... With my small collection of books, was as an emissary of a country that did not exist, it came with a repertoire of dreams to proclaim that other country that was his home ... AN
Read " Lolita "in Tehran, Azar Nafisi (El Aleph, 2003, translated by Ma Luz García de la Hoz) brought me to mind a brilliant statement of the Catalan author Albert Sánchez Piñol:" The influences are not the ones you read, but those that you read "I can not help but mention how I saw myself reflected in this account, which apparently nothing to do with me or any Western woman, but I saw and I read in the author's insomnia in their need to hunker down with a prize of books not to mourn, not to die and, above all in the sudden making a decision now or never. Born in Tehran in December 1955, Azar Nafisi suffered the religious dictatorship of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor ominous. It belongs to the generation of women who were born free and were suddenly in middle age, deprived of their fundamental rights, those who, like his own Azar, demonstrated against Vietnam and for the Cuban revolution, dominated the revolutionary jargon and were lovers of Russian cinema. Yes, "(...) I never gave up the habit of reading with pleasure counter authors: TS Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgerald and spoke passionately at rallies, inspired by phrases he had read in novels and poems (...) "(p. 121). University, executive and intellectuals had curled up in the overnight, behind a veil and give up nonsense like taking ice cream in public (and Azar is a fan of coffee ice cream with almonds), painting your nails or lips and show a lock hair. The violation any of these prohibitions could cost from a beating to prison: "Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man who says hate-Azar Bijan Naderi, her husband - (...) if you are forced to sleep with someone you dislike, leave a blank mind and pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here, as we constantly do elsewhere (...) "(p. 424).
Azar Nafisi is the daughter of Ahmad, a former mayor of Tehran and Nezhat Nafisi, the first woman to be elected to the Iranian parliament. Ahmad was known for its charm and rich culture, also its tendency to insubordination. That was the charge for which he spent four years locked up, actually, in the prison library, insubordination, a word that haunt her daughter, although in the case of his father only have been the manifestation of his ardent admiration for the French In a speech peppered with Chateaubriands and Victor Hugos with which General de Gaulle was not very sympathetic in the eyes of the Shah: "I'll always remember: insubordination after that became a way of life for me" (p. 71). It was his father who started on the lyrics, the first reader, who appeared in his life, having her as protagonist of all their stories. It was he who read Rumi, Hafez and Khayam, including Iranian glories of literature, banned by the Ayatollah. Azar must have acquired his passion for English literature during her high school student in Lancaster, England, but would attend his college career at the University of Oklahoma where he would graduate as a doctor in English and American Literature. At the time of the coup by Reza Shah Pavlevi, Westernized Iran, Azar has served as master of his specialty at the University of Tehran for nearly eighteen years, but is also and above all, passionate about her subject. Only such a passion can be transmitted further, infected, in such a way that their students complete their exact frequency tuned, even the most reluctant to be seduced by Western culture. Even after the coup of Khomeini, the teacher managed over a reasonable time to maintain the momentum of the class, avoiding the moral vigilantes lurking in the halls of the university, in such a way that begins to taste the bittersweet taste of the underground. Problems arise in 1981 when Random refuses to carry the veil, which has been accepted without a murmur by his colleagues. I do not understand how is that so funny Azar and bravely defied the police of the regime, not only to repudiate the veil but on many other occasions. Will their dignity to those who sought to be imposed persona overwhelmed? There were few women who defied the tyranny of Khomeini, but some as Yassi, a student of Chance, or even violating proposed to end up in prison. Her crime? Any nonsense warranted a string of strokes, if not death, from nibbling "inappropriately" block to awaken the lust of a holy man who responsible for the object of his desire to immoral thoughts. How many women are not paid with the squad on being beautiful and desirable? And if the fair was a virgin, before going to the wall should be violated simultaneously to prevent its entry into the heaven: "Lolita belongs to a category of helpless victims to whom they were never given the chance to tell their own story. As such, it becomes a double victim: not only robbed of his life, but also the story of his life (...) all murderers and all oppressors have a long complaint against their victims, only few are so eloquent Humbert Humbert-like. "(p. p 66 and 69). Random
