Iran

I am currently reading Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and then I will be following it up with Jasmine and Stars : Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz.

I am looking forward to seeing how these two compare as they are supposed to be two very different portraits of Iran's cultural and literary aspects.

Oh, yes, this should be an interesting comparison, especially since Keshavarz herself had a comparison in mind. I enjoyed Nafisi's book, which made me want to read Lolita.

It's terrible of me I know, but I have read none of the books referred to in Nafisi's book. Like you, I have the urge to read Lolita now and I am more than a little curious about The Great Gatsby.

I enjoyed Nafisi's book very much and look forward to your comparison with Keshavarz. I thought Nafisi came across not only as a very strong and independent woman, but also someone who knew and wanted to share the power of literature in offering different perspectives on life, especially when living in a very restricted world. Like you, she also inspired me to broaden my reading and I have been on a Nabokov kick ever since.

I wish I had better things to say..

I greatly adored Nafisi's book and when I read Jasmine and Stars I had problems maintaining focus. It hit me on a wrong note from the start though it did improve a great deal.

I believe both authors have the same goal in that they want to shake off the stereotype and share some of the Persian culture with the reader. They both also have a clear love of literature but the similarities ended there.

While Reading Lolita in Tehran (RLiT) paints a dark, gloomy and somewhat oppressive picture of Iran with just an occassional glimpse of brighter moments, Jasmine and Stars (JaS) is it's exact mirror image. JaS is filled with sunshine and roses on such a constant level that as a reader, I couldn't help but feel that it must have been nice for the author to have had such a picture perfect life. I am not happy with myself for thinking that, but it is the impression she gives.

In RLiT, as John also said, Nafisi does indeed come across as a very strong, independent woman. She also strikes me as very open minded and very pro-choice. She encourages her students and girls at all times to think for themselves, to question, to be aware of the world around them and to be open to new ideas. All in all, a pretty positive role model (in my eyes at least).

In JaS, Kasahavarz is equally a strong, independent woman, a feminist, pro-choice and she describes herself as open minded also and at times, she does seem that way. I found though that when reading parts of JaS, the author seemed to show an intolerance for those not sharing her way of thinking and I couldn't help but feel that her goal of shaking off steretypes was a double standard as she seems to use stereotypes on and off in the pages of JaS.

That said, whereas RLiT inspired me to read more western literature, JaS did the same for Persian literature. I was thrilled to get glimpses of classics and to be able to peek into their world of poetry. One poet especially comes to mind and she can be found at:

The website of Forugh Farrokhzad: http://www.forughfarrokhzad.org (Beautiful site and breathtaking poetry)

I think what bothered me most, was that between these two books, there is no real common ground. Usually when reading about a subject there are usually some similarities. Take for example the Holocaust.

Whether you are reading The Mercy Room, The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler's List, Child of the Holocaust, The Final Journey, Night, Dawn or a million other titles in this genre, you will always find that there are accounts that match up with those of other witnesses and survivors.

That isn't true in this case. I think (and hope) it is because of one book focussing on the positive and one the negative. It certainly doesn't help when one of the books takes things that are facts from the other book, and outright comments on them as wrong, wrong, and wrong. What are we left to think?

Part of me tried to chalk it up to the example that Nafisi uses in RLiT in which she mentions taking a chair and putting it in the middle of the room, then asking the students what the chair looks like to them. From where the student's are sitting, each would definitely have a different view and therefore their description of how they see it would change.

Keshavarz uses a different analogy but effective all the same, in which she describes an Elephant in a tent. It is dark but the people are excited about the elephant, having never seen one before and so they enter the tent and feel around. When asked what the elephant is like the accounts differ. Someone who felt it's trunk defines it as a drainpipe, another who felt a leg compares it to a big thick column and yet more who touched an ear describe it as a huge fan.

