the media coverage. After September 11, I was so disappointed that when 40,000 Iranians came out to the streets in Iran under threat of jail or torture and lit candles in sympathy with the American people, it got so little attention. Why should other demonstrations, just because they were noisier, get so much more attention? What I'm saying is, Iran needs support, and the policy toward the Iranian government should be firm. It should be firm on human rights. It should realize that a totalitarian government would never give up weapons of mass destruction. We should defend democracy pragmatically, if not for humanity's sake.
The generation gap in Iran is in a sense the opposite of what it is in the West?the post-revolutionary generation has grown up in a much more repressed, clo sed society than t! heir parents and even their grandparents did. Does this put a particular strain on relations between parents and children, or teachers and students?
It sometimes makes the youth resentful. One example that comes to mind: we had a satellite dish at home, and my daughter, at the age of eleven or twelve, became addicted to the program The X-Files. When our house was raided by the authorities and they took away our satellite dish, my daughter was crying. She started getting on my nerves. I told her that she was spoiled, and she got mad at me. She said, "You don't understand. When you were my age, were you punished for wearing colored shoelaces? We have nothing. This is all we have and you call me spoiled?" I encountered those kinds of feelings often when I was teaching. Sometimes I would forget myself, and I would talk about my days in college, going to Bergman movies and sitting out and playing guitar, and I would sense this bitterness from my studen ts. The! ir youths were devoid of such public freedoms. One of them told me tha t when she visited Syria and was able to go outside without her veil and feel the wind on her hair, she got so angry at what had been taken away from her.
So it is a very bitter generation, but it is also a very courageous and fighting generation. Mine is too soft. We would demonstrate in front of White House, knowing that nothing would happen to us. They would get flogged because of the way they wear their hair. I have more faith in them than I do in myself.
Your children must have a different perspective on the U.S. from yours and your husband's.
It's funny, I don't know if you remember that a few years ago there was this debate here about rap music, whether it should be censored because it made children violent, and my son said to me, "Mom, they think we're stupid, that we don't know the difference between reality and a song. It's like the Islamic Republic."
In a wa y he has a more sophisticated view than children who were born here! .
He doesn't buy these arguments here, because he's had the experience there. And my daughter said when we first came here that her American classmates didn't appreciate what they had. She was so glad just to be able to talk in class and to speak out against the teacher and not be penalized.
I wonder about the relations between emigres and their acquaintances who stayed behind in Iran. You mention in your book that as you were preparing to leave, a close friend told you he didn't want to stay in touch with you or anyone who was fortunate enough to leave.
There is a lot of resentment against people who live here, a feeling that this is a much softer life, that why should their countrymen have things here that they don't have and leave all of the problems to those who stayed behind. But that resentment really belongs to the older generation. The youth merely want as many good things as t hey can get their hands on. And then on the other side, ! a lot of emigre friends that I run into here look at Iran with nostalg ic longing. They say that life here is so empty that even going back to the Islamic Republic and tolerating the hardships would be better than carrying this emptiness with them. Of course they don't go back, but they say it. What I appreciate and find most important is that among both groups there are those who are making an effort to keep in touch, to fill one another in. I feel that bond with my students and with many young writers who are communicating by e-mail and fax and sending books and articles.
You write that "at the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives." Is it fair to say that your mission as a teacher and writer was not political rebellion so much as resistance to political intrusion?
One aspect of democracy is that different areas and fields can be free from politics. Of course they are interrelated. But it is such a great freedom for me as a writer to be able to think only about the books that I'm writing about and not to have to worry about what Mr. Bush or Mr. Clinton might do to me. If Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton are constantly in my thoughts as I'm writing! , already their dictatorship is over me. This is something that a lot of people over here don't understand, that freedom for a great book is freedom from the tyranny of the ever-presence of politics. It makes me so mad that every time I talk about being a woman in Iran or about reading Lolita in Tehran people always assume that my purpose must be political. Reading Lolita in Tehran was a reaction against books and against people who always refer to my country or culture as though we are interesting only because of Mr. Khatami and Mr. Khomeini. I want to say that we are interesting because we are bringing Lolita to your attention in a way that some of you have never thought about. Forget about Mr. Khatami and Mr. Khomeini, or if you're not forgetting about them, look at them from our perspective rathe r than looking at us from their perspective.
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