prefer to quit your job because you wear a veil. The demeaning of the veil is its depositor that also means the imposition of a religion, the imposition of ideas. Ironically Azar's grandmother suffered from the opposite: Muslim convinced he was unable to wear the veil, prohibitive for the Liberal government of Shah Reza Pavlevi. Raised in secularism, Azar refuses, and her grandmother to admit to decide for her, and like most Iranian women has aggressively any subversive act, however slight, of intimate it is, and paint your toenails, for example. But end up disgusted with the comprehensive inspections that are faced by women who enter the campus, who review them even colors that carry in their underwear, while men come and go at will, without noticing anything. His only solace and greatest act of subversion is the book club that has formed at home and attending their enthusiastic students to analyze the work of Nabokov, Jane Austen or Henry James. All huddled together arrive at his door so that, once inside, theatrically tearing the veil and become normal girls who wear jeans, crimped hair and admire Madonna. But his visits to Dr. Nafisi not only allows them to be who they really are and gobbling up all the coffee ice cream with almonds they want, but above all to acquire critical consciousness through literary fervor. Through heroes, heroines, anti-heroes and anti heroes in the case of Nabokov, become aware of the injustice they are objects, at the hands of a horde of men and women, fanatical, irrational, armed on board Toyota ready to whip mercilessly exposed any girl who let a piece of skin or a lock of hair: "A great novel heightens our senses and awareness of the complexity of life and individuals and does not allow us carried away by the puritanism that sees morality in fixed formulas of Good and Evil (...) I've concluded that true democracy can not exist without freedom of imagination or without the right to use works of the imagination without any restrictions ( ...) "(p 181 and p. 436).
Amid this atmosphere oppressive, the day of his resignation at the university, Azar is assaulted by a terrible premonition that the force to stop at the nearest bookstore for books coming overwhelmed by EM Forster, Heinrich Böll, Rilke, Hammett, Chandler, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, among others. This establishment will be closed soon by the regime. Would soon triggered the Iraqi bombing as if it were not enough with the local tyrants, to join the maddening praise sirens and the need to run (the women are required to sleep wrapped like mummies to protect her modesty from the eyes of invader, should die under the bombs), and manages to appease her fear Azar provisioning of books they read with the aid of a candle, with only a nightgown. It is during this time that decides Azar professional in and start writing to write literary criticism, from which emerge the Anti-terra test: a critical study of Vladimir Nabokoc's novels. "During those nights of sirens red and white, unconsciously I designed my future career. During the endless nights of reading, I concentrated only in fiction and when I started teaching again, I discovered that he had prepared the two courses on the novel. The best that I spent during the next fifteen years he went to teach literature and to think and write about it (...) if a sound can be kept between the pages like a daughter or a butterfly, I would say that among my Pride and Prejudice those of my Daisy Miller is hidden, like an autumn leaf, the sound of the siren red. "(p. 247).
A society that has banned the reading of the great national poets, and artfully kills its intellectuals for failing to sufficiently sweeten the ear of the ruler in turn, not to mention the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie can hardly accommodate a woman long as Azar for more efforts to bring to pass unnoticed. Not only refuses to wear the veil at university, also secretly make appointments with her best friend, an intellectual who simply calls "my magician" relationship that could easily lend itself to misunderstanding but which even Bijan is aware. In a opportunity, while Azar and his magician talk and drink coffee at a bakery, are forced to part with the menace of the patrol of decency that would penalize the owner of the premises and discovered that a man and a woman are not husband and wife share a table. Azar is then that says to herself: "I'm outta here, I can not stand this life." Probably it has been said many times, but never so clearly and firmly as ever. Her husband, a prosperous engineer, decides to follow along with their two children, Negar and Dara. Not be easy, not easy to start from scratch in a Western country ... but nothing more difficult to survive the constant violation of the most basic human rights. On June 24, 1997, Azar and his family departing for the United States. Currently taught at John Hopkins University: "(...) I continued my journey with joy, thinking how wonderful it is being a woman writer at the end of the century" (p. 437). He never lost contact with her students, many of whom followed his example and left Iran. In his magician he never heard anything, and not because he has begged him forget (Forgot? If he whom are dedicated this), but because he has asked you not have known any signals time, for mutual safety. Naturally, Reading Lolita ... is banned in Iran, but as pointed out by Azar in an interview with Robert Birnbaum, "the more you prohibit something, the more interesting it becomes for the people ..." "The lack of empathy was, in my opinion, the sin of the regime and that arising from all others ", the statement on page 293.
