by Azar Nafisi
Over the course of my readings, reflections and recollections I came to see associations between Baldwin and Twain, an affinity that Baldwin had never acknowledged or even hinted at, one that existed not by choice but as a testament to other affinities unknown and maybe even unwanted. Because in life and writing James Baldwin was a descendant of the “infinitely shaded and exquisite mongrel” that Twain once claimed kinship with.
From the moment Plato’s philosopher king threw the poet out of his Republic, we knew that imagination was dangerous to authority and that the alternative eye of the poet would always be deviant and unpredictable, always subverting authority and captivating souls. It is with this idea in mind that I wrote this book at the dawn of a new century, which has begun with doubts and anxieties and a crisis that goes far beyond the immediate economic one. It is written not out of despair but out of hope, by which I mean not a simple giddy optimism but the belief that once you know what is right and what matters, you can get there with enough determination. My experiences in Iran gave me a definition of hope that is very different from simple optimism. What I have in mind is most closely captured by Václav Havel, who said, “Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.”
I believe all great art and literature, all great deeds of humanity, rely on this fragile and most enduring hope. One function of art is to be a witness and historian of man’s endurance, to provide “conclusive evidence” that we have lived. The central theme of the play Antigone, written in 441 B.C., about a young woman’s dilemma as she finds herself caught between the pressures of obeying the dictates of personal honor and burying her brother, who rebelled against the kingdom, or of heeding a more public notion of justice and obeying the law of the king, her uncle, by letting his corpse rot unburied, resurfaces in various guises today even in our most popular story forms, in episodes of Boston Legal and White Collar. If we need fiction today, it is not because we need to escape from reality; it is because we need to return to it with eyes that are refreshed, or, as Tolstoy would have it, “clean-washed.”
Six years ago, I swore a public oath in a bland government office building, but I became an American citizen long before that, when I first began to trace my imaginary map of America, beginning with Dorothy’s Kansas and the desiccated farmland of the Ingalls sisters. That America is a country of immigrants is a truism, and even now it remains the case—it is populated by people from many parts of the globe who have brought with them the restless ghosts of their original homelands, making homelessness an integral part of American identity. More than any other country, America has become a symbol of exile and displacement, of choosing a home, as opposed to being born in it.
The first immigrants and their descendants devastated the homes of this new land’s original occupants, uprooting some while enslaving others. But their saving grace was the invention of a dream. There was something in that dream, in the imagination of America’s founders and the humanistic spirit they embodied, that made it possible for later generations to question and subvert the conditions under which they wrote their founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, so that later men and women like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr. and others would make those words their own, insisting on new freedoms and reminding us, as the historian Gordon Wood so eloquently put it, that “it is not suffrage that gives life to democracy, it is our democratic society that gives life to suffrage.” This, for me, is the intersection where the real America meets the imaginary one. This is how I explained my view of America to my children. If you believe your country was founded on the actualization of a dream, then an obvious and essential question arises: How can you dream without imagination?
For homelessness and despair, for the injustices and suffering imposed on us by the fickleness of life and the absoluteness of death, imagination has no cure. But it finds a voice that both registers and resists such injustice, evidenced by the fact that we do not accept things as they are. So much of who we are, no matter where we live, depends on how we imagine ourselves to be. So much of the home we live in is defined by that other world in our backyard, be it Dorothy’s Oz or Alice’s Wonderland or Scheherazade’s room, to which we have to travel in order to see ourselves and others more clearly.
Stories endure—they have been with us since the dawn of history—but they need to be refreshed and retold in every generation through the eyes and experiences of new readers sharing a common space that knows no boundaries of politics or religion, ethnicity or gender—a Republic of Imagination, that most democratic republic of all. For every writer deprived of the freedom of speech, millions of readers are also deprived of the freedom to read what they might have told us. That is why the voice of a poet who endured and resisted tyranny should be the voice of conscience, reminding us of what is essential: “Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature,” Joseph Brodsky said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Though we can condemn the material suppression of literature—the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.”
