Reading Between Words

Reading Lolita in Tehran has to be read between the lines. The real meanings that Azar Nafisi wants to tell us are hidden between the anecdotes that she is telling us. By telling us brief summaries of books, we can see that all of the eight girls can relate their lives to the fictional books. She never tells us directly what all of these girls are going through, but she does gives us a general idea of how society is treating women during that time. If one is not paying attention to the reading, one wouldn’t notice that most of the books that they talk about in their class relate to their real lives. One example of these is when she is having a nice conversation with Yassi, and Yassi starts making her all of these “what if´s” questions. She states, “What would she look like? Would it affect the way she walked or how she moved her hands? How would others look at her?” (32) The first thing that came into Azi mind was Nabokov´s novel: Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Ada, Pnin. What better way to explain reality through literature? She explains how this book talks about the “other world” and how you are always going to live with a shadow of another world.

Azi is constantly making analogies and comparisons in order to help us understand what’s going around them.  A very good example I found was when she was explaining how the chief film censor in Iran was blind and based all of his judgments on audio tapes. She explains how the world they were living in under the mullahs´rule was “shaped by the colorless lenses of the blind censor” (25). They were so limited for doing things that they felt as if they were blind. I found it interesting because even thought they had the chance to see their surroundings, they were not enjoying it and they were all living miserable lives. Not even their imagination could take them to happy, colorful places. As she states, “Not just or reality but also our fiction had taken on this curious coloration in a world where the censor was the poet´s rival in rearranging and reshaping reality, where we simultaneously invented ourselves and were figments of someone else´s imagination” (25).  They were so trapped in a world that not even their imagination could wonder off. With these comparisons we can see how much they were suffering and being mistreated, but still Azi would never tell us to the face what they were going through.

I also found some irony while Azi is telling us about her past. One example is the green gate of the entrance of the university. The first word that comes to my mind when I think of a gate is a prison, or something that encloses me and limits me from the rest of the world. But for Yassi that green gate represented the complete opposite: freedom. She explains, “The gate appears in this poem, and in some of her other writings, as a magical entrance into the forbidden world of all the ordinary things she had been denied in life” (29). For here that green gate represented the life that she should be living, behind that gate she wasn’t invisible, she was rather a different “thing” that every man was curious about. It was the only place were she could feel free from the rest of the society rules.

So far I have found Azar Nafisi way of writing very interesting. I like how she is telling us the stories through out other literature works and I guess she is doing this so because she wants to keep safe the real characters of her book. Since all of those girls could have gotten into trouble for going to the literature class.