Italics, and Everything From Column

¶ … italics, and everything from column two is not in italics. I have numbered the rows)

"The colors had faded into gray suitcases..." (pg. 3-4)

Quote talking about how Azar packs her brightly colored belongings in order to move West, leaving behind only colorless things which belong in Iran. Color appears as a metaphor for her private things, which may not have been allowed in Iran but which are natural to the west and which she'll take with her.

THEME: colors vs. monochromaticism

"I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't... Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments... listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us." (pg. 6)

Author is asking the reader to empathize with the girls, so that we will understand them. However, in so doing she also seems to imply that they don't exist without being imagined by others -- that they are to some degree fictional. This seems wrong in a supposedly nonfictional story. Have to go looking for reasons for it, both in the story and external. Of course, the way in which their lives have been taken away from them is also important.

THEMES: Identity/Existence

3. "The facts in this story are true... But I have made every effort to protect...students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them, perhaps even from themselves..." (Author's note)

If all the details of the girl's lives have been changed and rearranged, there is a degree to which we can't believe anything that is said about them. The details of who came from repressive backgrounds and who liberal, who was married and who not, who was raped or imprisoned and who not, and how this relates to their ideas about the veil and the regime and the literature is actually very important -- in changing these details, the integrity of the girl's life experiences is compromised and fictionalized. How does this relate to the fictionalization of their lives by the regime that wants to standardize womanhood.

THEMES: Identity/Existence

4. "Reality as become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams" (11)

Again in this quote dreams and liberation are represented as colors, while reality in Iran is represented as bleak and colorless. It also shows the oppressed accessing dreams through art.

THEMES: Colors and Literature (in this case art) as an alternate world

5. "When I was very young, I was obsessed with the colors of places and things my father told me about in his nightly stories... once I asked him about the color of paradise. . .My paradise is swimming-pool blue!" (14)

Another case in which "real" life is compared to imagined or childhood colors. Next few paragraphs talk about a black chador, a cream colored (white) car, and other gray and black shades.

THEMES: Colors

6. "Upsilamba!" (18)

An imaginary word in Nabokov representing an archaic letter which is never used in totalitarian regimes. The girls define it as exciting things such as waltzes or a kind of bird. Notice that they claim the right to define it, and in so doing give it meaning.

THEMES: Identity/Existence and Imagination

7. "He [Nabokov] kept on writing his solitary prose while he heard the guns... Let us see... [if] faith will reward us reward by transforming the gloomy reality [here]." (19)

One of the main points of the book is that reading the classics and having imagination and creative thoughts is a way to survive the regime. Nabokov is shown as embodying this idea. Yet he is the writer of Lolita, in which H.H. transforms Lolita against her will. When is ignoring reality and writing one's own solitary world a good thing, and when does it define others unfairly?

THEMES: Literature as an alternate world

8. [the mythical virgins] "do not quite exist, because they leave no trace... Schezerade breaks the cycle of violence...through imagination." (19)

Here again Azar suggests that those which are not imagined (leave no trace) are not real even if they seem real to themselves. Thus, one assumes, she sees her girls as being less than real if they are not seen, or partly erased by being under a chador (she later speaks of a game where she pretends se's invisible under the veil). The myth of the poetess keeping the king entertained so that he does not kill her as he killed the others may also replicate the study group.

THEMES: Identity/Existence and Literature as an alternate world

9. "sentenced to death for [this] crime... In a place where all the citizens are required to be transparent, he is opaque." (22)

From Nabokov's book, Invitation to a Beheading. In the book C.C. is colored when those around him are transparent. This may line up with the chador and the veiling as ways of making women invisible... women are threatened with death if they become too colorful or too obvious.

THEMES: Colors and Identity/Existence

10. "The Executioner and the condemned man must learn to love each other and cooperate in the act of execution... [his] only window to another universe is his writing." (22)

This metaphor appears to have resonance with the plight of the women, particularly those like Mahshid who had worn the veil before the Revolution, or even Azar who had supported some revolution. In a way, though, all the girls are wed to the revolution, because they are part of Iran -- they escape through their literature, but they remain part of it and willing to comply to its laws and wear the veil.

