NOVEL THOUGHTS
………
RANDOM HOUSE, 2003
(available in paperback from Random House, 2004)
AS A WOMAN and an intellectual in postrevolutionary Iran, Azar Nafisi is forced to live a bifurcated existence. She veils herself, resentfully, to comply with government edicts and to keep her university position. She meets covertly with a male intellectual friend—she calls him “my magician”—so as not to arouse the suspicions of the police. And she restrains her natural impulse to clap on the back a male student whose religious beliefs forbid physical contact with women other than his wife.
Out of frustration and rebellion, Nafisi withdraws from her university post and convenes a literature class of seven young women—her prize students—to discuss the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, and other Western authors held in contempt by the Iranian fundamentalist theocracy. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi recounts the story of this literature class, describing how it came to be and introducing us to the “girls,” as she calls them, mostly in their twenties, who attend regularly, peeling off their veils and chadors upon entering the sanctuary of Nafisi’s apartment; and re-creating the discussions of literature and its relationship to the women’s personal lives and to Iran under Islamic fundamentalist rule.
Nafisi’s account includes flashbacks to the early days of the revolution, to her teaching position at the University of Tehran, and to the Iran-Iraq War. Nafisi provides a sweeping view of the profound changes in Iranian society since the revolution, especially for women. Her ultimate decision to leave Iran is tinged with sadness for herself and for the students who look up to her, as they must face the indignities and hard choices of living as women in Iran without her counsel.
The food in Reading Lolita in Tehran offers sanctuary, comfort, and the promise of intimacy in a cold, unpredictable, sometimes hostile society. The moment the women, tense and uncertain, enter their teacher’s apartment, they are offered a “calming distraction” of tea and cream puffs. So begins a weekly ritual of sharing tea, coffee, and pastries, which the women provide in turn. As the group’s comfort level grows, so does the abundance of their meals. Several weeks into the class, deep into discussion of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Nafisi’s students bring a feast of special dishes. As Nafisi writes, “Madame Bovary had done what years of teaching at the university had not: it created a shared intimacy.”
In countless situations, Nafisi shares intimacies with students and colleagues over food. With two tall cafés glacés between them, Nafisi’s student Yassi reveals her confusion about veiling herself and her negativity toward marriage. When Nafisi and her colleague Laleh brood over the evisceration of the Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature Department at the University of Tehran, their appetites are “insatiable.” And when Nafisi meets her magician, they conspiratorially call their ham-and-cheese sandwiches croques-monsieurs, a French term likely repugnant to the government. With laughter and raised glasses, they revel in their rebellion. “One could write a paper on the pleasure of a ham sandwich,” her magician says.
We asked Azar Nafisi to share her thoughts on the role that food has played in her life. Her response:
Some of my most intimate memories of childhood and early youth are associated with the many celebratory rituals in our family and country involving the preparation and eating of food, which was always a communal affair. Preparation, serving, and eating food can be very sensual, evoking pleasure through senses of sight, smell, and taste, and I can still evoke my past through aromas and colors of food. The images of those days are associated with the memories of different finely chopped herbs—cilantro, tarragon, rosemary, sage, basil—and scented and poetically named spices—saffron, cardamom, cumin, turmeric—and rice and sauces cooked over very slow fire, spreading their aroma hours before the food was served.
On Fridays my family usually ate out with close friends. Eating out was a carefully planned, much-anticipated, and noisy event. The Tehran of my childhood was filled with great restaurants, and at least once a week during summer we ate at some favorite open-air place, where we sat in a garden filled with scents of jasmine and roses, and ate a cold soup made of yogurt and cucumber mixed with finely chopped herbs, walnuts, and raisins. During these occasions everybody from children to grown-ups participated in singing and dancing that continued well past the children’s bedtime. More than anything else I miss these luminous moments when the pure and unadulterated joy of living took precedence over the usual considerations that separated us through age, rank, or gender.
