suellenstringer-hye/ An Interview with Azar Nafisi

## An Interview with Azar Nafisi
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<P><B><FONT COLOR=red SIZE=+1>An Interview with Azar Nafisi</FONT></B>
  <br>
<FONT SIZE=+0><b>by <A HREF="/">Suellen Stringer-Hye</A></b>
<p>
<p><strong>Last April, when Reading Lolita in Tehran</strong> was first published, I contacted Azar Nafisi and asked her if she would be interested in participating in an email interview exchange for final publication on Zembla and Nabokv-L. She was very interested but as RLiT gained in popularity the resulting book tour began to take much of her time. In between stops, she did however, answer some of my questions and we hope to pick up the exchange when the book tour ends in March. As she stated in her last email, &quot;To be in touch with Nabokovians is very important to me.&quot; Here then, is what I hope to be the first installment of our interview.

<p>

<strong>Q: Nabokov, while not exactly a character in &quot;Reading Lolita in
Tehran&quot; seems to be the guiding, guarding spirit of the book. You
mention receiving a gift of &quot;Ada&quot; while studying in Oklahoma during
the 1970s. What was your original impression of Nabokov and how
did that evolve as your life became more entwined with the Islamic
Revolution? </strong>
<p>
  A:You are right. The idea for this book first occurred to me when I was writing my book on Nabokov, <strong>Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels</strong>. I started writing that book as a straight critical study, but as I progressed more and more I wanted to write about Nabokov through following the different times I had read <strong>Ada </strong>and the different realities<strong> Ada</strong> and I had experienced together. The first draft for that book began with these words: &quot;The first time I read <strong>Ada </strong>I was very young and the man I was in love with gave me the book, writing in the flyleaf: 'to Azar, my Ada, love, Ted.' But I could never write that way in the Islamic Republic. In the Persian version of that story, the inscription had to be removed and Ted transformed into a friend, his name deleted and he was mentioned in a way to hide his gender.
<p>When I first read <strong>Ada</strong>, I was simply enchanted by the book, I did not look up the allusions, did not try to delve into the deeper meanings, I simply was enchanted. I was also amazed by Nabokov's magical powers as a &quot;painterly&quot; writer. There were scenes in <strong>Ada</strong> whose beauty and poignancy literally took my breath away. My imagination is visual and I empathized with this quality in Nabokov. He has never ceased to amaze me in that respect. </p>
<p>Even then, when I was so young and had no reason to feel nostalgic, <strong>Ada</strong> gave me a feeling akin to nostalgia. <strong>Ada</strong>'s scenes had no relation to my own experiences, yet they stirred longings about memories that were not mine; what <strong>Ada</strong> evoked in me was a feeling akin to the nature of memory, beyond images from a particular past. <strong>Ada</strong>'s effect was more like that of a music you had never heard or the perfume of a flower you had never smelt before. No other novel had influenced me in this manner. <strong>Ada</strong> had the same texture as the fairy tales, making me ask myself does the need for storytelling not arise from a familiar/unfamiliar feeling that we have about retrieving a lost paradise? Yet of course we know that this particular fairy tale was created as much out of paradise as of hell. </p>
<p>What amazed me was not only the way he turned Ada and Van both into monsters and irresistible lovers but also the portrayal of the discarded, the crazy, Lucette and Aqua, characters that never exactly fit, that are in one sense strangers and exiles in their own lands, his need for creating another world, always another world. I just fit into his world. Ad=hell, da=yes, therefore A, da=joy. </p>
<p>In 1979 when I returned to Iran I took a few of my favorite books with me along with the <strong>Ada</strong> given to me by my passionate and feckless boyfriend. I had waited for years to return home, but on arriving at the Tehran airport I knew at once that home was not home anymore. The Islamic Republic was not, is not merely an oppressive state, but it is a totalitarian state, much like the former Soviet Union that attempts to demolish and destroy its' citizens' individual claims to identity and integrity. It targeted everything that I identified with as a woman, teacher, writer, and human being. </p>
