Azar Nafisi (8 page)

Certain things saved me: my family and a small group of friends, the ideas, the thoughts, the books that I discussed with my underground man when we took our afternoon walks. He worried constantly—if we were stopped, what excuse could we give? We were not married; we were not brother and sister. . . . He worried for me and for my family, and every time he worried, I became bolder, letting my scarf slip, laughing out loud. I could not do much to “them,” but I could get angry at him or at my husband, at all the men who were so cautious, so worried about me, for “my sake.”

After our first discussion of
Lolita,
I went to bed excited, thinking about Mitra's question. Why did
Lolita
or
Madame Bovary
fill us with so much joy? Was there something wrong with these novels, or with us?—were Flaubert and Nabokov unfeeling brutes? By the next Thursday, I had formulated my thoughts and could not wait to share them with the class.

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love
Madame Bovary
and cry for Emma, why we greedily read
Lolita
as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.

15

Manna and Yassi had come in early. Somehow we got to talking about the definitions we had concocted for the members of the class. I told them I called Nassrin my Cheshire cat, because she was in the habit of appearing and disappearing at strange times. When Nassrin came in with Mahshid, we told her what we had been saying. Manna said, “If I had to come up with a definition for Nassrin, I would call her a contradiction in terms.” This, for some reason, made Nassrin angry. She turned to Manna, almost accusingly: “You are the poet, Mitra the painter, and what am I—a contradiction in terms?”

There was a certain truth to Manna's half-ironic definition. The sun and clouds that defined Nassrin's infinite moods and temperaments were too intimate, too inseparable. She lived by startling statements that she blurted out in a most awkward manner. My girls all surprised me at one point or another, but she more than the rest.

One day Nassrin had stayed on after class, to help me sort out and file my lecture notes. We had talked randomly, about the university days and the hypocrisy of some officials and activists in various Muslim associations. She had gone on to tell me, as she calmly put sheets of paper in blue file folders and entered the date and subject for each file, that her youngest uncle, a very pious man, had sexually abused her when she was barely eleven years old. Nassrin recounted how he used to say that he wanted to keep himself chaste and pure for his future wife and refused friendships with women on that count.
Chaste and pure,
she mockingly repeated. He used to tutor Nassrin—a restless and unruly child—three times a week for over a year. He helped her with Arabic and sometimes with mathematics. During those sessions as they sat side by side at her desk, his hands had wandered over her legs, her whole body, as he repeated the Arabic tenses.

This was a memorable day in many ways. In class, we were discussing the concept of the villain in the novel. I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image. I reminded them of Humbert's statement that he wished to stop time and keep Lolita forever on “an island of entranced time,” a task undertaken only by Gods and poets.

I tried to explain how
Lolita
was a more complex novel than any of the previous ones we had read by Nabokov. On the surface of course
Lolita
is more realistic, but it also has the same trapdoors and unexpected twists and turns. I showed them a small photograph of Joshua Reynolds's painting
The Age of Innocence,
which I had found accidentally in an old graduate paper. We were discussing the scene in which Humbert, paying a visit to Lolita's school, finds her in a classroom. Reynolds's print of a young girl-child in white, with brown curly hair, hangs above the chalkboard. Lolita is sitting behind another “nymphet,” an exquisite blonde with a “very naked porcelain-white neck” and “wonderful platinum hair.” Humbert settles in beside Lolita, “just behind that neck and that hair,” and unbuttons his overcoat and, for a bribe, forces Lolita to put her “inky, chalky, red-knuckled hand” under her desk to satisfy what in ordinary language is called his lust.

Let us pause for a moment on this casual description of Lolita's schoolgirl hands. The innocence of the description belies the action Lolita is forced to perform. The words “inky, chalky, red-knuckled” are enough to take us to the edge of tears. There is a pause. . . . Do I imagine it now?—was there a long pause after we discussed that scene?

“What bothers us most, of course,” I said, “is not just the utter helplessness of Lolita but the fact that Humbert robs her of her childhood.” Sanaz picked up her Xerox of the novel and began. “ ‘And it struck me,' ” she read, “ ‘as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply didn't know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions . . .' ”

I tried to ignore the meaningful glances they exchanged among themselves.

“It is hard for me,” Mahshid said at last, “to read the parts about Lolita's feelings. All she wants is to be a normal girl. Remember the scene when Avis's father comes to pick her up and Lolita notices the way the fat little daughter and father cling to each other? All she wants is to live a normal life.”

“It is interesting,” said Nassrin, “that Nabokov, who is so hard on poshlust, would make us pity the loss of the most conventional forms of life.”

“Do you think Humbert changes when he sees her in the end,” Yassi interrupted, “broken, pregnant and poor?”

The time for our break had come and gone, but we were too absorbed in our discussion to notice. Manna, who seemed engrossed by a passage in the book, raised her head. “It's strange,” she said, “but some critics seem to treat the text the same way Humbert treats Lolita: they only see themselves and what they want to see.” She turned to me and continued: “I mean, the censors, or some of our politicized critics, don't they do the same thing, cutting up books and re-creating them in their own image? What Ayatollah Khomeini tried to do to our lives, turning us, as you said, into figments of his imagination, he also did to our fiction. Look at Salman Rushdie's case.”

