Raychul hearts Books

“Reading Lolita in Tehran” is the story of an Iranian literature professor, Dr. Azar Nafisi, who returns to her home in Tehran only to become trapped there in the wake of Iran’s religious revolution of the early 1980’s. On the most surface level, the story it tells is of Nafisi’s time in Iran – her teaching, her family, and, most importantly, the secret book club she held in her home with nine of her best female students. Below the obvious narrative is another tale, the story of a story. Or rather, the story of the power of stories.

In the Arabian novel “A Thousand and One Nights”, the tales given to the reader are really stories within a greater story: the tale of Schererazade’s triumph over the domineering and brutal king through her imagination. The king, pushed to the brink of madness, marries a virgin each night and kills her the next morning. Schererazade volunteers to be the king’s next bride, but each evening, before they can consummate their union, she says they must wait because she has to tell him a story. In this way, she puts off her demise until the king himself is free from his obsession. The tales in the book are Schererazade’s; they are her way out of the life that is being forced upon her, and indeed upon all of the women in her kingdom.

Azar Nafisi opens up her memoir of life in Iran with reference to "A Thousand and One Nights", just as she opens up her first meeting of the secret book club. The reason for this choice becomes clear as Nafisi weaves her tales of life in Iran, as she writes about her girls under pretend names lest the Iranian authorizes find them today. Nafisi, like the fictional Schererazade, is subject to the imposition of what she calls a “fictional reality”, a way of life imagined by another and thrust upon those unlucky enough to lack the ability to escape. Both heroines realize that their only escape – indeed, anyone’s only escape – is in circumventing reality as it’s framed by the dominant group or individual. Both heroines also accomplish this in the same way: by framing another reality through storytelling.

I’ve always believed that telling a story is more than just conveying information or ideas, but I’d never really conceived of storytelling as subversive. Now it makes sense to me that in a reality where the very information people have access to is controlled with an iron fist, making information available outside of the dominant metaphor is the very essence of subversion. This is what Schererazade knew: her escape lay in creating another reality, a reality beyond what her new husband knew. And it seems that Nafisi subtely continues this tradition by exposing her students – also the unwitting objects of a male-dominated, violent regime – to the realities that are denied them in the contraband stories that Americans toss aside in exchange for the Cliff’s Notes.

Roland Barthe explains this phenomenon of multiple realities in Mythologies, where he outlines his understanding of what he calls myth. A myth, according to Barthe, is any narrative. He also points out something that we all know: the story that we know as true is always the narrative of the dominant. But Barthe goes beyond this to say that, despite what we accept, there simply is no narrative that’s true: every version of history is colored by perspective, and no narrative is unbiased. Knowing this, our job is to be mythologists, by constantly striving to deconstruct the narratives we’re told until we find our own truth.

I’m not a person who believes that there’s no absolute truth. But even the existence of an absolute doesn’t get around the fact that our knowledge of it is based on our own perspective, and is as unique to each of us as our own fingerprints. This isn’t a bad thing – it means that every person can teach something to every other person, that it’s completely impossible for anyone to know everything. It’s the responsibility that we each have to get to know each other.
In the time since I first read Barthe, I’ve realized that being a mythologist is a damn lot of work. It takes constant vigilance (to borrow a phrase from J.K. Rowling), not just to examine what you’re told, but also to keep your skepticism from evolving into negativity. It takes more self-awareness than I’ll probably ever have, and the ability to Listen. The Baha’I Writings give the following advice on seeking Truth:

“The state in which one should be to seriously search for the truth is the condition of the thirsty, burning soul desiring the water of life, of the fish struggling to reach the sea, of the sufferer seeking for the true doctor to obtain the divine cure, of the lost caravan endeavoring to find the right road, of the lost and wandering ship striving to reach the shore of salvation.” – Abdul-Baha

More than anything those words make me realize that reflection, in its true form, isn’t a hobby. It isn’t a pastime or something you can do casually. It’s a way of life that informs everything you do, it’s a questioning spirit and the ability to weave your own story. This can be disconcerting, save the recognition there’s not one grand answer to discover. Each answer is just the open door to the next question, and each question is its own guidance to the next answer.