<p>In this new orphaned state more than anything else I survived and kept my sense of balance as an individual through reading and writing. And I also rediscovered Nabokov. I found new depth to the way he structured such amazing worlds, mixing love and anguish and loss and always retrieving the loss and surpassing the anguish through imagination. His Russian nuances shining through his English prose, always poignant and always giving us a sense of power in the creative power of his stories. There were aspects of him that I had not paid attention to before: I had not noticed how that sense of beauty came out of an irretrievable sense of grief, of an exile that went far beyond geographical locations. All of these I am writing about now, in hindsight as I try to tidy up and find links between my different experiences. In those days I merely felt this amazing sense of attraction to Nabokov's works, for more than anything else reading for me was a matter of passion and feeling. </p>
<p>When I returned to Iran, I started rereading the classics including Nabokov's works. I found Laughter in the Dark in my father's library marked some date in late 50s, and Luzhin Defense. One day browsing in an old second hand store I came across<strong> Speak Memory </strong>and later a copy of<strong> Lolita,</strong> to which I had not paid as much attention before as I did to <strong>Ada</strong>. This time what first caught my attention in all these works was that sense of loss, a feeling of anguish with which I now related more strongly, realities constantly lost and confiscated. Memory and the idea that you can never capture the past, life is like holding the wind in your hands, constantly brushing against you and evading you. How do we encounter this? Reading Nabokov led me to rethink ways in which fiction relates to reality, how a work of fiction by remaining true to its own nature becomes subversive of reality and reshapes it. Reduction of all life and all areas of life into politics was so dangerous. It fascinated me how Nabokov took control over the reality of his life through his act of writing. The act of writing became an act of defiance, a brave attitude towards the absolutism of both life and death. </p>
<p>It was at this point that Nabokov became not a great read but an obsession. I started collecting his books and writing to friends abroad to send me copies of his works and works published about him. The first Nabokov book I taught was<strong> Invitation to a Beheading</strong>. I was really worried about how it would be received (will they understand it, will they decipher it?) but my students linked to the structure of that novel, they immediately detected the comic/tragic absurdity of the life he was depicting, for them it was not at all abstract. The theatricality of life under such a regime. </p>
<p>Teaching first <strong>Invitation to a Beheading</strong>, later <strong>Pnin</strong>, and later <strong>Lolita</strong> to a group of girls in my private class, made me realize the main reason we could correspond to Nabokov's novels was because of a structural affinity between his fiction and our reality. There was of course no one to one correspondence, but he created worlds that were poignant and comic, absurd and arbitrary, constantly challenging our habits and our complicity in our own everyday oppression. More than anything else, Nabokov made me reexamine and reformulate my ideas and feelings about what was fiction and what was reality.
  Nabokov was not merely fairy tale, his novels pulled me into voids like the voice of sirens, like reality his novels were full of real mirages. For Nabokov the security and happiness of childhood are as real as the orphaned state and pains of exile. The reason we empathized him with as I keep saying was not what we call the message or content of his book but the structure. The gaps and voids in his novels, the carpets he pulled from under your feet, the arbitrariness of both his characters' lives and life itself. </p>
<p>If you lived in a kingdom where the age of marriage had been lowered from eighteen to nine, where Ophelia was cut from the Russian version of Hamlet, where the bachelor professors at the universities were issued ultimatums to either marry according to the edicts or be expelled, the absurdity, the tragic farce of <strong>Invitation to a Beheadin</strong>g would be easier to understand. It was as if he had predicted us. Did he not say in <strong>The Gift </strong>about how life imitates art? </p>
<p>When I wrote my book on him, I wanted to demonstrate how, when a writer is genuinely faithful to the kingdom of imagination, to his land of dreams he becomes genuinely subversive of the social and political realities of his time. At first I was going to name my book <strong>In Tartary</strong>, because Nabokov's description of that land was so close to the actual land I lived in. But it was in the book I wrote in Washington DC that I could portray that Tartary. And this is how Nabokov presides over and colors this last book. </p>
