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In an atmosphere where
"teaching is a guerrilla warfare", Nafisi used
canonical literature "in order to provoke her students into
thinking about their own lives". And think they did, and
quite engagingly at that. They came to her secret classes
dressed in the prescribed veil but once inside the professor’s
secure house, threw it off. Then would follow heated discussion
about the texts and their relevance to their personal lives. In
the process they would reveal their own anguish with the Islamic
codes.
One of the key
episodes in the book is the ‘trial’ of Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby conducted before her ouster. We have the
Islamist Niyazi ranged against the secular interpreter Zarrin,
with professor Nafisi providing textual evidence. The arguments
move from open denunciation of the novel to its strong defence
with uncommitted students in between.
This scene
encapsulates the intellectual strategy of the book inasmuch as
it keeps the text in the centre of the class and registers
varying responses from the participants. There are similar
scenes when Henry James and Jane Austen are read — scenes that
bring out the best and the worst among Iran’s embattled
students. After each discussion the professor applauds the ‘democratic’
nature of the novel, its multiple points of view fighting the
monolithic impositions of the cultural police.
She comes through
as an eloquent teacher offering original insights into classic
novels. Her scrupulous reading methods, unburdened by her
feminist beliefs, capture the intricacies of the works in
question, as evidenced by her reading of Gatsby and Daisy
Miller.
Henry James
described art as "a human complication and social stumbling
block." Azar Nafisi’s role as a literature teacher has
been to bring home this truth to her students and to relate it
to her own experiences as a woman. That is why she does not feel
comfortable with her teaching alone. She narrates her career as
an activist, a friend and mentor as well as a challenge to her
less sympathetic students. Her handling of Bari, Nahvi and Ghomi,
reluctant students of her pre-dismissal class, brings out in the
open the conflict between orthodoxy and pluralist thinking. But
Nafisi is as tolerant of them as she is enthusiastic about her
own small band of acolytes.
Nafisi is a
riveting raconteur. She sees comic absurdity in grim situations,
as when she describes her colleague Laleh’s brush with the
university bosses over the veil. Or when she and her housekeeper
try to hide her illegal satellite dish from the moral police. Or
when she and Laleh celebrate the latter’s dismissal with a
sumptuous dinner. Such a gift for self-deprecation saves her
from being overwhelmed by her predicament.
Her narrative
acquires the fluency of a practiced novelist as she records the
tragi-comedy of teachers like herself facing the onslaught of
obscurantism and calumny (fundamentalist students denounce her
as ‘adulterous Nafisi’). The ‘trial’ of Gatsby
itself is a Dickensian rendition of serious concern about the
fate of great writing.
Her descriptions
of her family and, particularly, of her shadowy ‘magician’
who steers her life at every step, mark significant minor
epiphanies in this heart-felt literary-academic memoir.
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PART
literary and part political commentary, I commend this book on three
counts. It proves teeth-gnashing feminists wrong about the alleged
baleful influence of male writing. It indicts Iranian clerics for
suppression of women in the name of Islam. And, what is to me a very
special pleasure, it celebrates the great works of literature and
recognises their power to heal and sustain. Madame Bovary`85offered
a shared community’, asserts Nafisi at one point.
