Making a Space

     God is so good to give me gifts, things that make my heart happy and encourage me to jump into life with more vigor.  This past month, He has provided me with something that makes me especially happy—a library card!!  Along with this comes an overdue reunion with my long-lost literary friends and places, words and ideas, all barely stuffed within the confines of the narrow wooden shelves at my local library.  The Jenkintown library is a quirky little place, with low lighting and tight corners.  Piles of books and papers sit in random places on counters and behind desks.  It looks more like the large home collection of some old, reclusive historian who generously opened his home to the public.  And I love it! 

     The first section I wandered into was that of the literary criticisms.  I thumbed through some essays on classic literature and pulled out a small (I get overwhelmed by the big ones) criticism on Lord of the Flies.  I stuffed it under my arm and continued down the list of titles, printed along mismatched layers of book spines.  I came to one that I wasn’t expecting to see in the row—Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi.  I had heard about this memoir years ago but had forgotten about it.  This day, it practically jumped off the shelf at me; it was just the thing I was craving to explore.

     I recommend this book to anyone who loves literature and cares about social justice. Every page in this story reminds me of the joy and freedom we have in reading.  I am grateful that here in America books are in abundance, and the opportunity to read them is a right for all.  The memoir retells the season in the life of a former Iranian University teacher, who holds a female-only literary class in her small home.  She writes about the personalities and opinions of her eager students, who shed their black burka coverings and reveal the “color of their dreams” each week.  (Think, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” but on a more intense scale.)  The ladies discuss the themes in books by Austen, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and James, to name a few, applying these new worlds of ideas to their more harsh world as second-class citizens.  It warms my heart to read about these young women who, every week, travel silently and anonymously to a poor, cluttered living room, where they can shed their veils and speak loudly, creating a just reality, even if only for a couple hours.   

     Like everything else, when I read this book I found myself thinking of South Sudan.  Women have more basic rights in South Sudan; however, they still struggle with disrespect.  There are strong gender roles established in this part of Africa, which leads to a societal disbelief that women could ever be educational or intellectual leaders.  There is a part I love in Nafisi’s memoir, where she and her cheeky students play on Jane Austen’s classic introduction of Pride and Prejudice.  She writes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.”  I feel like I could make similar statements, equally as sardonic and disgusted, regarding dating and marriage in South Sudan. 

     I have to catch myself when I start becoming overly cynical, as it reflects a lack of hope that things will ever change for the better.  God has a plan, even though it includes the pain that has haunted (and will continue to haunt) the pages of women’s stories for centuries to come.  I am grateful that in this ugliness God has given us a yearning for something much bigger and much more fulfilling that anything in this world has to offer. 

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory 

that will be revealed in us.” -Romans 8:18