<p>So, here is the story, from reading him in Norman Oklahoma to Tehran Iran, and later, now in Washington DC: when all is said and done what is important no matter where you read a great work of art, what remains long after the reality of time and place have become faded memories, is the hidden and indirect feelings and emotions a great work of art evoke, simultaneously strange and familiar, waking the familiar stranger in us. </p>
<p><strong>Q:Although Americans do not live under the kind of oppression you
  experienced in Iran, Invitation to a Beheading has always been one
  of my favorite books; a metaphor for the invisibility of the value
  of the individual. Do you think that oppressive societies are
  simply the extreme representations of tendencies inherent in all
  human societies or do there need to be additional triggers? In
  other words, is it simply a matter of degree or of kind? </strong></p>
<p>A: I agree that much of what happens in totalitarian states and under extreme conditions is a reflection of what happens or could happen in democratic societies and under 'normal' conditions. Genuine creativity and imagination are always threatened by smugness and the kind of blindness that exist in both societies. This is the beauty of Invitation...Nabokov does not confine his story to a particular location, rather he is creating a mindset, one that is existentially opposed to individuality and therefore to imagination....I would like to write more but that needs more time and thinking.... </p>
<p><strong>Q: Sometimes these things are hard to discuss in the current American context. </strong></p>
<p>A :I know, I just had an interview where the interviewer informed me his wife would not be seen in public with a copy of Lolita for the fear of what might be thought of her! is it not bloody amazing?? this in the 'freest country in the world&quot; and yet in Iran apart from the censor, carrying a copy of <em>Lolita</em> in public would earn you so much respect. </p>
<p><strong>Q:Oh yes...but that's because when Lolita was first introduced into American culture, during the so called &quot;sexual revolution&quot; , even critics like Lionel Trilling thought it a &quot;love story&quot; (as you note in your book). Now, of course, people have become conscious of pedophilia and now some think Lolita condones it.</strong>    </p>
<p>A:You know it is so strange because even now, I can't help thinking about Lolita and her immense helplessness without an actual lump in the throat.
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	<P><B><FONT COLOR=red SIZE=+1>An Interview with Azar Nafisi</FONT></B>
	<br>
	<FONT SIZE=+0><b>by <A HREF="/">Suellen Stringer-Hye</A></b>
	<p>
	<p><strong>Last April, when Reading Lolita in Tehran</strong> was first published, I contacted Azar Nafisi and asked her if she would be interested in participating in an email interview exchange for final publication on Zembla and Nabokv-L. She was very interested but as RLiT gained in popularity the resulting book tour began to take much of her time. In between stops, she did however, answer some of my questions and we hope to pick up the exchange when the book tour ends in March. As she stated in her last email, "To be in touch with Nabokovians is very important to me." Here then, is what I hope to be the first installment of our interview.

	<p>

	<strong>Q: Nabokov, while not exactly a character in "Reading Lolita in
	Tehran" seems to be the guiding, guarding spirit of the book. You
	mention receiving a gift of "Ada" while studying in Oklahoma during
	the 1970s. What was your original impression of Nabokov and how
	did that evolve as your life became more entwined with the Islamic
	Revolution? </strong>
	<p>
	A:You are right. The idea for this book first occurred to me when I was writing my book on Nabokov, <strong>Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels</strong>. I started writing that book as a straight critical study, but as I progressed more and more I wanted to write about Nabokov through following the different times I had read <strong>Ada </strong>and the different realities<strong> Ada</strong> and I had experienced together. The first draft for that book began with these words: "The first time I read <strong>Ada </strong>I was very young and the man I was in love with gave me the book, writing in the flyleaf: 'to Azar, my Ada, love, Ted.' But I could never write that way in the Islamic Republic. In the Persian version of that story, the inscription had to be removed and Ted transformed into a friend, his name deleted and he was mentioned in a way to hide his gender.
