Reading Lolita in Tehran, 2

     This "Memoir in Books"  left a strong impression the first time around, but even more so today, having met two Iranian young people in one week.

     The author, after leaving her post as a university professor, starts an underground reading group for women in her house.  As the women read forbidden literature, they share their experiences in the frightening new regime.

     For Azar and her "girls," as she calls them, the living room is their oasis.  When they leave there, they have to cover themselves and walk home, looking at the ground, avoiding even eye contact with men.  When they return to their houses, they can never let anyone know where they have been.

     Their "real lives" are not out there in the public streets of Tehran, but in the room of literature where the stories open doors that allow them to speak their minds and ask questions of each other.  In the privacy of their teacher's house, they take off their scarves and robes, under which are orange tee-shirts, jeans, and brightly colored skirts and blouses.

     At any minute, there could be a knock at the door--officers wanting to search their houses, confiscate their secret satellite dishes, or question them about activities that might be illegal.  Imagine this--children afraid to sleep because they've been ordered "not to have illegal dreams!" In one case, three students are reprimanded for "eating an apple too seductively." One of the women in the reading group was caught out with friends without a chaperone and given "virginity tests" by the authorities.

     I can't stop thinking about a comment by one of the students regarding the censors cutting up books: "What Ayatollah Khomeini tried to do to our lives...turning us into figments of his imagination, he also did to our fiction...."

     In a totalitarian regime, those with power don't see people as human beings; they see "things" that they can turn into what they want them to be. Breakers of arbitrary laws can be arrested and punished at the whim of the Ayatollah, and everyone lives in fear and secrecy.

     "My generation [pre-revolution] complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country," the author writes.  "Yet we had a past to compare to the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin.  This generation has no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had...."