Jasmine and Stars

Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran

Fatemeh Keshavarz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780807883754
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

In a direct, frank, and intimate exploration of Iranian literature and society, scholar, teacher, and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Her fresh perspective on present-day Iran provides a rare insight into this rich culture alive with artistic expression but virtually unknown to most Americans. Keshavarz introduces readers to two modern Iranian women writers whose strong and articulate voices belie the stereotypical perception of Iranian women as voiceless victims in a country of villains. She follows with a lively critique of the recent best-seller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which epitomizes what Keshavarz calls the "New Orientalist narrative, " a view marred by stereotype and prejudice more often tied to current geopolitical conflicts than to an understanding of Iran. Blending in firsthand glimpses of her own life--from childhood memories in 1960s Shiraz to her present life as a professor in America--Keshavarz paints a portrait of Iran depicting both cultural depth and intellectual complexity. With a scholar's expertise and a poet's hand, she helps amplify the powerful voices of contemporary Iranians and leads readers toward a deeper understanding of the country's past and present. Reading Lolita in Tehran, which she says epitomizes this New Orientalist attitude. Blending in firsthand glimpses of her own life, Keshavarz paints a portrait of Iran depicting both cultural depth and intellectual complexity.
-->

Chapter 1: The Jasmine, the Stars, & the Grasshoppers

In Shiraz of the 1960s, where I grew up, summer nights were a journey with a few clear stops. We slept in the courtyard under a sky full of stars, away from the orange, persimmon, and pomegranate trees, but still in the yard. Wooden beds would be brought out at the beginning of the summer. They would be covered first with light textured rugs and then the bedding laid on top. The first station in the night was the cotton mattress on the wooden bed a few steps away from the trees. I would lie there and just look at the sky with wonder, trying to do the hardest thing: fight off sleep just a bit longer. How could the whole neighborhood be sleeping? Most nights, there was the regular crowd of stars overhead. But once in a while there was such an outburst of glittering spots that I would just lie there enveloped in light. Then my gaze would wander around the sky in search of empty patches until my eyes could not stay open anymore. I was very young, and the problems I had then look insignificant now. Still, I did have things to sort out, and it was much easier to put them into perspective under the sky. Most things looked small by comparison anyway. Many years later, when I studied in England for my graduate degree, I missed a lot of things, most of all sorting problems out and putting things into perspective under the stars.

The next station was not a place but a voice. It was not there every night either. Some nights, close to midnight, a particular passerby walked through our alleyway and sang. I never got up to take a peek through the door to see what he looked like. I imagined him to have long hair and to wear a white cotton robe. Perhaps he was a wandering dervish, but certainly not a beggar. Had he meant to beg, he would not have come at midnight when no one was awake to give him anything. He must have gone to school, I thought some years later, because he sang poems that I recognized from my school books and my father’s recitations. They were mostly about love, God, or both. But it was not the words alone that stayed with me; he sang them with a voice that was full of urgency and yet untroubled. That is what I loved most. He sang every word as if it carried the secret of the universe, and yet he sang to a neighborhood that was mostly asleep:

I am glad to be, for being is gladdened by you

I am in love with the world, for the world is in love with you

I must have been seven or eight then. I did not know much about philosophy or mysticism. For a while I did not even know that the words the singer sang were a celebrated verse by the master ghazal writer Saʿdi of Shiraz, who lived in the thirteenth century. But I knew that he was singing about me, of that I was sure. In his singing, there was a sense of peace with the night that made me grateful for being who I was and where I was. It felt right. Some nights, just as I began to think he was not coming, his voice would start in the distance. The combination of the stillness of the trees, the pale moonlight, and his voice was magical. I would keep still and wait to hear the whole verse then drift into sleep. I never asked anyone the next day if they had heard my passing dervish the night before. It was too risky. What if they said, “Which dervish?” and somehow jinxed him out of existence? Or, worse still, they could say, “O, the dervish,” and he would not be magical anymore. As long as no one talked about him, he remained my secret door to a world of comfortable sleepy thoughts.

The next station was just before dawn, and sometimes I missed it completely. I would wake up to the sound of my parents—and my grandmother if she was staying with us that night—performing their ritual wash before the dawn prayer. I had seen the ritual many times during the day. There was nothing mysterious about it. You washed the hands, face, arms, and feet. But before dawn, it was different. First, came the sound of water, then very gentle footfalls—so as not to wake us up—and then the soft whispers of the words of prayer spreading in the early morning air. This was such a short stop that I was never sure if I had really woken up. But it was an important one, particularly if I had argued with someone the day before, done badly on a test, or been scolded for something I should not have done. The sound of prayer said all was back to normal. I would turn softly—careful not to disperse the prayers in the air—and go right back to sleep.

