Lolita in Tehran

Nafisi notes that one of her strongest memories of working at Allameh Tabatabai is the green gate one walked through to get into the university. However, by the time Nafisi began to contemplate leaving the university, the green gate was closed to all female students. Instead, they were required to walk through a small, curtain-covered opening nearby and have their appearance and belongings checked completely before they were able to enter the university. These separate entrances symbolize the gender-segregation and differing treatment of females in Iran at the time. As Nafisi writes, Yassi, the young poet, wrote about the green gate in her poems as "a magical entrance into the forbidden world of all the ordinary things she had been denied in life" (29).