[the third garden]
This book, a memoir, is by a woman, a professor of English, who resigned her post at a university in Tehran, and, out of the void that opened up after this resignation, she created a sanctuary for seven of her women students. She created this sanctuary in the dining room of her house. And she did so with a series of novels, including more than one by Nabokov. Thus, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Perhaps the book is one with which you're familiar.
It’s 1995. Outside that dining room, as Ms. Nafisi describes it, the streets of Tehran are patrolled by militia, the Blood of God, men with guns riding in a series of white Toyotas. The women walking in these streets, are followed—watched—by the men in the Toyotas. On the streets the women have to be vigilant. They must wear their veils properly, without a single strand of hair showing. They must keep their faces free of make-up, and be particularly careful not to be found walking in public with men, unless these men are their husbands or brothers or fathers.
Inside her home, Ms. Nafisi arranges the meetings such that no men are present in the house. She tells the young women they can remove their headscarves if they like. Some of them do. That kind of detail—arranging the meetings such that her husband will not be in the house when they arrive and thus the young women can more freely remove their headscarves—that kind of detail seems important. There’s a sense throughout the book, a sense that Nafisi is creating a climate. A climate within which she will be able to create, with and for these young women, a refuge.
How does she do this?
There are clues in her descriptions:
Each would have a private diary in which she would record her responses to the novels, as well as ways in which these works and their discussions related to her personal and social experiences. I explained that I had chosen them for this class because they seemed dedicated to the study of literature. I mentioned that one of the criteria for the books I had chosen was their authors’ faith in the critical and almost magical power of literature.
She invites the women to write about the books.
She invites them to make personal connections with the books—to use the word I.
She chooses authors who believe in the critical—and almost magical—power of books.
She chooses, among others, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and Henry James.
She writes:
I had a frame for the class, and had selected a number of books to read, but I was prepared to let the class shape me . . . . Often I ask myself: did I choose my students for that class or did they choose me? It is true that I had some specific criteria in mind when I invited them to participate, yet it seems as if they were the ones who created the class, who through some invisible agency led me to the present configuration in my living room.
She chooses the students with some care. (or they choose her)
She lets the students shape and create the class.
She offers a frame but lets the students move and grow and speak beyond that frame.
She offers snacks.
She describes breaking the ice and formality of the first meeting by offering “the calming distraction of cream puffs and tea.”
And there’s something she seems to understand intuitively—how talking about the books eventually gave these young women a way to talk about their lives in Tehran—how coming at their lives at a slant—through fiction—allowed them to find language. As if the novels offered a new context and this new context allowed them a way in and around to their own stories.
Nafisi writes:
Where they opened up and became excited was in our discussion of the works. The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection, and leave aside our stories about the deans and the university and the morality squads in the streets. There was a certain innocence with which we read these books; we read them apart from our own history and expectations, like Alice running after the White Rabbit and jumping into the hole. This innocence paid off: I do not think that without it we could have understood our own inarticulateness. Curiously the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.
They traveled into the books and back out into their own lives. They went through the books and out the other side with a new way of looking at—and speaking about—and potentially writing about—their own lives. They traveled into the books and came back out less speechless—less inarticulate.
The notion that in order to tell or write one’s story one must first find a language with which to tell it. And for some stories this might require an entirely new narrative frame. Novels, it seems, can sometimes offer this alternative narrative frame. And perhaps this is the reason that reading can sometimes release writing----a kind of call and response----