	<p>When I first read <strong>Ada</strong>, I was simply enchanted by the book, I did not look up the allusions, did not try to delve into the deeper meanings, I simply was enchanted. I was also amazed by Nabokov's magical powers as a "painterly" writer. There were scenes in <strong>Ada</strong> whose beauty and poignancy literally took my breath away. My imagination is visual and I empathized with this quality in Nabokov. He has never ceased to amaze me in that respect. </p>
	<p>Even then, when I was so young and had no reason to feel nostalgic, <strong>Ada</strong> gave me a feeling akin to nostalgia. <strong>Ada</strong>'s scenes had no relation to my own experiences, yet they stirred longings about memories that were not mine; what <strong>Ada</strong> evoked in me was a feeling akin to the nature of memory, beyond images from a particular past. <strong>Ada</strong>'s effect was more like that of a music you had never heard or the perfume of a flower you had never smelt before. No other novel had influenced me in this manner. <strong>Ada</strong> had the same texture as the fairy tales, making me ask myself does the need for storytelling not arise from a familiar/unfamiliar feeling that we have about retrieving a lost paradise? Yet of course we know that this particular fairy tale was created as much out of paradise as of hell. </p>
	<p>What amazed me was not only the way he turned Ada and Van both into monsters and irresistible lovers but also the portrayal of the discarded, the crazy, Lucette and Aqua, characters that never exactly fit, that are in one sense strangers and exiles in their own lands, his need for creating another world, always another world. I just fit into his world. Ad=hell, da=yes, therefore A, da=joy. </p>
	<p>In 1979 when I returned to Iran I took a few of my favorite books with me along with the <strong>Ada</strong> given to me by my passionate and feckless boyfriend. I had waited for years to return home, but on arriving at the Tehran airport I knew at once that home was not home anymore. The Islamic Republic was not, is not merely an oppressive state, but it is a totalitarian state, much like the former Soviet Union that attempts to demolish and destroy its' citizens' individual claims to identity and integrity. It targeted everything that I identified with as a woman, teacher, writer, and human being. </p>
	<p>In this new orphaned state more than anything else I survived and kept my sense of balance as an individual through reading and writing. And I also rediscovered Nabokov. I found new depth to the way he structured such amazing worlds, mixing love and anguish and loss and always retrieving the loss and surpassing the anguish through imagination. His Russian nuances shining through his English prose, always poignant and always giving us a sense of power in the creative power of his stories. There were aspects of him that I had not paid attention to before: I had not noticed how that sense of beauty came out of an irretrievable sense of grief, of an exile that went far beyond geographical locations. All of these I am writing about now, in hindsight as I try to tidy up and find links between my different experiences. In those days I merely felt this amazing sense of attraction to Nabokov's works, for more than anything else reading for me was a matter of passion and feeling. </p>
	<p>When I returned to Iran, I started rereading the classics including Nabokov's works. I found Laughter in the Dark in my father's library marked some date in late 50s, and Luzhin Defense. One day browsing in an old second hand store I came across<strong> Speak Memory </strong>and later a copy of<strong> Lolita,</strong> to which I had not paid as much attention before as I did to <strong>Ada</strong>. This time what first caught my attention in all these works was that sense of loss, a feeling of anguish with which I now related more strongly, realities constantly lost and confiscated. Memory and the idea that you can never capture the past, life is like holding the wind in your hands, constantly brushing against you and evading you. How do we encounter this? Reading Nabokov led me to rethink ways in which fiction relates to reality, how a work of fiction by remaining true to its own nature becomes subversive of reality and reshapes it. Reduction of all life and all areas of life into politics was so dangerous. It fascinated me how Nabokov took control over the reality of his life through his act of writing. The act of writing became an act of defiance, a brave attitude towards the absolutism of both life and death. </p>
	<p>It was at this point that Nabokov became not a great read but an obsession. I started collecting his books and writing to friends abroad to send me copies of his works and works published about him. The first Nabokov book I taught was<strong> Invitation to a Beheading</strong>. I was really worried about how it would be received (will they understand it, will they decipher it?) but my students linked to the structure of that novel, they immediately detected the comic/tragic absurdity of the life he was depicting, for them it was not at all abstract. The theatricality of life under such a regime. </p>
	<p>Teaching first <strong>Invitation to a Beheading</strong>, later <strong>Pnin</strong>, and later <strong>Lolita</strong> to a group of girls in my private class, made me realize the main reason we could correspond to Nabokov's novels was because of a structural affinity between his fiction and our reality. There was of course no one to one correspondence, but he created worlds that were poignant and comic, absurd and arbitrary, constantly challenging our habits and our complicity in our own everyday oppression. More than anything else, Nabokov made me reexamine and reformulate my ideas and feelings about what was fiction and what was reality.
