Columnists

The Enemy Within:
Reading Lolita In Tehran

T. SHER SINGH

DAILY FIX

Monday, May 28, 2012

“I have no philosophy, nor piety, nor patience, no art of reflection, no theory of compensation to meet things so hideous, so cruel, and so mad, they are just unspeakably horrible and irremediable to me and I stare at them with angry and almost blighted eyes.” [Rupert Brooke]
 

Twenty years of life as a trial attorney has left me with a DNA warped in many ways.

One of them is dependence on deadlines.

I am now forever married to my diary, a slave to her till death do us part. If she wishes it, I go somewhere, do something; if it isn’t in her plans, it ain’t gonna happen.

So when it dawned on me a while ago that the same two decades had played a havoc on my reading habits, and left a huge gap in my view of the world, I knew I had to play quick catch up, or else I would date myself every time I opened my mouth or penned a line.

So I joined a book club. Never done it before, but anytime is a good time to start something new.

A bunch of us get together once every month, each having read the same pre-selected book designated for the month, and share our thoughts and impressions about it over coffee and cookies.

It’s done wonders for me. Not only do I get a new or recent best-seller read every month, but it has got my juices flowing again and I find I’m reading much more on my own. A breath of fresh air, trust me, from the box-loads of lawyers’ briefs I had to wallow in not too long ago!

Even though each of us in the book club makes recommendations for the ones to be added to the reading list, I’ve shied away from putting forth my own two bits. Because I don’t need to: I’m so far behind that any and every item on the list is welcome, as far as I’m concerned.

So, imagine my surprise when this month’s selection brought me face to face with a book I’ve known, and been curious, about for years, but have carefully avoided. I’ve known, from the paeans sung over it by the reviewers, of what it’s contents are: painful and heart-breaking.

I’ve also, through the years post 1984, and then, post 9/11, turned into a coward. Dealing with the daily onslaught of all that man does to man, I have come to be a bit over-cautious over what I’m willing to pick up and read, knowing it may send me off on another spiral of despair.

But it being this month’s selection, I’ve had no choice.

Bravely, I’ve dived into “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, a memoir by an Iranian teacher of literature.

Azar Nafisi, now safe and mercifully teaching in the U.S., was in Tehran, off and on, for lengthy periods during the crucial goings on around the revolution that overthrew the Shah and then the “cultural revolution” put into operation by Khomeini and his ilk.

Predictably, I’ve found the book deeply troubling.

I have enjoyed, I should add, the delicious confections of book discussions she uses as a framework of the memoir, leaping back and forth between Vladimir Nabokov and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen.

But it is her detailed, almost day-to-day telling of how the initial euphoria brought about by the overthrow of the Shah quickly dissolves and slowly, ever so slowly, an air of doom envelopes the land.

Purveyors of religion have decided that it is their duty and their privilege - all self-proclaimed, of course - to get all of the country’s men, women and children to transform themselves in order to conform to the way they, the high priests, believe they should live.

There is no debate, no discussion, no compromise. No ifs and buts. Not even ‘when’ and ‘where’.

It’s now! And everyone, everywhere.

Those who fail or refuse, for whatever reason, are arrested, beaten, raped, tortured, maimed and mutilated, murdered. Without a trial. Summarily, in the hundreds of thousands.

All virgins, for example, are mandatorially raped by the jailers before they are killed ... so that then they will not be eligible to enter heaven!

Even intellectuals are not exempt from terror and death. Actually, especially intellectuals!

Thus, the revolution has turned into a jihad by Muslims against Muslims.

More accurately, Shia Muslim tyrannizing Shia Muslims!

Nafisi describes calmly and matter-of-factedly how, one by one, her students and colleagues, friends and relatives, disappear, only to reappear years later - if at all! - defeated, broken and crushed.

Not soldiers, not criminals, not the enemy. Just ordinary citizens who had done no wrong, had contravened no law, had been accused of nothing.

“After staring at this apparition for a while, I suddenly recognized my old student Mahtab.

“For a second all three of us stood there, frozen in place. Nassrin seemed almost detached; detachment had become her defense against unpleasant memories and uncontrollable realities. It took me a few moments to digest this new Mahtab, to make a shift in my mind and transform that Mahtab, the leftist student in her trademark khaki pants whom I had last seen on the grounds of a hospital hunting for her murdered comrades, to this Mahtab, standing with a rueful smile and begging recognition outside my office …”

The State had won. Mahtab was now dressed in black, head to foot, smothered in a chador - a burqa - even though she absolutely did not want to be in it.

Nafisi does not argue the merits, or for or against any of the practices the mullahs would like the populace to adopt. What she questions is the imposition of one religious regimen, formulated or interpreted by a handful of self-appointed guardians, on an entire nation. Virtually overnight.

Slowly, very slowly, the days of the former Shah start looking not so bad after all. The Iraqis, who are waging a deadly war against Iran - ultimately killing a million and more - no longer appear as monstrous as they have been made out to be.

And the Americans? Still the instruments of Satan, of course. But, people begin to wonder, could they possibly be worse than our own wolves in shepherd’s clothing?

It’s a message that rings loud and clear as you turn page after page, and hear …  along with Nafisi … that yet another student of hers is never to return again, and why.

I find Nafisi’s calm and collected tone of voice, and an absence of superlatives and hyperbole reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino. Interspersed between cups of tea and literary juxtapositions between Nabokov and Fitzgerald, for example, we are informed of how yet another young woman who has been missing for seven years had met her fate; after rape and torture, she had been killed seven years ago. And forgotten.

The very feeling that I had dreaded and therefore avoided the book for so long, now sweeps over me.

I don’t understand how people can kill their own people. Not that killing ‘others’ is any more acceptable. It’s just that, doesn’t one have to transform one’s own people into ’other’ in one’s mind before tormenting them?

And, pray, how do you do that?

The Iranians didn’t invent this pinnacle of man‘s inhumanity to man. Or the idea of turning against your own with the viciousness normally reserved for one's worst enermies.

It’s as old as Abel and Cain of the Jewish/ Christian/ Islamic myth, and the Kauravs and the Pandavas of the Hindu myth.

Christians will tell you, when aglow with inter-faith camaraderie, that they are cousins to both Jews and Muslims - the three groups stem from the same Old Testament. Yet, look at how Christian Europe has hounded its Jewish and Muslim cousins through the ages. And how seamlessly the 'new' world has adopted the very same prejudices. 

The Jews of Israel, and the Palestinians who live in the very same lands which the Israelis now occupy, are first cousins. Look at what one does to the other.

The hatred exchanged between the Irish Catholic and the Irish Protestant is truly special and nurtured from generation to generation.
 
The Hindus in India are no different. Their resentment of the Sikhs from within their own land is unfathomable and fathomless. Even more poignant is the envy and jealousy of the Sikh-Punjabi that stick in the craw of the Punjabi Hindu … notable exceptions, no doubt, abound, but they merely prove the rule!

And so on and so forth … these are but a few examples.

There is one thing that lies in common at the heart of each conflict: the asinine pride that each group has in the imagined superiority of its own religion over that of others!

I was about to recommend that you read “Reading Lolita in Tehran“.

But don’t.

Because it’ll only make your heart heavier.       

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