I think what happened between these books is simply that. Two people with very different views of the country in which they lived and equally as passionate about it. I could have lived without the negativity in JaS but that aside, I would definitely still say that both of these books should be read and I am hoping in time, to review other Iranian Memoirs too.

Added Note: I just realised I have Lipstick Jihad on my bookcase so.... I will read that when I get chance. I have more reviews to do first but I look forward to seeing if Lipstick Jihad is a more balanced view.

Thanks for a really interesting comparison, Charlene. I love the elephant tale, which I had heard in its Indian variation - three blind men and an elephant. It's so wise. Surprising that Keshavarz would actually use this analogy and still insist that she is right and Nafisi is wrong. Perhaps Keshavarz is still living in Iran and afraid to express any criticism of the government? If that's true, the elephant story might be a secret message to her readers that she could not express in any other way.

Another excellent book about Iran, from the perspective of a Western man who lived there for many years, is Garden of the Brave in War by Terence O'Donnell. He lived in a rural area, so his experiences were quite different than they would have been in a city. It's a very positive view of the people (not much is said about the political system). Although it doesn't whitewash the cultural difficulties or the personal failings and foibles of some of the local characters, he obviously felt great affection for the Iranians he knew.

margrad: I found it surprising too. Keshavarz is in the U.S.A and so I shouldn't think she has a problem with censorship and conflict with the government of Iran.

One of the other things which bugged me. Not included in the book, but in a "conversation with Keshavarz" included with the book to review, she states a number of different things to back up her reasons for being so harsh with her critique. One of the things that stunned me a little, is that she mentions that in all the holes in RLiT, things are left out which should be shared, such as:

"Similarly, people have no idea that in Tehran alone, Iranian Jews worship in over 20 synagogues on a daily basis. These are facts that are simply omitted from the picture".

This comment alone, in this context, isn't quite so stunning. In the context that as much as the above information is missing from RLiT and other Iranian novels/memoirs, it is also missing from Jasmine in Stars, the author's own book. I find it a little odd that she would criticize others for not including this info and yet not reveal this in her own book either.

Perhaps I just expect too much. I tend to live my life with a "practice what you preach" way of looking at things and sometimes I have to remind myself that not everyone follows that same ideal.

I shall definitely look out for that book. Thank you for the recommendation. I saw a few titles that piqued my interest. They are:

My Name is Iran: A Memoir by Davar Ardalan
Persian Girls: A Memoir by Nahid Rachlin
My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices edited by Lila Azam Zanganeh

"Practice what you preach" is an awfully good rule of thumb, it seems to me. Of course, it's not easy to live up to all the time.

I'm off to Texas tomorrow and will soon be in the throes of LT and BC withdrawal symptoms! I'll be eager to see what's new in this thread and others when I get back.

Charlene,

Just a quick note to let you know that I was very interested in your comparison. I love to read books about different cultures. I loved Nafisi's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Now, your comparison has piqued my interest to get the other book (Jasmine and Stars) and read another point of view. I should be getting it through InterLibrary Loan in a week or so.

I guess that this is part of the purpose of this group...making readers who may have enjoyed one of the comparison books interested enough to try to the other.

After I finish Keshavarz' book, I hope to bring my comparison thoughts back here again to this post.

i loved both Reading Lolita in Tehran and Lipstick Jihad and hope you enjoy Lipstick Jihad as much as i did. i wouldn't say it will give you a 'balanced' view, but it will give you one woman's perspective. It struck me as honest, painful (in parts), and fascinating.

Thanks for the Jasmine and Stars recommendation. i'm looking forward to it.

i haven't read Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir but the review by Kendra Nordin in The Christian Science Monitor makes it sound as if this thread's readers might be interested:

Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir by Marina Nemat

A 'Prisoner of Tehran' Tells Her Story
reviewed by Kendra Nordin, ed. The Christistian Science Monitor

Most Americans have some memory of the 444 days the world waited to see if Iranian revolutionaries would release 52 American hostages seized at the American Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979.