The last station I should call the jasmine station. It was bright and fragrant, and I got the pleasure of it only if my grandmother was staying with us. She would not go back to bed after the dawn prayer. She would walk around the yard, quietly water the plants, and pick little, white jasmine blossoms from the tree that had climbed one wall of the yard all the way to the top. In summertime the tree, covered in white star-like flowers, many of which also covered the ground, looked like a bride standing on a white carpet. My grandmother somehow associated these flowers with prayer and collected fresh jasmine to keep inside her prayer rug until the next morning. But she always collected a few extra flowers for us children and left them on our respective pillows right under our sleepy noses. I would wake up first to their scent, then to their white smiles, and finally to the softness of their petals. They were not just jasmines. They were inseparable from grandma and her prayer rug. They were the gateway to busy summer days.

There were less desirable stations too. One was the arrival of the grasshoppers. Sometimes during the summers in Shiraz the sky would suddenly go dark, and worry would spread over the faces of the grown-ups. It was the migrating grasshoppers. The grown-ups worried because they knew that the wheat or vegetables in some nearby field were about to be destroyed in a matter of hours. A few days after that, many small farmers would be broke, and a few weeks later the price of fresh produce would double. I mourned the attack of the grasshoppers, even when I was not old enough to know the full sad story. I had my own reasons. I was afraid of their long, green bodies and springy legs. Plus, I hated the fact that no one understood my fear. Children in the neighborhood played with the grasshoppers, and my youngest uncle used all the psychological tricks he knew to convince me to touch them so I would lose my fear. But it did not work. Once the insects invaded the sky, I knew there would be lazy ones who would land in our yard to rest and tired ones who would fall despite their will to get to the fields. I would go inside, keep the windows closed, and be suspicious of every green spot that appeared to be moving. It took many days before sleeping in the yard would be safe, bright, and fragrant again.

If I told you only about the grasshoppers, you would never look for the stars or the jasmine of my summer nights. Especially if all you had ever heard about was the attack of the grasshoppers. That is why I am writing this book. I am piecing together a colorful tapestry of events, people, and books to give you a new picture of the place in which I grew up. Too many good things fall through the cracks in many books written about the country of my birth and the people who nurtured me. So I have decided to write one that focuses on the good things, one that gives voice to what has previously been silenced or overlooked. Ideally, it should be easy to point to the stars or to give you a handful of my jasmine so next time you think of Iran, you will remember things other than grasshoppers. But in fact it is not easy. The prevailing perceptions make it very hard for me to give you my gifts. It is as if a voice in the background, a master narrative, has told us how to imagine each other. That narrative has seeped into the fabric of our daily thought and the simplest of our interactions. To empower both of us to break out of that narrative is my challenge. Let me explain the voice in the background with an anecdote, the story of something that happened recently in my friendly hometown, St. Louis.

I was heading home after a long day’s work when I stopped in a local grocery store to pick up bread, eggs, orange juice, and a bottle of vitamins. Waiting in line to pay, I spotted a woman standing behind me. She was more or less my age, very likely heading home from work, and had similar things in her shopping basket. Our eyes met for a second and we laughed. There was no need to say anything. We almost knew each other’s thoughts: “You are tired, too … and glad to be heading home!” Then I got to the cash register, where a bubbly young girl with an extraordinary pair of green earrings was the cashier. She continued chattering with the customer who had finished paying and was about to leave. Then she turned to greet me:

—O My God! You are Mrs. Karamustafa (my married name), aren’t you? I remember you. Am I saying it right? Mrs. Ka-ra-mustafa?

—Yes, you are saying it right. And you have a great memory!

I exclaimed with admiration, remembering her attempt to learn my name when she had looked at my credit card the last time I was in the store. People always try to say my name out loud and feel proud when they get it right. We were still laughing when I turned to pick up my bagged groceries and my eyes met those of the woman standing behind me. She was standing straight, arms pressed against the sides of her body, looking at me with a mix of discomfort and suspicion. What was conspicuously absent was the smile. I picked up the bag and walked out of the store without lingering on the incident or wondering what had happened. It was not hard to guess. My name had done it. After she had heard my Muslim name our similarities—the fact that we were two women more or less the same age going home after a long day—had become secondary. It was no longer funny that we had bought very similar things and had smiled at each other. My name said we belonged to two different—and opposing—worlds. That was enough to take anyone’s smile away.