Sanaz, playing with her long hair and rolling it around her finger, looked up and said, “Many people feel that Rushdie portrayed their religion in a distorted and irreverent manner. I mean, they don't object to his writing fiction but to his being offensive.”

“Is it possible to write a reverent novel,” said Nassrin, “and to have it be good? Besides, the contract with the reader is that this is not reality, it's an invented world. There must be some blasted space in life,” she added crossly, “where we can be offensive, for God's sake.”

Sanaz was a little startled by the vehemence of Nassrin's retort. Through most of this discussion, Nassrin had been drawing furious lines in her notebook, and after she had delivered her pronouncement, she went on with her drawing.

“The problem with the censors is that they are not malleable.” We all looked at Yassi. She shrugged as if to say she couldn't help it, the word appealed to her. “Do you remember how on TV they cut Ophelia from the Russian version of
Hamlet
?”

“That would make a good title for a paper,” I said. “ ‘Mourning Ophelia.' ” Ever since I had started going abroad for talks and conferences in 1991, mainly to the United States and England, every subject immediately took on the shape of a title for a presentation or a paper.

“Everything is offensive to them,” said Manna. “It's either politically or sexually incorrect.” Looking at her short but stylish hairdo, her blue sweatshirt and jeans, I thought how misplaced she looked enveloped in the voluminous fabric of her veil.

Mahshid, who had been quiet until then, suddenly spoke up. “I have a problem with all of this,” she said. “We keep talking about how Humbert is wrong, and I do think he is, but we are not talking about the issue of morality. Some things
are
offensive to some people.” She paused, startled by her own vehemence. “I mean, my parents are very religious—is that a crime?” she asked, raising her eyes to me. “Do they not have a right to expect me to be like them? Why should I condemn Humbert but not the girl in
Loitering with Intent
and say it's okay to have an adulterous relationship? These are serious questions, and they become difficult when we apply them to our own lives,” she said, lowering her gaze, as if looking for a response in the designs on the carpet.

“I think,” Azin shot back, “that an adulterous woman is much better than a hypocritical one.” Azin was very nervous that day. She had brought her three-year-old daughter (the nursery was closed; there was no one to look after her), and we'd had difficulty convincing her to leave her mother's side and watch cartoons in the hall with Tahereh Khanoom, who helped us with the housework.

Mahshid turned to Azin and said with quiet disdain: “No one was talking about making a choice between adultery and hypocrisy. The point is, do we have any morality at all? Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs?”

“Well, that is the crux of the great novels,” Manna added, “like
Madame Bovary
or
Anna Karenina,
or James's for that matter—the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.”

“And what if we say that it is right to do what we want to do and not what society or some authority figure tells us to do?” said Nassrin, this time without bothering to lift her head from her notebook. There was something in the air that day that did not relate directly to the books we had read. Our discussion had plunged us into more personal and private arenas, and my girls found that they could not resolve their own dilemmas quite as neatly as they could in the case of Emma Bovary or Lolita.

Azin had bent forward, her long gold earrings playing hide-and-seek in the ringlets of her hair. “We need to be honest with ourselves,” she said. “I mean, that is the first condition. As women, do we have the same right as men to enjoy sex? How many of us would say yes, we do have a right, we have an equal right to enjoy sex, and if our husbands don't satisfy us, then we have a right to seek satisfaction elsewhere.” She tried to make her point as casually as possible, but she had managed to surprise us all.

Azin is the tallest one in our group, the one with the blond hair and milky skin. She would often bite the corner of her lower lip and launch into tirades about love, sex and men—like a child throwing a big stone into the pool; not just to make a splash, but to wet the adults in the bargain. Azin had been married three times, most recently to a good-looking and rich merchant from a traditional provincial bazaari family. I had seen her husband at many of my conferences and meetings, which were usually attended by my girls. He seemed very proud of her and always treated me with exaggerated deference. At every meeting, he made sure I was comfortable; if there was no water at the podium, he would see to it that the mistake was rectified; if extra chairs were needed, he would boss the staff around. Somehow at these meetings it seemed that he was the gracious host, who had granted us his space, his time, because that was all he had to give.

I was sure that Azin's assault had been partly directed against Mahshid, and perhaps indirectly against Manna, too. Their clashes were not only the result of their different backgrounds. Azin's outbursts, her seeming frankness about her personal life and desires, made Manna and Mahshid, both reserved by temperament, deeply uncomfortable. They disapproved of her, and Azin sensed that. Her efforts at friendship were rejected as hypocritical.

Mahshid's response, as usual, was silence. She drew into herself and refused to fill the void that Azin's question had left behind. Her silence extended to the others, and was broken finally by a short giggle from Yassi. I thought this was a good time for a break and went to the kitchen to bring in the tea.

When I returned, I heard Yassi laughing. Trying to lighten the mood, she was saying, “How could God be so cruel as to create a Muslim woman with so much flesh and so little sex appeal?” She turned towards Mahshid and stared at her in mock horror.

Mahshid look down and then shyly and royally lifted her head, her slanted eyes widening in an indulgent smile. “You don't need sex appeal,” she told Yassi.