Azar Nafisi by Reading Lolita in Tehran Read Free Book Online Page A

forced her will. She was the little cinder girl, living in the shadows of an inaccessible palace, in love with the unseen prince, who would one day hear her music.
    Her rebellion did not stop there: she did not marry the right suitor at the right time and instead insisted on leaving her hometown of Shiraz to go to college in Tehran. Now she lived partly with her older sister and husband and partly in the home of an uncle with fanatical religious leanings. The university, with its low academic standards, its shabby morality and ideological limitations, had been a disappointment to her. In one sense it was more limited than her home, where she was blessed with a loving and intellectual environment. The loss of that love and warmth had caused her many sleepless nights in Tehran. She missed her parents and family, and she felt guilty for the pain she had inflicted on them. Later, I discovered that her guilt caused her long hours of disabling migraine headaches.
    What could she do? She did not believe in politics and did not want to marry, but she was curious about love. That day, sitting opposite me, playing with her spoon, she explained why all the normal acts of life had become small acts of rebellion and political insubordination to her and to other young people like her. All her life she was shielded. She was never let out of sight; she never had a private corner in which to think, to feel, to dream, to write. She was not allowed to meet any young men on her own. Her family not only instructed her on how to behave around men—they seemed to think they could tell her how she should feel about them as well. What seems natural to someone like you, she said, is so strange and unfamiliar to me.
    Could she ever live the life of someone like me, live on her own, take long walks holding hands with someone she loved, even have a little dog perhaps? She did not know. It was like this veil that meant nothing to her anymore yet without which she would be lost. She had always worn the veil. Did she want to wear it or not? She did not know. I remember the movement of her hand as she said this—flitting in front of her face as if to ward off an invisible fly. She said she could not imagine a Yassi without a veil. What would she look like? Would it affect the way she walked or how she moved her hands? How would others look at her? Would she become a smarter or a dumber person? These were her obsessions, alongside her favorite novels by Austen, Nabokov and Flaubert.
    Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy—even in the books, there were few men for her. What was wrong with that? She wanted to go to America, like her uncles, like me. Her mother and her aunts had not been allowed to go, but her uncles were given the chance. Could she ever overcome all the obstacles and go to America? Should she go to America? She wanted me to advise her. They all did. But what could I offer her, she who wanted so much more from life than she had been given?
    There was nothing in reality that I could give her, so I told her instead about Nabokov’s “other world.” I asked her if she had noticed how in most of Nabokov’s novels
—Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Ada, Pnin—
there was always the shadow of another world, one that was only attainable through fiction. It is this world that prevents his heroes and heroines from utter despair, that becomes their refuge in a life that is consistently brutal.
    Take
Lolita.
This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of
Lolita
’s story is
not
the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but
the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.
We don’t know what Lolita would have become if