By the time I got to the car I had forgotten the incident. Such encounters are part of daily life; they happen too often to hold onto. Besides, feeling like a victim does not appeal to me. I am recounting the incident merely to explain what I mean by the power of the storyline in the background, the one that takes away our freedom to imagine each other. The popular eyewitness literature discussed in the introduction may not be wholly responsible for the polarization, but it adds to it significantly. Most of all, it translates the forbidding nature of the voice into soft and quasi-entertaining literature capable of seeping smoothly into the popular culture. Since we “know” what the elephant must look like, our numbed curiosity gives up on looking for a candle or envisioning the beast with any sense of adventure.

In the introduction, I described this popular eyewitness literature as branching out of what I call a New Orientalist narrative. Among the books exemplifying this narrative I have chosen to focus on one—perhaps the only one—about Iran that so many people have read: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (RLT). The slanted vision of books such as RLT is not to be taken lightly. Rather it should be critiqued properly to diminish its role in the escalating fear and suspicion in the background of our encounters. If you have read this kind of partial and exaggerated portrayal of Iran and its Muslim inhabitants, I would like you to know that under the same sky, on the same streets, and in the same houses there are jasmine flowers, skies full of stars, and passersby who sing about love. And yes, they are still there.

RLT is the memoir of a professor of literature who met with seven of her female students weekly to read classics of Western literature a decade or so after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. As the revolution went on outside, the marketing copy on the cover of the book tells us, in the professor’s living room these young women read Nabokov, James, Austen, and Fitzgerald. And yet RLT is no simple and innocuous discussion of literature. Every reading in the book is tied together with some episodes from the lives of the students or their teacher. Sometimes the readings are sidestepped entirely and replaced with the author’s personal observation on the revolution or an extended political commentary. The blurb promises the book to be an “exploration of the resilience” of these people “in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.”

In fact, the book can be many things to many people. To some, it is a memoir, the personal encounters between a teacher and her students in a classroom that is her own living room. To others, it is an episodic encounter with the evils of extremist Islam. To yet others, who know something about the richness of life in Iran, the book is the story of a vibrant culture pushed like a genie into the bottle of the revolution. It is a very incomplete account of the two most troubled decades in contemporary Iranian history, the 1980s and 1990s. RLT is a landscape turned gruesome, the soil barren, the trees snatched away, the sky dark, and the rivers dry. Portraits of people or of social and cultural conditions should be like tapestries woven out of a hundred different threads, or like mosaics made of many tiles. When there are holes in the tapestry or tiles missing, the entire picture is distorted. Like many works contributing to the New Orientalist narrative, RLT contains a few patches of truth. In its entirety, however, it is a tapestry with many holes, a mosaic that has every other piece missing.

It is easy to underestimate the impact of texts on our lives. Inquiries by friends and acquaintances about RLT made me realize I should read the book sooner rather than later. Even then, I felt the need for providing a critique of it only after the author visited my university in the spring of 2004. In the simple events of that day, I saw the larger issues connected to the book’s silencing narrative that privileged the attack of the grasshoppers at the cost of the jasmine and stars. Washington University’s Assembly Series—a major speaker series designed to appeal to the broader St. Louis community-had selected the book. That in itself underlined the growing significance of the emerging Orientalist narrative. A faculty member is usually handpicked to introduce the speaker in this prestigious series. Being an Iranian woman on the literature faculty, I had been asked to make the introductory remarks. Graham Chapel, where the presentation was held, was filled with a large audience, many of them Iranian Americans. This was a rare occasion on which Iran was not being discussed as a nuclear threat, a suitable hideout for future al-Qaʿidah members, or a place in which sexual transgressors are likely to be stoned. A book about Iran was the focus of attention.

