next i’ll try to find my goodreads password

I’ve made good on my promise to start reading again.  It’s been a slow progression, going from a girl who merely skims headlines and is only able to fully complete a handful of blog reading each day, to a girl who actually reads literature.  Real books.

In early July I finally finished the first book my sister loaned me: Reading Lolita in Tehran.  A few times Hubby looked at me–sometimes as he laid against the headboard of our bed and read his own book, sometimes as he merely walked into the room and saw me with that book in hand–and told me to be done with it already.  Because it was taking me an awfully long time to finish it and he joked that he was tired of looking at it.  Once upon a time I read two books a week.  That one took me a month and a half.

But I had good reason to read it slowly.  Other than having only a few minutes at night to read it, the book was dense with upset.  I read about the Iranian Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power; the squads that went in to people’s homes and stole them away in the dead of night, never to be seen again; the bombs that dropped on a wedding celebration.  As Nafisi is such a good writer she brought me in to Iran with her, and I watched her fight against wearing the veil to work, I watched her home get raided, I listened as her students retold the stories of getting groped by female security guards as they made their way into school.

It was a difficult book to read.

Often I’d read a bit then set it aside.  I had to let my mind process the evil those women walked among before I could move further into the book.

Here is the excerpt that has stayed with me the longest:

We [Nafisi and one of her students] exchanged stories as we walked that day.  Nassrin told me more about her time in jail.  The whole thing was an accident.  I remember how young she had been, still in high school [when she was arrested for opposing the group that eventually took power in the revolution].  You’re worried about our brutal thoughts against “them,” she said, but you know most of the stories you hear about the jails are true.  The worst was when they called people’s names in the middle of the night.  We knew they had been picked for execution.  They would say good-bye, and soon after that, we would hear the sound of bullets.  We would know the number of people killed on any given night by counting the single bullets that inevitably came after the initial barrage.  There was one girl there–her only sin had been her amazing beauty.  They brought her in on some trumped-up morality charge.  They kept her for over a month and repeatedly raped her.  They passed her from one guard to another.  That story got around jail very fast, because the girl wasn’t even political; she wasn’t with the political prisoners.  They married the virgins off to the guards, who would later execute them.  The philosophy behind this act was that if they were killed as virgins, they would go to heaven.  You talk of betrayals.  Mostly they forced those who had “converted” to Islam to empty the last round into the heads of their comrades as tokens of their new loyalty to the regime.  If I were not privileged, she said with rancor, if I were not blessed with a father who shared their faith, God knows where I would be now–in hell with all the other molested virgins or with those who put a gun to someone’s head to prove their loyalty to Islam.

I do not know another way to insert these quotes into my post after the above, but they are profound to me, and so I will haphazardly insert them here, copying Nafisi’s quotes of Henry James (the American novelist who sided with the British in World War I before the U.S. officially did so) to give expression to my feelings of the women in the book:

•  ”[H]e insisted on the most important of all human attributes–feeling–and railed against ‘the paralysis of my own powers to do anything but increasingly and inordinately feel.’ “
• “Feel, feel, I say–feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and inspiration.”
• “I confess that I have no philosophy, nor piety, nor patience, no art of reflection, no theory of compensation to meet things so hideous, so cruel, and so mad, they are just unspeakably horrible and irremediable to me and I stare at them with angry and almost blighted eyes.”