#19. Reading about Women, March 2023
Women's History month, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Ronald Roy
Hello,
Taking a slight detour from our regular discourse on living the slow life to talk about women’s history month. From a young and impressionable age, I saw how reading made a difference in the lives of ordinary women. Pop Culture comes up with a new definition of what it means to be a woman every year, and I find it hard to keep up. I keep coming back to women’s rights to education which were often the birthplace of the women’s liberation movements across the world. Not only did the movement ensure equal social and political opportunities for women, but it also normalized stories written by women where they shared about their lives, and a growing sisterhood ensued among its readers.
Reading Corner
Reading Lolita In Tehran has been on top of my TBR for a really long time. As a 23-year-old, I had read Things I’ve Been Silent About by the same author, and at that time it had left a deep impact on me. It was my window to the Iranian Revolution, and how it changed the way women lived overnight. The memoir holds no barrier, often spilling out scandalous secrets of the family, and recalling chilling details.
So, it only seemed apt to revisit the author in March for Women’s History Month.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a first-person account of a woman Professor who starts a private reading club with hand-picked students, at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution. She resigns from the University of Tehran after serving as a faculty for many years, as a means of protest and begins hosting these secret meetings at the confines of her home, where they decide to read ‘forbidden works of English Literature’.
Its Back Cover Blurb reads…
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. "Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.
Writing Corner
Ronald Roy is an ongoing series that features every month on TOAT.
Click here to read the previous episode.
To read the first episode, click here.
Episode 6
Before I knew it, I was typing Nirupama’s name on Facebook Search. I was gritting my teeth without realizing it, and her feed only made me feel worse. Some of us have never had to question our choices. Some of us have never been penalized for the decisions we have had to make. I could see that Nirupama was not one of us. I was looking at a photo of her farewell party. She was moving to Italy, and everyone I knew from Komal’s Party was attending. They were dressed in white. Even Ronald. Was it deliberate? Did she send out a memo before the Party to everyone about a Dress Code?
Ughhh! Do people do such things anymore?
Nirupama could. Only she did. Only she had the power to influence people into having a dress code, and not be judged for it. If she did it, everyone followed suit. I was scrolling through her feed and found a picture where they were all laughing, mid-pose.
I would be seething with resentment if I didn’t see how childish it was. Who was fooling whom here?
Beep. Beep.Beep.
The microwave stops whirring and the timer begins to ring, snapping me out of the screen.
I took another look at Ronald’s face in the photo - his smug face breaking into a burst of laughter. Really Ronald, who was fooling who here?
Learning Corner
Some interesting things that I found on the internet
Lounge Corner
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See you in the next edition,
Pratiksha