Read " Lolita "in Tehran, Azar Nafisi (El Aleph, 2003, translated by Ma Luz García de la Hoz) brought me to mind a brilliant statement of the Catalan author Albert Sánchez Piñol:" The influences are not the ones you read, but those that you read "I can not help but mention how I saw myself reflected in this account, which apparently nothing to do with me or any Western woman, but I saw and I read in the author's insomnia in their need to hunker down with a prize of books not to mourn, not to die and, above all in the sudden making a decision now or never. Born in Tehran in December 1955, Azar Nafisi suffered the religious dictatorship of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor ominous. It belongs to the generation of women who were born free and were suddenly in middle age, deprived of their fundamental rights, those who, like his own Azar, demonstrated against Vietnam and for the Cuban revolution, dominated the revolutionary jargon and were lovers of Russian cinema. Yes, "(...) I never gave up the habit of reading with pleasure counter authors: TS Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgerald and spoke passionately at rallies, inspired by phrases he had read in novels and poems (...) "(p. 121). University, executive and intellectuals had curled up in the overnight, behind a veil and give up nonsense like taking ice cream in public (and Azar is a fan of coffee ice cream with almonds), painting your nails or lips and show a lock hair. The violation any of these prohibitions could cost from a beating to prison: "Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man who says hate-Azar Bijan Naderi, her husband - (...) if you are forced to sleep with someone you dislike, leave a blank mind and pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here, as we constantly do elsewhere (...) "(p. 424).
Azar Nafisi is the daughter of Ahmad, a former mayor of Tehran and Nezhat Nafisi, the first woman to be elected to the Iranian parliament. Ahmad was known for its charm and rich culture, also its tendency to insubordination. That was the charge for which he spent four years locked up, actually, in the prison library, insubordination, a word that haunt her daughter, although in the case of his father only have been the manifestation of his ardent admiration for the French In a speech peppered with Chateaubriands and Victor Hugos with which General de Gaulle was not very sympathetic in the eyes of the Shah: "I'll always remember: insubordination after that became a way of life for me" (p. 71). It was his father who started on the lyrics, the first reader, who appeared in his life, having her as protagonist of all their stories. It was he who read Rumi, Hafez and Khayam, including Iranian glories of literature, banned by the Ayatollah. Azar must have acquired his passion for English literature during her high school student in Lancaster, England, but would attend his college career at the University of Oklahoma where he would graduate as a doctor in English and American Literature. At the time of the coup by Reza Shah Pavlevi, Westernized Iran, Azar has served as master of his specialty at the University of Tehran for nearly eighteen years, but is also and above all, passionate about her subject. Only such a passion can be transmitted further, infected, in such a way that their students complete their exact frequency tuned, even the most reluctant to be seduced by Western culture. Even after the coup of Khomeini, the teacher managed over a reasonable time to maintain the momentum of the class, avoiding the moral vigilantes lurking in the halls of the university, in such a way that begins to taste the bittersweet taste of the underground. Problems arise in 1981 when Random refuses to carry the veil, which has been accepted without a murmur by his colleagues. I do not understand how is that so funny Azar and bravely defied the police of the regime, not only to repudiate the veil but on many other occasions. Will their dignity to those who sought to be imposed persona overwhelmed? There were few women who defied the tyranny of Khomeini, but some as Yassi, a student of Chance, or even violating proposed to end up in prison. Her crime? Any nonsense warranted a string of strokes, if not death, from nibbling "inappropriately" block to awaken the lust of a holy man who responsible for the object of his desire to immoral thoughts. How many women are not paid with the squad on being beautiful and desirable? And if the fair was a virgin, before going to the wall should be violated simultaneously to prevent its entry into the heaven: "Lolita belongs to a category of helpless victims to whom they were never given the chance to tell their own story. As such, it becomes a double victim: not only robbed of his life, but also the story of his life (...) all murderers and all oppressors have a long complaint against their victims, only few are so eloquent Humbert Humbert-like. "(p. p 66 and 69). Random
prefer to quit your job because you wear a veil. The demeaning of the veil is its depositor that also means the imposition of a religion, the imposition of ideas. Ironically Azar's grandmother suffered from the opposite: Muslim convinced he was unable to wear the veil, prohibitive for the Liberal government of Shah Reza Pavlevi. Raised in secularism, Azar refuses, and her grandmother to admit to decide for her, and like most Iranian women has aggressively any subversive act, however slight, of intimate it is, and paint your toenails, for example. But end up disgusted with the comprehensive inspections that are faced by women who enter the campus, who review them even colors that carry in their underwear, while men come and go at will, without noticing anything. His only solace and greatest act of subversion is the book club that has formed at home and attending their enthusiastic students to analyze the work of Nabokov, Jane Austen or Henry James. All huddled together arrive at his door so that, once inside, theatrically tearing the veil and become normal girls who wear jeans, crimped hair and admire Madonna. But his visits to Dr. Nafisi not only allows them to be who they really are and gobbling up all the coffee ice cream with almonds they want, but above all to acquire critical consciousness through literary fervor. Through heroes, heroines, anti-heroes and anti heroes in the case of Nabokov, become aware of the injustice they are objects, at the hands of a horde of men and women, fanatical, irrational, armed on board Toyota ready to whip mercilessly exposed any girl who let a piece of skin or a lock of hair: "A great novel heightens our senses and awareness of the complexity of life and individuals and does not allow us carried away by the puritanism that sees morality in fixed formulas of Good and Evil (...) I've concluded that true democracy can not exist without freedom of imagination or without the right to use works of the imagination without any restrictions ( ...) "(p 181 and p. 436).
Amid this atmosphere oppressive, the day of his resignation at the university, Azar is assaulted by a terrible premonition that the force to stop at the nearest bookstore for books coming overwhelmed by EM Forster, Heinrich Böll, Rilke, Hammett, Chandler, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, among others. This establishment will be closed soon by the regime. Would soon triggered the Iraqi bombing as if it were not enough with the local tyrants, to join the maddening praise sirens and the need to run (the women are required to sleep wrapped like mummies to protect her modesty from the eyes of invader, should die under the bombs), and manages to appease her fear Azar provisioning of books they read with the aid of a candle, with only a nightgown. It is during this time that decides Azar professional in and start writing to write literary criticism, from which emerge the Anti-terra test: a critical study of Vladimir Nabokoc's novels. "During those nights of sirens red and white, unconsciously I designed my future career. During the endless nights of reading, I concentrated only in fiction and when I started teaching again, I discovered that he had prepared the two courses on the novel. The best that I spent during the next fifteen years he went to teach literature and to think and write about it (...) if a sound can be kept between the pages like a daughter or a butterfly, I would say that among my Pride and Prejudice those of my Daisy Miller is hidden, like an autumn leaf, the sound of the siren red. "(p. 247).
A society that has banned the reading of the great national poets, and artfully kills its intellectuals for failing to sufficiently sweeten the ear of the ruler in turn, not to mention the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie can hardly accommodate a woman long as Azar for more efforts to bring to pass unnoticed. Not only refuses to wear the veil at university, also secretly make appointments with her best friend, an intellectual who simply calls "my magician" relationship that could easily lend itself to misunderstanding but which even Bijan is aware. In a opportunity, while Azar and his magician talk and drink coffee at a bakery, are forced to part with the menace of the patrol of decency that would penalize the owner of the premises and discovered that a man and a woman are not husband and wife share a table. Azar is then that says to herself: "I'm outta here, I can not stand this life." Probably it has been said many times, but never so clearly and firmly as ever. Her husband, a prosperous engineer, decides to follow along with their two children, Negar and Dara. Not be easy, not easy to start from scratch in a Western country ... but nothing more difficult to survive the constant violation of the most basic human rights. On June 24, 1997, Azar and his family departing for the United States. Currently taught at John Hopkins University: "(...) I continued my journey with joy, thinking how wonderful it is being a woman writer at the end of the century" (p. 437). He never lost contact with her students, many of whom followed his example and left Iran. In his magician he never heard anything, and not because he has begged him forget (Forgot? If he whom are dedicated this), but because he has asked you not have known any signals time, for mutual safety. Naturally, Reading Lolita ... is banned in Iran, but as pointed out by Azar in an interview with Robert Birnbaum, "the more you prohibit something, the more interesting it becomes for the people ..." "The lack of empathy was, in my opinion, the sin of the regime and that arising from all others ", the statement on page 293.
If this topic interests you, I invite you to take a look at Orhan Pamuk, Turkish writer awarded the Nobel for literature and whose masterly novel Snow discusses among other things, the conflict of women between using or not using the veil: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/10/13/a03n1cul.php
Fatema Mernissi 
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