Yet there was a strong sense of ambivalence among many of us Iranian Americans in the audience. On the one hand, RLT critiqued totalitarianism and endorsed the transformative and liberating power of literature. It celebrated Fitzgerald, Austen, and James, whom so many Iranians had enjoyed—and still were enjoying—in Persian translation. But there were things in the book that shocked anyone who kept close ties with Iran, even the critics of the current regime. The teaching of Western literary works to Iranian students was presented as a groundbreaking act or as something on the order of taming the savages. The view presented was that “we [Iranians] lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works” (RLT, 25). I had lived, studied, and worked on three continents, and if there was a culture in which people expressed their enthusiasm for literature more publicly than in Iran, I could not think of one. It would be difficult to live in Iran and not see that this enthusiasm was not limited to the educated elite either. How many a baker, shopkeeper, or taxi driver had I heard whispering Omar Khayyam under his breath. Now this book, which meant to celebrate the power of literature, denied and erased this most prevalent cultural behavior in the society I knew so well.

Narratives achieve their sense of closure through an inherent claim to completeness. Whether they specify that or not, by virtue of telling a story, they take responsibility for giving their readers the whole truth. If they adopt a strategy of selective narration they should underline the fictive nature of their presentation or risk becoming a tool for erasure, a kind of silencing medium. Many Iranian Americans who traveled to Iran regularly had no illusions about the need for change. But even to them, the outlandish culture portrayed by RLT was shockingly incomplete. Cinemas had been burnt, professors expelled students who disagreed with them, uncles who considered themselves “pure and chaste” Muslims molested their nieces, and every twelve-year-old girl was “considered long ripe for marriage” (RLT, 43).

In this gruesome human landscape, there were few Iranians who could be described as sensible and normal individuals. In contrast, there was no shortage of fanatical, senseless, hypocritical, and cowardly persons. For example, a blind censor decided the fate of Iranian cinema (which—if you follow international cinema—is in fact doing well). Even the revolutionary guard who came to arrest a member of the armed opposition hid behind a woman servant in the author’s house for fear of being shot. Stern husbands and obnoxious brothers looked particularly deprived of humanity. Worse still, these problems were presented as results of the social changes following the revolution and particularly the revival of Islamic practice. With no reference to serious problems that plagued Iran under the Shah, the revolution itself appeared to have been motivated by a longing for fanaticism and a dislike for freedom and modernization.

In short, RLT’s narration left many holes in the tapestry, depicting a culture peopled with petty monsters who cared only about religion, and in a superficial way. No wonder hearing Muslim names wiped smiles off people’s faces. The standard conversation went something like this: “Have you read Reading Lolita in Tehran? My roommate is reading it. She says it is amazing.” “Yes, isn’t it?” I would think, “Nothing but marauding grasshoppers. It is truly amazing.” Who could believe that under those circumstances jasmine and stars ever existed?

On the day RLT was to be introduced in our Assembly Series, I walked through the campus toward the chapel where I would make my introductory remarks. For some reason I remembered my bright graduate student Omid, who had given me RLT as a present with a worried look on his face. “Will you tell me what you think of the way she portrays Iran, Professor Keshavarz?” he had asked. I had promised him we would talk about the book in class. The doors of the chapel were open and people were coming in. “Omid must be sitting there,” I thought. His parents lived in California. They had been forced to leave Iran when Omid was very young as conditions had worsened for Bahaʾi families in the early years following the revolution. Omid loved Iran and the opportunity to learn anything about it. Over six feet tall and largely built, he had the complexities of a young scholarly mind and the pure smile of a child. I do not remember any other student ever studying Persian with that kind of sincere passion. Once I brought him hard candy fragrant with dried jasmine from Shiraz, a gift from a Baha’i family he did not know. He wanted to travel there some day.

The chapel was now full. One could say people were “stuffed into the hall,” if the language that RLT used to describe Iranian audiences attending a concert by teenage boys were to be adopted. The concert in Iran had been ridiculed. The author and her friends had tried to get out early that night so as not to be trampled by the “mob.” But this eager American audience would not be the “mob.” RLT reserved such pejorative terms as the “mob” and “mediocre” for performances in Iran and even suggested that the word concert be placed in quotation marks so that “such cultural affairs” would not be mistaken for “the real thing” (RLT, 299). Once again, to an uninformed reader, this statement erased the Iranian’s love for music as it did the presence of all Iranian master musicians who performed worldwide. No, the audience in St. Louis would not be the mob. They would belong to the same category as the friends from the summer night party described a mere eight pages after the concert. These latter sat at tasteful small tables with fragile candles on terraces overlooking the pool, serving homemade wine. They were “cultured, witty, and sophisticated” (RLT, 307)...