Reading Lolita in Tehran

Semester 1, blog post 4

This blog post may contain spoilers. Reader discretion is advised. You have been warned...mwahahaha. >:D

Reading Lolita in Tehran was the book of choice for our second memoir. It chronicles the period of time in which the author, Azar Nafisi, spent living in Iran. As this memoir is set in the 1970's in Tehran, during the Iranian Revolution, it could be expected to be intriguing. Right?

Wrong.

Why? Well, there's quite a few reasons, but I'll try to keep it short. I suppose the problem is with the plot of the book. It doesn't ever grab or hold the reader's attention. And the fact that I have the attention span of a fly doesn't really help either... Whatever, it's not like my opinion is all that important for this particular blog post. XD

Anyway, to summarize: the book is about a group of women who meet weekly to read and discuss Western (and thereby illegal) literature. And that's pretty much all they do. Basically, reading these banned books and recognizing the messages they reveal is their form of protest.
So. An important central idea within this memoir would undoubtedly be education. (I made the font size bigger because I can okay?) And an important realization to go with this central idea would be that education is necessary to earn and/or protect your rights. Due to the fact that Azar's culture

"denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent – namely ideology" (25),

Iranian citizens (especially women) like Azar were made to follow numerous unreasonable, even absurd, regulations. However, Azar and a group of her university students read banned Western literature to learn how other cultures and societies operate. Then, they begin rebelling against the Iranian Regime in subtle yet meaningful ways. As Nafisi says,

"...we took every opportunity to flaunt our insubordination: by showing a little hair from under our scarves, insinuating a little color into the drab uniformity of our appearances, growing our nails, falling in love and listening to forbidden music," (25).

Click here to read an article about the life of an average Iranian woman before and after the Iranian Revolution. This article explains how, before the Iranian Revolution, women were oppressed. They had very limited rights and had to follow extremely strict rules. After the revolution though, women were allowed to vote. They could go into career fields that were normally restricted to men. They didn't have to cover every part of their body other than their eyes, and they could actually talk to males or laugh out loud. All these restrictions that had once hindered their pursuit of happiness were no more after the Iranian Revolution. (This article is the actual text-to-society connection part of this blog post I guess.)

Here's a YouTube video of the author speaking about the girls who were in her forbidden literature class/group discussions. She's native to Iran, so her accent may be a little heavy, but you can still understand her fairly well.

As you can tell, Azar Nafisi is a very wise, humorous woman. Hopefully you got some insight on the details of her life in Iran from the video.

Click here to visit Nafisi's website.

Click here for a Wikipedia article on Nafisi.

You have now reached the end of my ramblings. I hope I didn't bore you to death. And now I should probably thank you appropriately for reading. So thanks, I guess.