My conversation with Ramin and subsequent conversations over the years with those who have felt homeless in their own home—those who have carried their ghosts with them while in some way believing in and relying upon that other home, the portable one—inspired the writing of this book. Later my thoughts were reshaped by conversations with other readers, those I like to call intimate strangers, the ones who create an invisible, almost conspiratorial society, bound by the books they read. This book is for them. My hope is that they will find a home in its pages.
PART I
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show its own shame.
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I muse upon my country’s ills—
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time
On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.
—Herman Melville, “Misgivings”
1
“‘Huck Finn’s Progenies’” is not a good subtitle for your book. ‘Children’ would be better, but not much. Find something easier on the ear,” Farah said with finality. “And now, tell me all about it.”
Farah was my best friend from childhood. She always wanted to know what I was up to, and she wouldn’t stop needling me about my book. “Tell me all about it,” she would say, “from start to finish.” I told her it was impossible, that I seldom if ever showed my writing to anyone other than my editor. And besides, how could I tell her all about a book I had not yet written? She’d just have to wait.
“I can’t afford to wait,” she said with a smile. “I might not be around to read it.”
I couldn’t offer the usual platitudes—“Of course you’ll be around. You have beaten the cancer so far; you will beat it this time, too.” Because we both knew this time was different.
She kept smiling, with no trace of self-pity or pain, just pure mischief—she had me where she wanted me. It was a typical Farah gesture, letting on that she was manipulating you into doing what she wanted, making you complicit in a conspiracy against yourself. This was what made it possible for her to transcend and resist what her daughter would later call the “hurdles” in her life. Farah herself once good-naturedly complained that the gods above must have known her tolerance for hardship, because they kept “blessing” her with all manner of nightmares. She had survived a revolution and a war, had been smuggled across the
border from Iran into Turkey, seven months’ pregnant, her two-and-half-year-old daughter in tow while her husband was being tortured in a Tehran jail—to name just one example among many.
“I want to know,” I said, “just how low you will stoop.”
Ignoring me, she said, “And don’t forget I am an editor. Pretend I am your editor.”
She was a senior editor at the International Monetary Fund, not exactly the kind of editor I had in mind. But Farah and I had a long history.
We were driving back to Georgetown from Chevy Chase, where we had spent over two hours at a Borders bookstore that no longer exists with Farah’s older sister, Mahnaz, jumping from heated discussions of the presidential race in America (this was 2008, and despite Obama’s victory in the primaries, we were still debating the comparative merits of Obama and Clinton) to gossip, shopping, the Iranian government’s machinations and my upcoming interview for U.S. citizenship. Because after eleven years in Washington, I had finally applied to become an American citizen. Farah took this as a cue to proselytize for her latest obsession, a passionate enchantment with U.S. history.
Before she became too ill to drive, the three of us would meet regularly in bookstores dotted around Georgetown and Dupont Circle, or at the Cheesecake Factory in Chevy Chase, or Leopold’s in Cady’s Alley, to talk and talk. We would be giddy with excitement, too impatient to let one another finish our sentences, childishly interrupting with a chaos of allusions and shortcuts understandable only to ourselves. Even at the hairdresser (because we three would meet there, too, when one of us needed a haircut or a blow-dry), we would be so raucous that soon the polite and considerate owner relegated us to a back room, serving us cappuccinos while we tried in vain to keep our voices down.
Farah and Mahnaz had both majored in English literature—rare for Iranians even now, and more so then—and our discussions were always peppered with exchanges about books. We were related, but blood alone was not responsible for this intimacy. Long before I was called into a drab office at Immigration Services to answer a few questions and take an oath as a newly minted American citizen, we shared the complicity of being citizens of two countries, straddling two such different worlds. We belonged to two languages, simultaneously reminding us of the country we had left behind and the one we had chosen to make our new home. More than anything else, it was that ready access to two languages, to their poetry and fiction, to their cultures, vague as that term might seem, that provided us with a temporary feeling of stability.
I have always believed it was that initial sense of kinship, the sharing of the same dreams and our love of literature, that sustained our friendship—that led us to take that car ride and so many others like it, when Farah and I would often get so involved in conversation that we would inevitably lose our way, miss an exit on Rockville Pike and almost always be late for our meetings with Mahnaz, who sat like patience on a monument, trying to find something funny in our schoolgirl excuses and suppressed giggles.
