Faculty of Education

Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Puncak Alam Campus

TSL 571
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

"READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN" 's WRITTEN

ASSIGNMENT
PREPARED FOR: ASSOC. PROF. DR SUTHAGAR NARASUMAN

PREPARED BY: (ED241 8C)

NURUL NAJIHAH BINTI MOHAMED YUSOF 2016589155

 This essay will examine Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran to shed light on the
relationship between war and its impact on man's inhumanity and the resistance to victimization
as depicted within this novel. Throughout Nafisi's memoir, as suggested by its title, one follows
the forbidden trips of Nabokov, Austen, and other authors' novels to Tehran, where they are
admired by some readers but condemned by the Islamic authorities. At the same time, Nafisi's
work is allowed to travel West, out of Iran, and into our own cultures.

1.0 MAN'S INHUMANITY AGAINST MAN

Azar Nafisi highlights the issue to the reader that many of the women's issues are both
directly and indirectly caused by the Islamic Republic of Iran. When the writer confronts the
magician with this mentality, he argues that she should not blame everything on the regime,
and she must forget about the politics and focus solely on teaching literature. It is almost
impossible for the reader to agree with the magician as we see Sharia's harsh rules and how
they eventually affect Azar Nafisi and her beloved students. As the book progress even further
and the women grows and develops more individually, it is apparent that while the women
consume the literature, they must digest and address the nature of politics surrounding them,
which eventually is the utmost influential factors considering the nature of the then-situation
of Tehran, in order to gain the epiphanies of truths as what Nafisi describes fully. As Nafisi
exposes these women to literature, she is also allowing them to grasp the world around them
slowly but thoroughly, filled with such hatred and disgust upon women to find themselves.
This novel eventually exposes the Islamic Republic of Iran, where women fall victim to a
discriminatory set of laws that sexually suppresses them both physically and mentally and
further dehumanizes them by stripping off completely their essential life elements.
Simultaneously, these women are exposed to Western literature by the author of this book,
leading them to take charge of their individualities. As the novel is set during the pre-
revolution, revolution, and post-revolution of Iran, Nafisi can show the reader the transition
from the rule of Shah to when the Sharia Law was introduced, enabling us to fully see how the
law's harsh sexual suppression impacted these women physically and mentally. The
government then enforces the veil to hide women and protect the men from temptation, but in
actuality, it is used as a tool to rip away women's individuality. By forcing women to wear the
veil, the law eventually categorizes all women according to their bodies instead of their minds,
skills, or professions.
 This loss of individuality causes women to feel uncomfortable and confused with their own
identity. This can be seen when Nassrin takes off her veil and chador in front of people asides
from her family; she becomes unsure "like a toddler taking its first steps" and tries to hide her
figure. Nassrin is uncomfortable with her body as the government forces the women to perceive
their own body as something secretive, sexual, and dirty. As Nafisi elucidates, "now that she
was unrobed, I noticed how the chador was an excuse to cover what she had tried to disown,
and it is mainly because she genuinely did not know what to do with it" (p.296). Due to the
sexism in Iran's rulings, it is harder for her students to accept their womanhood wholeheartedly
after it has caused them great pain and suffering. The republic forces the women to be ashamed
of their bodies, resulting in dehumanizing themselves. The women's search for their own
identity becomes contradictory as they can no longer differentiate between Sharia's Law's
image upon them and their image of themselves.

2.0 RESISTANCE TO VICTIMISATION

In this novel, Dr. Nafisi left the university because she refused to wear the veil. She talked
about the impact of the long Iraq-Iran war on women in Tehran. This is the tyranny of religious
leaders, who gave orders as if they came directly from God. Therefore, she needs to carefully
select women and let her students participate in "small literary discussions" in her apartment.
The guardians of morality will regard these women chosen by Nafisi as rebels because they
have succumbed to the Iranian ruling's pressure for so long. For example, when Nafisi told us
how Yassi was the "true rebel" of the group because she accepted much inappropriate music
and rejected from marrying the right suitor at the right time. She even decided to leave Shiraz's
hometown to go to university in Tehran. Yassi was given the chance to elucidate for what
reason the simple, regular life behaviour has become a petty resistance and radical disobedience
against women like her. Yassi's life has been shielded since she was a child. She has never been
obscured by her sight, let alone provided her with a private corner to manifest and shape her
individuality. The expression of the conflict between conservatives and liberals in Iranian
society ostensibly defines the tone of the book and links Nafisi's chronicles with the Iranian
people generally epitomized by Western mass media. Some conversant themes are retold; the
motto contained slogans reproving Western philosophy, men blaming and hating women for
refusing to wear a proper hijab, banishing professors for violating Islamic teachings, and
censorship of university courses and the media, and considering severe consequences for
treachery and prostitution in the country for so long.

Considering these timeline, it is understandable on why Nafisi invited her best, loyal
female student to her home for a reading and debating session on her selected novels. As a way
to see it, this is one of the best coping mechanisms and resistance against women's victimization
in Tehran during that time. This is because Nafisi created a safe space for them. Nafisi was
assisting these girls to discover a world beyond the realm of politics and turbulence of the
country, through an act of reading forbidden kinds of literature together and enabling them to
fully immerse in it, to read everything between the lines and relating it with their realities as a
sign of resisting the victimization. Once the idea of wearing a veil became compulsory, and
she refused to wear a veil, she was forced to withdraw from teaching, and one way she figured
out a way to fill the time was to call her best students to attend a weekly literature class to
escape the real world.

In these courses, they discussed Western classics. Nafisi dedicated a part of his memoir
to each writer. The young women outside these classes struggle to live under the Islamic
Republic laws and the potential daily insults, and they painfully show that they read not only
for the noblest purpose but also for the most fundamental reasons. She hopes they see that
novels can change their depressed and humiliated lives, and she seems to have achieved
fantastic success. During this time, they want to believe that literature may be the comfort and
inspiration needed in the oppressive years, as she said: "our class was shaped within this
context, in an attempt to escape the gaze of the blind censor for a few hours each week. There,
in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no
matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were,
like Lolita, we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom. Furthermore,
like Lolita, 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." These
weekly courses provide students with lessons about the power of hope, imagination, and
personality that she gives dedicated students. Nafisi finally got rid of this violent and cruel
reality in Tehran and entered the imaginative world of Western fiction, where she discovered
that the democratic ideals in the novel could help us sympathize with others.
Reference:

Nafisi, A. (2008). Reading Lolita in Tehran. London: Harper Perennial.