Kudos to mary13 for reminding us where we had encountered Milosz recently. I couldn’t remember
Mary13
I think Dabashi got a little bit carried away, SJCM (as perhaps Hitchens did also 
). But it is good to learn about the range of views on Nafisi.
Wow, I took a class with Milosz, and attended many of his seminars, back in my Berkeley days. So interesting he reverberates to this day.
@southjerseymom, no need to distrust Nafisi because of her background. There was an educated elite in Iran which was greatly influenced by western ideas on philosophy and freedom before and during the reign of the Shah. That elite had very, very little to do with the Shah’s repressive, anti-intellectual regime. (Let’s not forget who put him in power: the USA.) And many suffered tremendously both under the Shah, and the Ayatollah.
Milosz, too, had the backing and respect of the neocons. All intellectuals did whose views – usually simplified & glossed over – coincided with whatever politics the neocons backed.
I recently read the section about her “magician” not being in his apt, he was consoling a younger man who just lost his grandmother and because they are Baha’i faith couldn’t have regular burial-
It was Nafisi’s lack of empathy, talking about the corpse in the back of the car, and her concern that the “magician” hadn’t left her a note or contacted her, seemed very self centered.
Also, when she spoke about someone being tortured in hotel room , fingers burned , and in he next statement something like " so we put gatsby on trial"
.
She seems so disconnected from events, yet she referred to protests while in America. Confusing.
@katliamom, that is very cool that you took a class with Milosz and attended his seminars!
@SouthJerseyChessMom, I had the same feeling about Nafisi’s detachment when describing horrific events. (For me, even more than the grandmother’s burial, it was the story she told about the girl who was repeatedly raped and then executed for her “sin” of amazing beauty. It reminded me of the way the original versions of fairy tales are told, e.g., Rapunzel’s prince having his eyes gouged out by thorns, Cinderella’s sisters cutting off their own toes, etc.)
However, in Nafisi’s defense, I think that telling such stories without emotion is a protective mechanism–a way to cope with the atrocities happening around you. “Traumatic stress tends to evoke two emotional extremes: feeling either too much (overwhelmed) or too little (numb) emotion…Numbing is a biological process whereby emotions are detached from thoughts, behaviors, and memories.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/
I would add, though, that Persepolis contains accounts of similarly terrrible events, but there is no sense of detachment there. On p. 145, for example, Marji’s mother angrily and heart-breakingly tells her daughter about what happens to the young, innocent girls who are arrested. This is where a graphic novel has the advantage–even in the simple drawings, you can see the fear and sorrow.
NJTM, Nafisi’s use of specific works of western literature and corresponding hot button characters let me better understand the impact, especially the psychological punches, of an extreme political/religious revolution on women! For example Nabokov’s villain Humbert Humbert of Lolita as a metaphor for an oppressive political control mechanism that robbed women, especially young women, of a great many societal freedoms was extremely helpful to me. I knew a simplistic version of the factual consequences for women of the Iranian revolution, but because I find the fictional Humbert ultimately and uniquely repulsive, Nafisi’s use of Nabokov’s Lolita was a creative way, imo, to help me register the horrid impact of such invasive oppression. Using and discussing a western fictional creation I was familiar with, especially one that always leaves me with a queasy feeling, allowed me a better way to imagine the turmoil of a mandatory veiling wardrobe, or paranoid accusations of “impurity” with forced virginity testing, or being held captive by an entity seeking dominance and mind control… I don’t think I ever would have thought of Lolita or Tehran in the same bubble, but it was effective.
^Aha, got it. Thanks, PlantMom!
Khomeini must have had some incredible charisma, right? Nafisi writes at one point:
It’s as if he bewitched the population. I’m not well-versed enough in Iranian political history to really understand it, but I did find this interesting book review from The Economist about “debunking the myths that sustained Ayatollah Khomeini’s republic”: http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21572740-debunking-myths-sustained-ayatollah-khomeinis-republic-waiting-god
I’m more interested in the second half of the question. What do you think of Nafisi’s line “Was it any consolation, and did we even wish to remember, that what he did to us was what we allowed him to do?” She reiterates this idea later in the book, writing: “Added to the crimes, to the murders and tortures, we would now face this last indignity—the murder of our dreams. Yet he had done this with our full compliance, our complete assent and complicity.”
I was a little troubled by this because I don’t think that the raped, murdered, tortured,and imprisoned victims of the Islamic State gave their “full compliance” and “complete assent” any more than the Jews consented to the Holocaust. So what does Nafisi mean? In what way—and why—did the Iranian people allow such things to happen?