THEMES: Complicity and Literature as an alternate world

11. "The chief censor in Iran... was blind." ( 24)

Only content, not beauty or colors, was necessary to the Regime.

THEMES: Colors

12. "These girls... had both a real history and a fabricated one... The regime's definition of them as Muslim women." (27-28)

Being forced to wear the veils strips them of their individuality. The rules seek to disguise them

THEMES: Identity/Existence

13. "The desperate truth of Lolita is not...rape...but...confiscation of... life." (33) "Lolita belongs to a category of victims wo ave no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story." (41)

Lolita is like Azar's girls because she is so young and controlled, but also because she is effaced by H.H., who never cares what she is, only what she means to him.

THEMES: Identity/Existence

14. "Humpert exonerates himself by implicating his victim ... [like] Iran." (44)

He implicates her (calling her a slut, vixen, etc.) but he also makes her become complicit, so that she does start bargaining with sex, etc. Making implicit through labelling (defining another against their will) leads to their actually becoming complicit, as their identity is stripped away.

THEMES: Identity/Existence and Complicity

15. "Her subservient nakedness is dependent on that talon, and she reaches out to it." (75)

This from a drawing done by one of the girls. it's compared to Lolita, in that Nabokov was inspired by an ape who drew the bars of its cage. This is a metaphor for the relationship between being a victim of a totalitarian world and accepting that role.

THEMES: Identity/Existence and Complicity

16 ."The worst crime committed by totalitarian mindsets is that they force their...victims... To become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer..." (76)

An idea from Invitation to Beheading, by Nabokov. It is a continuation here of the theme of women becoming overshadowed by the will of the government.

THEMES: Complicity

Lolita Becoming

In her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi chronicles the beautiful and often agonizing experience of teaching a women's reading group in theocratic post-Revolution Iran. The first segment of the story particularly deals with the theme of reading Nabokov's Lolita (other sections include ...Gatsby and Austen) and the memories that surround or are somehow connected to that book. In this first section of the memoir, the reader is introduced to what is possibly the most baffling and yet important theme of the Nafisi's story, and the key to understanding her interpretation both of life in Tehran and of the meaning of Nabokov's Lolita. Nafisi writes that "The desperate truth of Lolita is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another." (Nafisi, 33) She may as well have written, for it would have been equally true, that the desperate truth of Tehran and the plight of women in Iran is not about mandatory dress laws or even systematic misogyny, but about the confiscation and control of their individual lives by the state. Nafisi explores the way in which the strict shari'a laws and their enforcers seek to erase the individual life and color of women's lives and to make them invisible within society; the women in Nafisi's personal group rebel against this through literary and artistic endeavors that allow them to (at least temporarily) define reality as they themselves would like to see it, yet this only further raises the question of who has the right to define reality and to manipulate the world and people around them to enforce their personal fantasy. Subtly, between the pages of memoir and of literary and political criticism, this book deals with the uncertain and uneasy solipsism of the world.

The way in which the totalitarian, theocratic regime seeks to impose its will on the women of Tehran is certainly horrific. Girls are forbidden to have any sort of color in their attire or about their person, as if someone the very existence of color would challenge the monochromatic existence of the regime. All must wear dark-colored robes related to the chador, and similarly dark veils that must cover every strand of hair; they must not wear lipstick or fingernail polish, or even pink socks. This robe makes women almost indistinguishable, a situation heightened by the Islamic prohibition against looking directly at unrelated women; Nafisi imagines that it makes her invisible, "I pretended that when I wore the robe, my whole body disappeared." (Nafisi, 167) in wearing the robe and assuming this costume, the women become converted into actors in their own lives. "These girls... had both a real history and a fabricated one... The regime's definition of them as Muslim women." (Nafisi, 27-28) Throughout the book Nafisi speaks of the way that being so obscured seems to steal away the very existence of women who "do not quite exist, because they leave no trace..." (Nafisi, 19) Women who defy the system are jailed, tortured, or even killed.