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So, I'd like to talk about a recent controversy and see what everyone thinks about it. Let's use wikipedia for the basic information:
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is a book by Iranian author and professor, Azar Nafisi.
Published in 2003, it has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over one hundred weeks and has been translated into thirty-two languages.
Plot
The book narrates the personal and intellectual events of a private literature class Nafisi started in Tehran after leaving her teaching post at the University of Allameh Tabatabei. The class consisted of seven of her best female students, who met at Nafisi's house every Thursday morning from 1995 to 1997 to discuss forbidden works of Western literature.[2]
In this private class, they also discussed the situation in Iran shortly after revolution (1978-1981).
Structure
The book is divided into four sections: "Lolita", "Gatsby", "James", and "Austen".
Nafisi states that the Gatsby chapter is about the American dream, the Iranian dream of revolution and the way it was shattered; the James chapter is about ambiguity and the way totalitarian mindsets hate ambiguity; and Austen is about the choice of women, a woman at the centre of the novel saying no to the authority of her parents, society, and welcoming a life of dire poverty in order to make her own choice.
"Lolita" deals with Nafisi as she resigns from The University of Tehran and starts her secret literature class with students Mitra, Nassrin, Azin, Sanaz and Manna. They talk not just about Lolita, but One Thousand and One Nights and Invitation to a Beheading. The main themes are oppression, jailers as revolutionary guards try to assert their authority through certain events such as a vacation gone awry and a runaway convict.
"Gatsby" is set about eleven years before "Lolita" just as the Iranian revolution starts. The reader learns how many Iranians' dreams, including the author's, became distorted through the regime's eventual law and order. Nafisi's student Mr. Nyazi puts the novel on trial, claiming that it condones adultery. Chronologically this is the first part of Nafisi's story. The Great Gatsby and Mike Gold's works are discussed in this part. The reader meets Nassrin.
"James" takes place right after "Gatsby", when the Iran-Iraq war begins and Nafisi is expelled from the University of Tehran along with other professors. The veil becomes mandatory and the regime wants to control the liberal-minded professors. Nafisi meets the man she calls her "magician". Daisy Miller and Washington Square are the main texts. Nassrin reappears after spending several years in prison.
"Austen" succeeds "Lolita" as Nafisi plans to leave Iran and the girls discuss the issue of marriages, men and sex. The only real flashback (not counting historical background) is into how the girls and Nafisi toyed with the idea of creating a Dear Jane society. While Azin deals with an abusive husband and Nassrin plans to leave for England, Nafisi's magician reminds her not to blame all of her problems on the Islamic Republic. Pride and Prejudice, while the main focus, is used more to reinforce themes about blindness and empathy.
So that's what the book is all about. Already you might have noticed something a little fishy about how it's all about English classics - what about the Persian and Arabic literature that's also banned?
The main attack on the book, however, is about the cover. Says Hamid Dabashi:
I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of Reading Lolita in Tehran we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage "girls" and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.
The evident act of provoking this colonial trait on the cover of Azar Nafisi's book is not the end of what this cover does. There is more, much more, to it. In fact the case of this cover provides an intriguing twist on Roland Barthes' binary opposition between the denoted and connoted messages of a photograph and its caption. The twist rests on the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different context. The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.
The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are "Reading Lolita"--with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of "in Tehran." In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem.
Here are the two pictures:
So - for the cover image, we lose any idea that these women might be students, and might be reading political newspapers, in Farsi, not English, and from within Iranian culture.
I wondered what people had to say about this. Is Dabashi's criticism valid? There are certainly a whole lot of 'harem-horror' novels out there - novels that sentimentalize the 'plight of the Oriental woman', in which saviour can only come from the 'West' and anything Islamic or 'native' can only be a source of pain nad opression. |
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