The bitter feelings from that event are just now beginning to lessen: It was only last month that the United States and Iran sat down for their first diplomatic talks in 27 years.

From a distance, the Iranian revolution remains in the realm of political power plays. But to the Iranians who lived -- and loved -- through it, it was as if the world had gone mad. Books were frowned upon. Public displays of affection became a crime. Schoolchildren were arrested and held prisoner. Many were executed.

In Prisoner of Tehran, Marina Nemat chronicles some of what it meant to come of age during this social upheaval.

For young Marina, childhood in Tehran has its simple pleasures: a special friendship with a used bookstore owner, a doting Russian grandmother, and summer-long trips to the Caspian Sea.

But as Marina reaches the edge of her teen years, the normal order of daily life begins to unravel. An Islamic revolution overthrows the reigning monarchy and establishes Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme leader of the country. Adherence to fundamentalist Islam is brutally enforced. At first the upheaval does not touch Marina, who is Christian and more apt to lose herself in The Chronicles of Narnia than pay attention to politics.

But this changes with the first blush of teen love. Although Arash is five years older than 13-year-old Marina, they find a connection through similar family histories and a devoutness to religious faith.

Arash, however, believes Islam alone will save the world. Within a year he is a martyr, killed during a political rally on Tehran's streets.

Marina is now fully awake to the chaos taking shape around her. At school, she begins to gain courage in voicing her objection to being taught about the perfection of Islamic society instead of calculus. Other students follow her lead. They begin a small newspaper to report on the events they see happening around them.

Within a year, Iraq bombs Tehran. Iran's borders are closed, and no one is allowed to leave the country without a special permit. Marina and her friends join a rally to protest the violent ways Islamic principles are being enforced. Revolutionary guards on rooftops open fire on the crowd. Fleeing for home Marina contemplates swallowing her mother's jar of sleeping pills.

But this questions stops her: "What if everyone who believed in goodness decided to commit suicide because there was too much suffering in the world?"

The decision to stand for good becomes her North Star.

Well-meaning teachers and friends implore Marina to flee the country before she is sent to Evin, the infamous political prison. With no financial means, and not wanting to alarm her parents, Marina stays put and is arrested.

At Evin she is received by two prison guards. One beats her until she is unconscious. The other, Ali, falls in love with her.

The events that follow read like a grotesque Harlequin romance. Marina is scheduled for execution. Lovesick Ali uses family connections to win a pardon from Ayatollah Khomeini, changing Marina's death sentence to life imprisonment. But tormented by his love for a Christian, he leaves to fight in the Iran-Iraq War. Four months later, he is back with a wounded leg and a plan: He wants Marina to convert to Islam and become his wife. If she doesn't, things could get really messy for her loved ones.

Marina considers the alternatives, the psychological toll of imprisonment made obvious, and complies with his wishes.

Thus begins a weird double life where Marina alternatively gets carried to the outside world to be embraced by Ali's loving family and then sent back to Evin to be on call as Ali's secret wife. It isn't long before Ali is assassinated by his colleagues.

Because she proved herself a dutiful Islamic daughter-in-law, Ali's father once again makes an appeal and after two horrific years as a political prisoner Marina is released. She soon remarries a Christian and eventually relocates to Canada.

Nemat's story is not so much a political history lesson than it is a memoir of faith and love, a protest against violence that cannot be silenced. Following Nemat as she follows her intuition through these treacherous events is like watching a stalk of grass that repeatedly bends without breaking through the wind and rain of a violent storm only to rise and stretch toward the sun once more. Her persistence in standing for goodness is a lesson for us all.

I am very happy that I took the time to read Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran by Fetemeh Keshavarz. I am indebted to Charlene Martel (charlenemartel) and the LT Books Compared group for making this fascinating title known to me. It was definitely worth the effort and provided me with many vivid positive images of life in modern Iran. I recommend it highly to all who seek a clearer understanding of the people and culture of modern Iran.

