Azar Nafisi lives in America now. The decision to leave her native Iran full-time and emigrate to America was, understandably, a long and difficult decision for her, but one which ultimately I absolutely applaud. As a professor of Literature at Iranian universities, she lived through the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war and the strictures of Khomeini whilst her life revolved around art, thought and forbidden novels. Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is Nafisi’s account of the small, private classes she began teaching, with a small group of hand-picked students, at her home in Tehran. It is a story primarily about women, and the way in which women were treated under the vile theocracy of Iran and its dogmatic, misogynist ayatollahs. It is the veil, that most symbolic and histoically loaded of garments, which takes centre stage for substantial portions of the text, as Nafisi details her own resistance to the enforced wearing of hijab, which eventually led to her initial expulsion from her university post. She writes also about the “morality squads” of Iran, driving around the city in their van, making sure the women are “appropriately” dressed, with no hair visible, no make-up, and no touching of men who are not husbands, at risk of fines, imprisonment or worse. Such are the horrors of the Islamic caliphate in Iran for women; the logical conclusions of the velayat-é-faghi.
And yet the book is not a mere (mere!) depiction of the awful treatment of women in Iran; it is also, finally, about the redemptive power of art and literature. As Nafisi and her all-female group of students gather in her flat, remove their veils and begin to learn to speak openly about themselves, their lives and their dreams, they read and study some of the great canonical works of Western literature: Nabokov, The Great Gatsby, Henry James and Saul Bellow; Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Reading these novels, they find ways of expressing and identifying what is happening in their own lives, both personally and politically: Nabokov’s great protagonist Humbert Humbert is read as a way of thinking about how the regime in Iran imposes an identity as “woman” on them, just as Humbert imposes a constructed identity upon his “nymphet”. The quiet subversion of Austen slots neatly into a discussion of the roles these women must play in their own relationships with men, whilst a reading of Fitzgerald forms the backbone of Nafisi’s recollections and thoughts on the ascendancy of the Islamic revolution and the attempt to recapture some kind of mystical past. Her students are a varied bunch; some extroverted, some introverted, some desperate to escape and others determined to change Iran for the better, or merely to reconcile their own faith with what they see around them; all of them struggling with the confines placed upon them. They are brought to life on the page with empathy and no small amount of grace in the straightforward (this is an eminently readable book) yet quietly poetic prose of Nafisi, whose only flaw is that of repetition over the course of the text.
For anyone interested in the roles and lives of women in Iran, or what life was (and is) like for the citizens under the theocracy; or for anyone who wished to be introduced to, or reminded of, the transformative power of literature and the necessity of that imaginative bridge between the personal and the political, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a thoughtful, unusual and, in its own personal and small way, a powerful work.
Funny Misshapen Body (2009) is the latest instalment of comic book artist Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical graphic novels (although the term “graphic novel” somehow seems not to apply in this case), following previous works such as Clumsy and Unlikely. The book takes us through Brown’s uncomfortable adolescence at high school and art college, through his travails with the opposite sex, his internal struggles with art, his dalliances with drink and drugs, and more. Brown’s trademark sketchy and bare style reflects the universality of his subject, and many readers (perhaps particularly male readers) will be able to identify with various of his experiences (hopeless crushes on unattainable girls, the awkward first kisses, worrying about being fat or ugly and unable to get dates, etc). His drawing style also lends an almost nostalgic, childhood feel to the book; the most interesting sections are those which undercut this feeling, most notably the chapter dealing with Brown’s teenage diagnosis with Crohn’s Disease.
