When I was a kid I took swimming lessons for years at a place called Playhaven Swim School in east Portland, Oregon.  It was a big deal at Playhaven to “move up” swim groups, and when you got to group four or five, the final test was a dive into the deep end.

I remember standing there on the end of that long board, toes over the edge, long hair straining inside my swim cap, shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.  Arms up, head tucked, I made the leap – and cut down through the water like a blow torch through butter.  I’d never dived that far that fast.  But as I my descent slowed and the water darkened, I panicked. I didn’t know which way was up.  My chest tighten and seized and I was paralyzed with fear.  If I went the wrong way, I knew I’d be lost forever.  Never mind the pool full of people.  I was alone, I was drowning, and no one was going to save me.

Then my hand hit the rough pool floor, and I pushed off, shooting to up like an arrow, breaking the surface, gasping for air. Hiding my tears behind chlorine and pool water, I swam to the edge, pulled myself out and ducked into the changing room without looking up.  I cowered in a bathroom stall shivering in a thin blue towel until I heard my mother come in to hurry me to get dressed.  She was oblivious to my crisis, and I never did tell her what happened.  I had survived, and in the end I felt empowered; I’ve never shown anyone the scar I carried up from the bottom of that pool until now.

Part literary criticism, part memoir, part social commentary, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a dive to the bottom of the pool.  It is not an easy read, but it is well worth the effort.  And while many who read it will focus solely on the contrasts between western culture and that of the Middle East (and Iran in particular) there is a lot to be learned about one’s self from these pages.

After attending college in the United States, author Azar Nafisi returned to her native Iran just before the 1979 revolution, full of independence and Western ideals, and promptly secured a position teaching literature at the University of Tehran.  However, as restrictions on women tighten, she loses that job and resigns from the next.  She then creates a book group made up of seven former female students, and it is with this group that Reading Lolita takes form.  Meeting weekly to discuss literature now banned in Iran, Nafisi makes account of each clandestine gathering, deftly paralleling whichever text that the group is reading with Iran’s descent into censorship, oppression, and totalitarianism.

It is clear that the literature offers hope and independence to the group that life does not.  As Nafisi writes,  “There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom.”

In addition to a greater understanding of the Middle Eastern mindset and Iran’s relatively recent political history, one of the most enduring things I took from Reading Lolita was a revitalized appreciation for the canons of modern literature around which Nafisi structures her book.  Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Washington Square, Pride and Prejudice – I have, at one time or other, perfunctorily skimmed and set aside each one as required for some literature studies class or another.  However, Nafisi’s commentary and the real-life parallels she drew took me beyond the requisite discussions, allowing me to appreciate each book’s deeper themes and relevance.

A few years ago, I went to see Azar Nafisi speak in Portland.  Like her book, she was passionate, deliberate, and relateable as she shared the world of her youth, growing up in a democratic Iran; a country she remembered as one of educated men and women who enjoyed and exercised their religious and personal freedoms, and then contrasting that world to her later experiences upon returning to a very different Iran.

Having previously read her book, the content was familiar, but her personable presentation brought a more intimate, immediate dimension to the discussion,  and I became rapt as she focused in on the political process that resulted in Iran denying education to its female citizens – one she described as a methodical, institutional stripping away of human rights – veiled in theocratic dogma, all done in the name of “protecting” the people and their traditions.

Sitting there in my cushioned seat listening to Nafisi speak, surrounded by writers and teachers and readers of all walks, I found myself thinking that we were all – at that very moment! – doing something that this woman’s country-women could never do.  I imagined myself in their onerous shoes – unable to get an education because my government, or my family (or both) denied them to me.  The very thought that someone else could so direct my destiny was sickening, and my response was visceral.  I was back in the deep end, unable to find the surface, gasping for air.

Recently, as I revisited Ms. Nafisi’s book in preparation for this blog post, I was filled with gratitude for the underpining messages of her cautionary tale.  The pen IS mightier.  Hope IS alive.  We SHALL overcome.  We MUST be mindful, diligent, alert, and courageous.  All the more reasons to consider the changes this country – the US – has made in the last decade in the name of “protecting” its people.  Are we really that hell-bent on stripping away individual rights one thin epidermal layer at a time?  And I don’t just mean that figuratively – thanks to post-Underwear bomber knee-jerking, half the country is ready to bend over and remove their scivies “for the greater good.”  What other rights are we willingly giving up in the name of safety?  How much will we expurgate speech in the name of political correctness before people recognized it for the censorship it is?  At what point will we find ourselves lost at the bottom of the pool, unable to find our way to the surface?