	Nabokov was not merely fairy tale, his novels pulled me into voids like the voice of sirens, like reality his novels were full of real mirages. For Nabokov the security and happiness of childhood are as real as the orphaned state and pains of exile. The reason we empathized him with as I keep saying was not what we call the message or content of his book but the structure. The gaps and voids in his novels, the carpets he pulled from under your feet, the arbitrariness of both his characters' lives and life itself. </p>
	<p>If you lived in a kingdom where the age of marriage had been lowered from eighteen to nine, where Ophelia was cut from the Russian version of Hamlet, where the bachelor professors at the universities were issued ultimatums to either marry according to the edicts or be expelled, the absurdity, the tragic farce of <strong>Invitation to a Beheadin</strong>g would be easier to understand. It was as if he had predicted us. Did he not say in <strong>The Gift </strong>about how life imitates art? </p>
	<p>When I wrote my book on him, I wanted to demonstrate how, when a writer is genuinely faithful to the kingdom of imagination, to his land of dreams he becomes genuinely subversive of the social and political realities of his time. At first I was going to name my book <strong>In Tartary</strong>, because Nabokov's description of that land was so close to the actual land I lived in. But it was in the book I wrote in Washington DC that I could portray that Tartary. And this is how Nabokov presides over and colors this last book. </p>
	<p>So, here is the story, from reading him in Norman Oklahoma to Tehran Iran, and later, now in Washington DC: when all is said and done what is important no matter where you read a great work of art, what remains long after the reality of time and place have become faded memories, is the hidden and indirect feelings and emotions a great work of art evoke, simultaneously strange and familiar, waking the familiar stranger in us. </p>
	<p><strong>Q:Although Americans do not live under the kind of oppression you
	experienced in Iran, Invitation to a Beheading has always been one
	of my favorite books; a metaphor for the invisibility of the value
	of the individual. Do you think that oppressive societies are
	simply the extreme representations of tendencies inherent in all
	human societies or do there need to be additional triggers? In
	other words, is it simply a matter of degree or of kind? </strong></p>
	<p>A: I agree that much of what happens in totalitarian states and under extreme conditions is a reflection of what happens or could happen in democratic societies and under 'normal' conditions. Genuine creativity and imagination are always threatened by smugness and the kind of blindness that exist in both societies. This is the beauty of Invitation...Nabokov does not confine his story to a particular location, rather he is creating a mindset, one that is existentially opposed to individuality and therefore to imagination....I would like to write more but that needs more time and thinking.... </p>
	<p><strong>Q: Sometimes these things are hard to discuss in the current American context. </strong></p>
	<p>A :I know, I just had an interview where the interviewer informed me his wife would not be seen in public with a copy of Lolita for the fear of what might be thought of her! is it not bloody amazing?? this in the 'freest country in the world" and yet in Iran apart from the censor, carrying a copy of <em>Lolita</em> in public would earn you so much respect. </p>
	<p><strong>Q:Oh yes...but that's because when Lolita was first introduced into American culture, during the so called "sexual revolution" , even critics like Lionel Trilling thought it a "love story" (as you note in your book). Now, of course, people have become conscious of pedophilia and now some think Lolita condones it.</strong> </p>
	<p>A:You know it is so strange because even now, I can't help thinking about Lolita and her immense helplessness without an actual lump in the throat.
	</p>
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