After the Islamic revolution, eating out lost its sense of joy. The regime negated and banned everything original and individual, imposing repressive laws to ensure the uniformity and conformity that are the trademark of every totalitarian mind-set. Pleasure was considered sin and therefore forbidden. Dancing and singing were banned, men and women could not go out together in public unless they were married or related by blood. Women had to wear the mandatory veil in restaurants, and laughing and other expressions of joy were forbidden. I remember one friend saying that whenever she ate at a restaurant she felt as if it were raining because of the long robe and large scarf she had to wear. Coffee shops and restaurants that became popular with the youth were raided and often closed down. Persians could not give up their appreciation of life, and when they were deprived of these joys publicly they had to create them privately, transferring most of their public entertainment and pleasure to their homes.
This is why in my book food is related to the idea of style, of retrieving those rituals that give color and shape to an otherwise shapeless and drab reality. At home we compensated for what we lacked in public by spending a great deal of time and effort over the preparation of food. In the private class I describe in my book, we looked forward to our tea and pastry. We took turns bringing the pastry, which ranged from delicate homemade Persian pastries to cream puffs made with real cream to elaborate cakes.
As we became more intimate, we added to our eating rituals, which gradually became very elaborate and innovative. I introduced my students to my favorite concoction: vanilla or coffee ice cream with a little coffee poured over and topped with walnuts or almonds. Later, as our discussions stretched far beyond the customary three hours, we sometimes organized feasts, to which everyone made a contribution. Soon there was a great competition among my students over who made the tastiest and most elaborate dish. Our table on such occasions, in which my family now and then participated, was graced with dishes such as duck with pomegranate and walnut sauce; saffron rice with herbed beef sauce; saffron rice with lentils, raisins, dates, nuts; cumin rice with chicken; and of course various desserts accompanied by my mother’s thick and creamy-looking Turkish coffee served in small, delicate china cups.
As I write these lines, evoking the sensual and forbidden scents and sights of our innocent yet guilty pleasures, I am once more struck by the way we were able to keep our sense of identity and community through gestures that might seem so trivial, but are so central to human existence, like the care and inspiration that go into the creation of one small dish and the pleasure that is evoked through sharing it, reminding us that no authoritarian power can take away from a people their sense of joy and pride in the simple and yet complex act of living.
As happened with the women in Nafisi’s group, delicious pastry sustained members of the Daughters of Abraham Book Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when they discussed Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Gay Harter, a retired social worker, drew on her knowledge of Iranian foods to prepare for the meeting. In the 1980s and 1990s, Harter worked with immigrants, including Iranian men and women fleeing political persecution, at the U.S. immigration detention center in Boston. “I made an effort to learn about their culture and even studied Farsi for a while,” says Harter. “During that time I found a Persian cookbook and tried some of the recipes.”
The cookbook Harter found, Persian Cuisine, Book One: Traditional Foods by M. R. Ghanoon-parvar (Mazda, 1982), contains a recipe for moist, delicious kolucheh Yazdi. Although translated as Yazdi cookies, the dessert more closely resembles a cake. “I’ve been told by an Iranian friend that a more appropriate name for the recipe would be keik-e-Yazdi, or cake from the city of Yazd, because it comes out more like cake than cookies,” says Harter. She highly recommends using rose water rather than vanilla to give this sweet an authentic Persian flavor. Serve with hot coffee or tea.
4 eggs, well beaten 1 cup sugar ¾ cup (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, melted 2 cups all-purpose flour 1 cup plain yogurt 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon ground cardamom |
1 tablespoon rose water or substitute 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup raisins ½ cup slivered blanched almonds 4 teaspoons chopped pistachio nuts |
In a large bowl, combine the eggs, sugar, and butter. Mix well. Gradually add the flour, mixing after each addition. Add the yogurt and mix well.
