May 6, 2004

• Lolita......?

  
  

  Right now I'm slowly devouring "Reading Lolita in Tehran." Penned by Professor Azar Nafisi, now at Johns Hopkins, it's a memoir of her early career in her native Iran, where as a young academic she suffered the cultural and religious oppression of the Iranian revolution, which transformed her from a vibrant female professional into a housebound non-person swathed in black and forbidden by formal edict from showing a strand of hair or wearing a pair of colored socks.  Nafisi's exploration, with a group of former students, of banned Western literature by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Austen and other luminaries underlies her deep analysis of the nature of the human spirit, caged and at bay in a once-familiar culture purposely alienating its own.  Lolita is in part a metaphor for Nafisi's exploration:  an analysis of the many viewpoints of that infamous girl-child.  Was Lolita a sexually precocious prepubescent nymphet, as Nabokov's untrustworthy narrator paints it; or was she an absolute victim: an innocent child struggling to seize what life she might still have in the grip of her inescapable captor?

  
  

  In the context of this difficult and fascinating journey into literature and culture and psychoanalysis, I was particularly stricken by yesterday's news.

  
  

  Somewhere in this world today there is a young woman with a puckish grin under her tousled dark pixie-cut. Hers is a grin that just begs a twinkle-eyed return, if the context of its appearance were any less appalling.  The context, as anyone within the reach of the media could hardly escape from noticing, is its atrociously inapropos placement in photographs of the torture of naked Iraqi  prisoners, in whose pain and utter humiliation the owner of the grin, U.S. Pfc. Lynndie England, and her lover Specialist Charles Graner, are participating.

  
  

  From the midst of the firestorm, one can choose from a wide variety of viewpoints.  Is Pfc. England a blameless peon engaged in a "silly prank," as her mother stated (oh what a preview to Mother's Day, to sit on your Appalachian trailer-stoop and see, for the first time, such images of your daughter in a reporter's hand, and grope for some response)?  Or the "grinning monster" excoriated in the press?  Or some aberrant psyche whom we would all prefer to cast, as Mr. Bush would have it, as "not representing the America that I know?"

  
  

  I am significantly less sympathetic to the President than to the young commanders in the field, baldly crying to the Iraqi masses and the ravening reporters:  "This was not my Army.  This was not my Army!" but in any case the basis for the argument is the same.  Torture and humiliation does not lie readily to hand in the standard American tool kit (as, of course, every American knows it does for others in the world).

  
  

  Yet seeking in the privacy of our inner soul, how other is this behavior, really?  Taking a cue from Mrs. England, when does "prank" become "atrocity"?  When does the thing the schoolyard bully is stopped from doing (too late to save a victim from shame, but soon enough to stop physical harm) become the thing that the fratboys do (that is exposed in the paper and badmouthed in the community as stupid and shameful and a waste of educational taxpayers dollars) become the thing that happens behind the American prison gates (where Specialist Graner was long employed and (perhaps) disciplined for inappropriate guardianship), become the thing that turns the self-proclaimed "liberator of Iraq" into a red-faced Goliath, stymied in his hubris by his own Achilles heel?

  
  

  Does tough young Lynndie, thrown from one-horse rural West Virginia into the maelstrom of Iraq, into the arms of a partner with an abusive history, into the confusion of ill-defined orders to keep sensitive prisoners awake and uneasy, merit anything other than the repudiation of her President and her countrymen?  Is there more than one way to view her story?  Is there a nymphette/victim under that brash, gruesome playfulness seen so hideously victimizing others?

  
  

  I'm going back to Nafisi's thoughtful world, to think.

  
  

  Note:  these ruminations do NOT mean that what happened was in any way excusable, or that Pfc. England was in any way an "innocent."  It was not excusable, and she was not innocent..  My train of thought points to the questioning of the creation of, and the punishment of, the perpetrator of such acts, and to what cultural and global lessons might be drawn.

  • 9:11 am
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