Literature and democratic spaces

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Madelline Romero specializes in development communications. She currently works for a development project that operates in poor and remote rural areas in Mindanao. She graduated with a degree in Broadcast Communication from the University of the Philippines.

Following the Iranian revolution in 1979 that saw the Western-supported Shah unseated and the Ayatollah taking over government, women did not dare venture out into public spaces without first enveloping their bodies with a black robe and covering their faces with a veil, leaving only a tiny slit for their eyes, or they risked public lashing when spotted “indecently clad” by the roving morality squad of the revolutionary government. Fastidiously they tucked their hair behind their veils because a single stray strand was enough provocation for an attack by the “guardians of morality.” They treaded very carefully on the streets of Tehran — chaperoned as much as possible — careful not to sway those hips or they would catch the morality guards’ unwanted attention. Adultery was to be punished with death by stoning. They did not dare wear the lightest makeup, which was seen as a sign of moral corruption and decadence of the West. What Azar Nafisi, a literature professor who came back from the United States to Iran shortly after the revolution, decried the most was the loss of intellectual freedom — not just for the women, but for everyone in post-revolutionary, conservative Ummah-led Iran.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a fitting title for Nafisi’s memoir, which documents her and her students’ struggle for intellectual and creative space within an environment that does not only discourage but downright suppresses free thinking. In defiance of regime-directed institutional deterrents to academic freedom, Nafisi and her students did not only read Lolita, but also The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Pride and Prejudice by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, respectively — Western authors who, like Vladimir Nabokov, conjured complex heroes and villains and entangled them in intricate plots, considered morally corrupting and undermining true Muslim values, by the extremely conservative theocracy.

As one flips through the book’s pages, one is transported simultaneously to both the banned literature’s world and the world of Nafisi and her students, and is made aware of the two worlds’ parallels and similarities, despite differences in history and context.

In Lolita, Nafisi’s students saw a parallelism between the rape and kidnap of 12-year-old Lolita by the dirty old man Humbert Humbert, and the totalitarian Iranian regime’s confiscation from them “of the beauty of life, of ordinary everyday life, all the normal pleasures that Lolita — like them — was deprived of.”

After her class put The Great Gatsby “on trial” with one party arguing for the case of Gatsby as a meritorious piece of literature on one hand, and a prosecutor ranting against Jay Gatsby’s immoral adulterousness and sinful materialism on the other, Nafisi began to discover how similar the revolution’s fate was to Gatsby’s: He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, only to discover that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. The revolution came in the name of the Persian people’s collective past and had wrecked their lives in the name of a dream. At a time when Iran was at war against Iraq from 1980 to 1988, Nafisi’s students were struggling to comprehend an unlikely heroine in Daisy Miller, a complicated character whose defiance of conventions of her time was considered revolutionary by some, and reactionary and decadent by others. In discussing Pride and Prejudice with her students, Nafisi praises Austen’s ability to create a “multivocality of diverse voices and intonations, and spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist,” and celebrates Elizabeth Bennet, a genteel and beautiful woman, a rebel ”who says no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers and the rigidly orthodox society…and who risks ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran is beautiful in its prose and ability to move gracefully between narratives and between worlds. It accomplishes what a novel should: it makes the reader enter and experience another world, making him hold his breath with the characters and be involved in their destiny; in other words, making him empathize with them. Indeed, I followed the lives of her loyal students (Manna, Mahshid, Nassrin, Yassi, Azin, Mitra, Sanaz, Nima) and even of the pro-regime students (Mr. Farzan, Mr. Nyazi) and I got hooked by their youth, ideals, passions, and most especially their doubts, confusions and their struggle to reconcile the promises of the revolution with their reality. Living as they were in a totalitarian society where they were “completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, “ where they “can no longer differentiate between their savior and executioner,” I sympathize with their need for art and literature in their lives for — as Henry James wrote to a friend amid a surging feeling of helplessness and inutility during World War I — “we must for dear life make our own counterrealities.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran gives a face to a society quite often misunderstood, and understandably so, by many whose image of Iranian society comes from media lenses showing only beard-wearing Muslim clergy or chador-donning women amid the ruins of the once-glorious Persian civilization. The more important story of the people, who are as much the victims of an extremist regime that claims to have saved them from a materialistic Western-supported administration, often gets lost in these stereotypical images. Reading Lolita in Tehran unveils the women, the people forced into hiding under a huge blanket of facelessness and lack of individuality by a totalitarian government.

In the face of mounting pressure from a conservative regime, Nafisi and her students struggled and fought hard to keep the only democratic space available to them — the world of literature. I think about the freedoms and liberties my generation in Philippine society enjoys, and I feel both relief and shame. I am glad that I was born into a democratic society that enjoys most, if not all, of the freedoms and liberties one could possibly think of. I feel shame for I feel that I have not optimized the possibilities afforded to me by my democratic society. Two elections have passed since I turned 18 nine years ago. I have yet to cast my vote.

Having enjoyed tremendous freedom in Iran before the fervor of revolutionary ideals took over in 1979, Nafisi laments the loss of these liberties, and fears that her young students might not clamor for freedom because they have had no prior experience of it. I ask myself, shall I wait for my freedom and liberties to be seized from me before I truly appreciate them?