In a separate bowl, combine the baking powder, baking soda, cardamom, and rose water. Add to the flour mixture and let the dough rest, covered, for 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 325°F. Stir the raisins and almonds into the dough. Transfer the mixture into a 9 ÷ 13-inch baking pan, sprinkle pistachios over the top, and bake 25–30 minutes, until golden brown. Allow to cool in the pan, then cut into squares.
Yield: 10 to 12 servings
NOVEL THOUGHTS
After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organized a memorial service led by spiritual leaders of various denominations. Standing in the crowd was First Church member Edie Howe, who found herself wedged among women of all faiths, some wearing traditional Muslim head scarves. Many were sobbing. “I thought to myself, This is crazy! We’re all daughters of Abraham,” says Howe, a former lawyer and student of theology who hopes one day to do interfaith work. “I started thinking that I had to respond to the powerful feeling in this church, and to the humanity in all its diversity that was standing there that day.”
A year later, the Daughters of Abraham—a book club bringing together women of the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—met for the first time. “The goal of our group is to get people to be aware of others’ faith traditions,” says Howe. “I hope that learning about others’ beliefs and practices will lead to greater understanding and tolerance.”
Food at Daughters of Abraham meetings is generally simple—fruit, cheeses, desserts, coffee, tea, juice, and seltzer—but is always kosher (consistent with Jewish dietary laws), and, when Muslim members attend, halal (consistent with Muslim dietary laws). The group was inspired to match foods with the theme of the book for the first time upon reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, a book that triggered one of the group’s most intense discussions.
What particularly struck the Daughters of Abraham was what member Margaret Gooch afterward called “the survival value of literature.” “These women faced hardship, deprivation, and danger as a tyrannical regime gradually—and unbelievably—took hold of the country. We talked about how literature offered them an outlet for their imagination, a way of envisioning a different future for themselves, a source of truth apart from their daily reality,” adds Gooch.
To group members, a trial of The Great Gatsby (see p. 156), conducted to determine the worthiness of the book to society, reenacted by Nafisi’s literature students, demonstrated most vividly the crucial role that literature played in their lives. “I would have been a terrible defense attorney because I never thought much of The Great Gatsby,” says Jenny Peace. “But Nafisi shows her students that it is not the morality of the characters that should be on trial. Great literature exposes great human truths. The insight illuminated in Gatsby is the danger of imposing one’s perfect and complete ideal on a messy, ever-changing reality. This is why Gatsby speaks to a group of Muslim women in war-torn Tehran: They are experiencing firsthand how it feels to live in someone else’s dream.” The commitment of Nafisi’s students to distill truth from literature gave the Daughters of Abraham renewed appreciation for something that Americans tend to take for granted: the freedom to read.
Members explored many other facets of Nafisi’s memoir, including her relationship with her “magician,” and the meaning of his decision to withdraw from society; the little-known effects on Iranians of the Iran-Iraq War; and Nafisi’s decision to wear—or not to wear—the veil. “When the government took away women’s right to choose to wear the veil, the act became submission rather than celebration,” observes Jeanette Macht. Several members, who, as former nuns, used to wear habits, talked about the physical limitations of wearing a head covering. “You can’t feel the wind on your neck,” says Anne Minton, an Episcopal priest and professor of history who spent seven years as a cloistered nun. “It’s remarkable what you miss.”
The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Daughters of Abraham had their first taste of thematic food for their discussion of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Their menu included kolucheh Yazdi (see recipe), cream puffs, baklava, pistachio nuts, and pomegranates.
“I think the food stimulated people’s taste buds and their spirits, and brought us into the mood of going to the Middle East,” says Edie Howe, a cofounder of the group. “It also paralleled what we were reading about. The women in the book always had wonderful things to eat during their meetings, and we did too. It was a case of life imitating art.”
The five members of the suburban New Jersey Alcott Society served a tea with dates, dried fruits, pistachio nuts, and cream puffs for their discussion of Reading Lolita in Tehran. The members felt that just as Nafisi bonds with her friends and students by sharing refreshments, their bond with Nafisi became deeper as they shared the same type of foods.