“You must bring more U.S. history in your new book, the way you did with Iran in Reading Lolita,” Farah said, turning toward me instead of keeping her eye on the road. “How else can you write about American fiction?”
Farah was never shy about telling me what to do. I started to complain that when I once mentioned Tocqueville in a graduate seminar, one of my students had raised her hand and asked, “Who is Tocqueville?”
“Can you believe it?” I said, with mounting indignation. “At a school for international studies, for heaven’s sake!” I would soon discover that most of the class did not know about the Frenchman who had written Democracy in America. “I bet quite a few of my students in Iran would at least have heard of him.”
“All the more reason,” Farah said, seemingly unperturbed, “why you should read Joseph J. Ellis’s Founding Brothers.”
Two years later, I would accompany Mahnaz to Farah’s bedroom to choose a keepsake from a pile of books randomly stacked against the wall, like a group of orphaned children waiting for a new parent. I did not hesitate in picking Founding Brothers. I could not think of any book that reminded me more of the intimately joyous times Farah and I spent together—any book, that is, other than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
It so happened that Farah’s prediction came true; she didn’t get a chance to read my book. Five years after that conversation, I had not yet finished writing it. The main hurdle was the chapter we talked so much about, the one on Huck Finn. It took me more than two years to write it, and then I set it aside for another year because it didn’t feel right—too much analysis, too little heart. Looking over my notes in frustration, I kept coming across my conversations with Farah. Then it hit me that she had left me the key to the chapter in our exchanges, when Huck became so central to our musings about becoming American, about the meaning of exile and home. Farah had made peace with what it meant to live with a divided heart.
I had not thought seriously of writing about those conversations until I received an e-mail from Farah’s daughter in response to my inquiry about how a dog Farah had adopted in the last months of her life had come to be called Huck. “There was something about Huck Finn in the air in our house that last year,” Neda wrote back. “Mom started talking about your project and was entranced. Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived. Sometime in the months before she died, she asked me to get a book on tape for her and download it to her iPod. I borrowed Huck Finn from the library and put it on her iPod and while she was listening to it with earbuds, I was listening to it at work during the long, long hours of watching Congress grind to a halt. And I still haven’t been able to return the original. Yes, I am effectively a thief.”
Huck came to mean more to Farah as she sorted through her memories and sought to tell herself and her daughter the story of her own journey—her “adventure,” if that is the right word for all manner of bad luck. In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so provident or benign.
When Farah and I met in those last eighteen months of her life, we seldom talked about anything other than Huck Finn—like two teenage best friends in love with the same elusive boy. Our conversations took place in different parts of Washington, usually somewhere between Foggy Bottom (my home) and Georgetown (hers), at her house or in various coffee shops and restaurants, and sometimes, when she felt well, on walks around the waterfront or along the canal. In every one of these places, our conversations would take us to familiar landscapes as sudden windows opened up, framing vistas of our past lives. So many things were happening then—two wars halfheartedly and desultorily waged, the economy going from bad to worse, heated election campaigns, and new hopes forming the seeds of new disillusionment both in Iran and in the United States. Farah was elated at the prospect of Obama and gave dinners and talks that she would rope me into, mobilizing everyone she knew between bouts of chemotherapy and radiation. She was in and out of the hospital for ever more painful operations, trying new treatments, until finally there was no treatment and I would find her bicycling to the clinic to get vitamin C shots, and then she had a new dog, small and mischievous—Huck.
Throughout that dreadful year, the original Huck was our guide, our inspiration, the thorn in our side who reminded us to be true to ourselves and who goaded us when we became too complacent, too conventional in our preoccupations, whenever we seemed too comfortable with our lot. He gave us vital clues as to the kind of Americans we wanted to be. He reminded us—and this was something I kept coming back to—that at their best, American heroes are wary of being overcivilized, that they carve out their own path and look to their heart for what is right and just. How far we seemed to be, I would confide complicitly to Farah, from that America, the one we had both discovered so many years ago when we first read Huckleberry Finn.