The larger part of this book relates loving tales of life in Iran immediately before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. These are deeply personal tales taken from the author's own life, and each is told in a gently loving and almost magical style. These are uplifting, liberating tales of everyday heroism, achievement, and humanity.

But other parts of the book were, for me at least, far less interesting. These parts are written in dense, academic prose and their purpose is to refute, from every detailed angle possible, all that the author found objectionable in Azar Nafisi's recent bestselling book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books She finds fault with much of that book, and, personally, I sense genuine intolerance and psychological blindness in much of her criticism.

It was only recently that I read Nafisi's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and that is why I picked up a copy of Keshavarz' book, to see what she had to say from a different point of view. I, like many people in the West, are extremely curious to understand the people in this part of the world. If Kashavarz had a different point of view, I wanted to hear it.

Keshavarz is an Iranian-American. She loves both countries and very frequently makes visits to Tehran to visit friends and family. She is welcome there and easily adapts to both cultures. She is a scholar of Persian and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Recently, she has become an outspoken voice for a large Iranian-American community living productive and happy lives in America. This community is fearful about what they see as a New Orientalist narrative arising in the West. Let me explain. The old (primarily 18th- and 19th-century) Orientalist narrative sought to justify the colonial presence of Europe in the Eastern Hemisphere. The authors were European philologists. Kashavarz goes to great lengths in this book to argue that a New Orientalism has emerged in the West in the last few years, particularly since 9/11.

"The emerging Orientalist narrative has many similarities to and a few difference from this earlier incarnation. It equally simplifies its subject. For example, it explains almost all undesirable Middle Eastern incidents in terms of Muslim men's submission to God and Muslim women's submission to men. The old narrative was imbued with the authority of an all-knowing foreign expert. The emerging narrative varies somewhat in that it might have a native-or seminative-insider tone. Furthermore, as the product of a self-questioning era, it shows a relative awareness of its own possible shortcomings. Yet it replicates the earlier narrative's strong undercurrent of superiority and of impatience with the locals, who are often portrayed as uncomplicated. The new narrative does not necessarily support overt colonial ambitions. But it does not hide its clear preference for western political and cultural takeover. Most importantly, it replicates the totalizing-and silencing-tendencies of the old Orientalists by virtue of erasing, through unnuanced narration, the complexity and richness of the local culture" (p. 3).

Kashavarz' purpose is thus twofold: first, to refute in detail all that she finds objectionable in Nafisi's book; and second, to provide abundant examples of the common humanity shared by the peoples of Iran and the West. In this manner she hopes to expose the irrelevance of prevalent stereotypes about Muslim culture that have recently been exacerbated by bestselling New Orientalist narratives such as: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brookes, The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Husseini. To Kashavarz, and others in the wider immigrant Muslim community in the West, these books foster otherness and difference. What Kashavarz and this wider community of Muslim want is clear and simple: The West needs to learn to better understand and then fully to respect their culture. In Kashavarz' words:

"Flying airplanes into buildings, keeping prisoners of war out of reach of the law, beheading those who might vaguely sympathize with the 'enemy,' setting off bombs in subway cars, and dragging the largest army of the world halfway across the globe to fight imaginary weapons of mass destruction are signs of big trouble. This environment festering with suspicion and hatred needs a more sophisticated global perspective, one geared toward respect, recognition, and healing" (p. 113).

Evidently, many in the immigrant Muslim American community are fearful that these New Orientalist narratives are providing the West with insider evidence that people from this part of the world are, in large part, the underdeveloped Orientals that everyone thought they were. Daily, they see the mass media enforcing this simplified image: that all that Muslims "do is pray, suppress women, and grow angry at the West" (p. 71).

Throughout the book there are numerous examples of great modern Iranian literature-literature that flies in the face of current stereotypical images of what we in the West may believe possible within their supposedly much more restrictive culture. For me, this was one of the best reasons to read Kashavarz' book. I came away from this book with a strong desire to read many of the titles she suggests, all of which are available in English translation.

