Reading Lolita in Tehran

I’ve been commuting a long distance the last five months, up and down that snake called Highway 280 that links my home in San Francisco to the peninsula south of the city. During my commute I’ve been listening to audiobooks, and attempting to fine tune my command of the cruise control function on my little Toyota Corolla so I can concentrate on the words I’m hearing.

The most recent audiobook I listened to was Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, a gripping, nonfiction account of living in that city during the first 18 years of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Azar Nafisi

The book centers around a small reading group of students, led by the author. Azar Nafisi started a private literature class in her home after she was expelled from her teaching post at the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the chador following the Islamic Revolution. Ironically, Azar Nafisi had been an active opponent of the shah, and voluntarily moved back to Iran from the United States after the Islamic Revolution. The theocratic elements of the movement to topple the monarchy quickly put an ideological lock on Iran’s political and academic institutions, even subjecting women to detailed inspection of their clothing before they could enter the campus, and expelling or punishing female students who ran up the stairs if they were late for class, or called out to friends in a loud voice.

The many horrors of living in the Islamic Republic of Iran that Nafisi bravely details in this book are a sobering reminder that the days of brutal dictatorships are not behind us. We tend to think that, with a few isolated exceptions, the type of repression that fascism and communism subjected many millions to has more or less ended, and that we live in a more open era, when that sort of governmental control of citizens has ceased to exist.

Nafisi makes it acutely clear that Iran is still suffering under a dictatorship that limits women, political opponents, non-Muslims, homosexuals, and intellectuals—and actually all its citizens—in ways that are horribly autocratic. I was particularly touched by the story of the character she calls Nasrin, a young woman who started auditing Nafisi’s literature classes at the university when she was only 13. Nasrin, like much of her generation, gets involved in the movement to overthrow the shah, but her more secular faction loses out in the power struggle that follows the revolution. As a result, Nasrin spends her teenage years in prison, where a number of the other female prisoners are shot or raped. Nasrin escapes this fate, but after her release from prison, she is not allowed to attend university for several years because of her former political affiliation. She ultimately ends up paying smugglers to help her escape Iran, but one is left with a disturbing sense of the emotional damage that living under this theocracy has caused her.

Another feature of Nafisi’s book I found fascinating was how Iranian readers react to certain English-language novels. In contemporary Tehran, Henry James sounds like a revolutionary, with his strong women characters such as Daisy Miller. In the U.S., James might seem slightly dépassé, but in Iran, his novels are still so relevant that Nafisi’s students formed a secret Daisy Miller fan club. James's reception in Iran is probably much closer to the impact his novels had in the U.S.A. when they were first published.

Reading Lolita in Tehran pulls no punches in recounting the nightmarish atrocities that the Islamic Republic of Iran has committed. I still found the book uplifting in many ways. That puzzled me, and I had to ask myself why. For one thing, Nafisi documents the little acts of resistance that the young women in her class committed every day, from wearing jeans or t-shirts or gold hoop earrings under their chadors, to talking openly amongst themselves about the hypocrisy of the men they know who are affiliated with the government. I think the book's uplifting quality also comes from Nafisi testifying to the incredible endurance of the human spirit, even under suffocating oppression, and how brightly literature can keep that torch lit.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

How to Get Published, Part 5: The Orphans of a Collection of Poems or Stories

There are certain poems or short stories in a book-length manuscript that I think of as the orphans. They are difficult to place on their own in magazines or anthologies. You could send them out twenty times, and they get rejected in twenty different places. All their poem/story-roommates have been adopted by different journals, but these guys are still in the literary orphanage, unable to find a home. 

An Orphanage.

This orphan is completely overlooked by every prospective parent who drives up in a fancy Bugatti, wearing an elegant ensemble. 

Why? And does this mean you should take the orphans out of your manuscript?

Sometimes the fact that a particular poem or story can’t get published on its own means that it is not of the same quality as the rest of the work in a manuscript. Other times, it’s just a matter of luck—a poem or story needs to be in the right place at the right time in order to get adopted.

Here’s an example. I had an odd poem in my last full-length book, My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers. The title of the poem was “Terrestial Extra,” and the piece was a bit of a concrete poem, with a fairly elaborate layout on the page. Most magazines steer clear of poems like that. Also, it wasn’t very personal. The poem was speculative, dealing with whether the earth contains all the shapes that life could assume anywhere in the universe. Not everyone’s cup of tea. Not even a few magazine editors’ shot of crème de cacao, apparently.

This is where a good book editor can make all the difference. An experienced editor will either give you the confidence to believe in a poem or story that hasn’t made it into print, or tell you the hard news that you’ve got a literary piece of spinach right between your two lower front teeth and you just have to get rid of it. In the case of “Terrestial Extra,” my editor, Sammy Greenspan at Kattywompus Press, thought well enough of the poem that she encouraged me to include it. Thank you, Sammy! Sure enough, the poem got accepted right before the book appeared, and by a superbly printed anthology, Overplay/Underdone, published by Medusa’s Laugh Press, a collection of poems with strong visual elements. My awkward orphan had found the perfect foster home!

My poem "Terrestial Extra" in the anthology Overplay/Underdone

But good editors are hard to find these days. Sometimes you feel you have to include a particular orphan in your book because it would leave an unexplained gap to take it out. Sometimes an orphan does have to go, if there is not a compelling reason why it belongs with the others in a collection, and/or it seems to be lowering the bar for that book. I wish I had five dollars for every poem I’ve written like that, poems that I’ll never publish. There are many more of them than there are orphans that I end up leaving in a manuscript after the final cut. Other times, an orphan just needs a little cleaning up and a new outfit. It has never quite come together the way the other pieces in the collection did, and it is asking for your help to make it better.

Sometimes you get lucky with an orphan. An editor may say to you, “I’ve got some space at the bottom of a column, the magazine is going to press tomorrow, can you send me a poem?” That’s when I bring in the orphans. I know I’ve got an editor who is not going to be super choosy, they will just be happy to have a poem. That’s often the only way that orphans find a home.

I have to confess a stubborn fondness for those strays, like the matron at the orphanage who takes a liking to a certain sniffly boy with a rabbit nose and terrible cowlicks. There is something about their awkwardness, their inability to even strive for perfection that makes them compelling to me. At least, when they are my own work. 

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer