Reading Lolita in Tehran: Identity, Color, and Resistance

Introduction: Confiscation as Central Theme

In her memoir 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 deals particularly with the theme of reading Nabokov's Lolita — other sections engage with Fitzgerald 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 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" (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 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.

Color, Visibility, and the Erasure of Identity

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 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. Early in the memoir, this chromatic suppression is made vivid: "The colors had faded into gray suitcases" (3–4), a description of how Azar packs her brightly colored belongings in order to move West, leaving behind only colorless things that belong in Iran. Color appears as a metaphor for her private life — things that may not have been permitted in Iran but are natural to her and which she takes with her into exile.

The dark robes make women almost indistinguishable from one another, a situation heightened by the Islamic prohibition against looking directly at unrelated women. Nafisi imagines that the robe renders her invisible: "I pretended that when I wore the robe, my whole body disappeared" (167). In wearing the robe and assuming this costume, the women become converted into actors in their own lives. "These girls," Nafisi writes, "had both a real history and a fabricated one … the regime's definition of them as Muslim women" (27–28). Throughout the book, Nafisi speaks of the way that being so thoroughly obscured seems to steal away the very existence of women, who "do not quite exist, because they leave no trace" (19). Women who defy the system are jailed, tortured, or even killed.

One of the stranger implications of Nafisi's framing is her suggestion that unimagined lives are, in some sense, less than real. Early in the memoir she writes: "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" (6). In asking the reader to empathize and imagine, Nafisi seems to imply that the girls do not fully exist without being imagined by others — that they are, to some degree, fictional. This sits uneasily in a supposedly nonfictional narrative and invites scrutiny, particularly given that many identifying details of the women in the group have been deliberately altered.

Lolita as Metaphor for Iranian Women

The way in which the Iranian state seeks to ignore women's real lives and force them into a subservient role is compared metaphorically by Nafisi and her class to the plight of Nabokov's character Lolita. Just as H.H. says of Lolita, "I simply don't know a thing about my darling's mind" (quoted in Nafisi, 49), and yet imagines her to be innumerable things, so the regime imagines its women and enforces that image upon them. "Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story" (41). She is effaced by H.H., who never cares what she is, only what she means to him.

Nafisi extends this parallel further: "Humbert exonerates himself by implicating his victim" (44) — calling her a slut, a vixen — but he also makes her become complicit, so that she does begin bargaining with sex. Making a victim implicit through labeling, through defining another against their will, leads to their actually becoming complicit as their identity is stripped away. This dynamic replicates the relationship between the Iranian regime and its female citizens. Additionally, one of the girls produces a drawing that Nafisi compares to Nabokov's famous observation that he was inspired by an ape who drew the bars of its cage: "Her subservient nakedness is dependent on that talon, and she reaches out to it" (75). This is a metaphor for the relationship between being a victim of a totalitarian world and eventually accepting that role.