In my estimation, both Kashavarz' and Nafisi's books, offer great insight. If there is truth, it must be found somewhere between the two. Kashavarz' main mistake in criticizing Reading Lolita in Tehran is that she does not validate Nafisi's right to have negative views about some aspects of her former country. Nafisi lived through the Iranian Revolution. She was teaching at Tehran University at the center of radicalism during the heart of the conflict. She was witness to many atrocities on a very personal level. These are events that have carved a deep scar on her psyche. Where was Kashavarz during the upheaval and chaos of the Iranian Revolution? Well, she left Iran in September of 1979 "to carry out her graduate studies at London University" (p. 47). On the same page, she reveals: "When I left Iran, I left Ati with my parents, hoping I could bring her over after I settled into my new environment. Little did I know that a war would break out between Iran and Iraq and I would not see my daughter, only eight years old at the time, for another seven years." That, I am afraid, is perhaps the only negative statement about Iran that Kashavarz allows herself to make in this entire book! It speaks volumes for what has been left out of her narrative. Need I say more?

But, please, DO consider reading this book. I recommend this book highly. It will open your eyes.

NativeRoses, thanks for recommending Marina Nemat's memoir. It sounds as though it reads like a novel. The suspense must be multiplied by the knowledge that the author actually lived through the experiences and made the decisions she describes.

Msbaba, thanks for adding to Charlene's comments about Jasmine and Stars. It's so important for us to understand Iran better, and useful to consider a wide variety of perspectives.

I read a good book a year or two ago about the covert U.S. intervention in Iran during the early 1950s which put the Shah in power. It ended an emerging democratic movement which was also starting to nationalize the country's oil resources and would have drastically cut the profits of U.S. oil companies. While Americans thought of the Shah as a positive, modernizing and even democratizing influence in Iran, to most Iranians, he represented the exact opposite--a return to an oppressive monarchy. I'll add another post when I track down the author and title.

>14 margad:, margad - Are you thinking of All The Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer? It sounds quite similar to what you're describing, except I'd say it was a GREAT book. :)

Since posting my review of “Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran” by Fetemeh Keshavarz, I have had a most interersting email exchange with another Iranian-American Persian Literature scholar concerning this topic. He agreed with my review and gave me two very interesting Internet links to further discusssions of this same topic. One link is an essay and the other is an interview—the author/interviewee is Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Before I stumbled upon this, I had no idea that Nafisi's book Reading Lolita in Tehran was such a “hot topic” among the immigrant Iranian community in the United States.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10707

msbaba, thank you for the review and those links. I've lately been reading books about Iran and/or by Iranians, and recently attended a lecture by Hamid Dabashi. I will be interested to read the URLs you provided as well as Keshavarz' book. :-) I'm keen to read some of the other books that others have mentioned, also. (I recently read Lipstick Jihad and found it very interesting, and often quite moving.)

Yes, Kinzer's All the Shah's Men is the one. It's very informative, and also quite well-written.

Another well-written nonfiction book about Iran is Terence O'Donnell's Garden of the Brave in War. O'Donnell spent many years living on a run-down estate in rural Iran and made friends among his neighbors. (This was before the Shah was ousted and Khomeini came to power.) His perspective is warmly sympathetic but unsentimental, and the writing is of the highest literary quality -- his prose is clean and sharp, full of humor and insight.

Thanks for the links, msbaba.

Wow, life has been keeping me so busy and off librarything group boards but I had to catch up and you guys have been amazing. I have loved getting still more thoughts on the books I compared. msbaba, thank you so much for sharing your throughts and opinions. You made me look at things even more and I loved viewing the book from another's eyes.

I still haven't had the time to read Lipstick Jihad but hope to soon. I have just been so crazy busy with my review blog and the creation of a community group here on base. Perhaps I need to read a book on time management *winks*.