I’m not sure what Nafisi meant about assent and complicity, but one thing that struck me about the book was the description of the early days after the Shah was deposed. It was a very chaotic time, and my impression is that few people had the faintest idea that a fundamentalist Islamic state was a likely outcome.
It kind of reminded me of a novel I read about Germany in the 1930s that made me understand how few people could have predicted the coming power of the Nazis.
Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition. At the start of the revolution Khomeini was just one of many powers in play. I don’t think it’s wrong to say the Irani let it happen any more than it is wrong to say that the Germans let Hitler happen. It reminds me of the famous Martin Niemöller quote:
People had their own agendas for not fighting Khomeini. And when they realized he was winning, it was too late.
I had trouble understanding this notion of complicity assigned to all Iranians. Weren’t most of these people, those ill-treated by the IR, victims? What woman would choose any of the punishments meted out? Who is really to blame for what has happened?
It seems a fact that as radical political movements of different flavors gather steam, dissenters, as well as supporters of said movements who may or may not have given their support much thought, who may or may not have felt threatened during the change, might have to endure unexpected consequences, especially if the political movement is successful in assuming a position of authority and control. Mixing in religious extremism in which faith makes its own demands to suspend questioning of ideas and follow authority, and then adding leaders capable of inflicting punishments to maintain control…it’s a recipe for disaster, and one that we humans keep testing.
I so want to make a comment about the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but I know I can’t… [-X , so I’ll be good O:-).
^^^^^^^ mary13 I thought the same thing when I read Plantmom’s comment. So relevant :-SS
http://■■■■■■■.com/zfpqsve (p. 272)
If this is what Nafisi refers to as “complicity,” I don’t know. It seems pretty innocent to me.
^ I think these two questions are very closely related. Banning books and other forms of art has a long history all over the world, including in our own “free” country. I think the short answer to the above questions is that it’s all about control. Authoritarian figures ban books to maintain the status quo and quell rebellious thought. Parental figures ban books to control what young people read as a means of (theoretically) protecting the innocent. Although I understand the motivation behind the latter category—if I had, let’s say, a 9-year old, I wouldn’t want her checking a copy of American Psycho out of the school library—banning books presents a far greater danger to young minds than does exposure to a “controversial” book.
There was an attempt to ban Persepolis in my neck of the woods a few years ago: http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/e-mails-show-cps-officials-pull-persepolis-classrooms/Content?oid=16355626
In the article linked in post #75, it looks as though the original request to pull Persepolis came from a group of elementary schools and then somehow warped into pulling it from grade levels K-12. I don’t particularly object to pulling Persepolis from elementary libraries for the reason stated ("… some students would not be developmentally capable of handling the mature content …"). Its graphic novel format can mislead younger students re the content. The word “pull” or “ban” sounds like censorship in play but books in elementary libraries do differ from those in middle school libraries which differ from those in high school libraries. Librarians check for age-appropriateness all the time from reading level to subject matter and then choose what to place on the shelves. Here’s where Persepolis works well: “This book is utilized in AP French, AP English Lit, and AP Comparative Government.” That’s a major jump from elementary schools wanting to pull the book. The word “ban” and the fact that the ban extended from K-12 was the problem. Those attempting to pull the book hadn’t read it but I bet those who placed it in elementary schools hadn’t either: they saw a graphic novel with a young girl on the front and thought “yeah.”
Persepolis is an ALA Alex Award Winner 2004: “The Alex Awards are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.” Again, not ages 5-11. I think my three read it somewhere in middle school through high school. Could they have read it in elementary school? Sure, but I think they got more out of it when older. For what it’s worth: they loved graphic novels. We own every Tintin and plenty of manga.
Our library mysteriously has the first book shelved with the adult graphic novels and the followup in the teen room. I agree it’s not a kid’s book. Definitely some language I preferred my kids to get later, even if they probably already knew those words in elementary school. (Not to mention I didn’t want them to get the idea that smoking would make them a grown up! p 117)
I couldn’t quite figure out why they were in the class. It seemed like a tremendous waste of their time. It was interesting their complete inability to see that Fitzgerald is not presenting Gatsby as some wonderful ideal, though he is interested in why he seems so appealing to others.
^ Maybe they were in the class as spies, even if only self-appointed. Nafisi does mention that many people were quietly keeping an eye on her–that she’d have mysterious janitors come in to her room in the middle of class, and sweep a corner or carry in and out a chair for no discernible reason.
I lean toward self-appointed … with varying degrees of negativity. Mr. Bahri seems, in some instances, to almost be a self-appointed protector. A fanatic, maybe, but I think he respected his professor. (Isn’t he the one who never took advantage of his position to skip class?)