The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  I remember one lunch in particular, at Leopold’s, when Farah wanted to talk about Huck. I was having a hard time with my chapter and wanted to talk about something else. She was eating an arugula-and-fig salad, and I had a coffee and a fruit tart. I was gazing at a girl who’d just walked in carrying an Hermès bag. She was holding the bag on a bent elbow, a little distant from her body. Trying to divert Farah from her single-minded focus, I said, “Look at the way that girl is holding her bag, in order to foreground it and make people admire the bag, and by extension its owner. But,” I added, “it makes me feel as if she is holding a dead rat a little distance away from her body to avoid further contact.”

  Farah was playing with her salad and did not respond—by then she had lost her appetite.

  “It reminds me of some of our so-called intellectuals,” I continued. “The academics especially, who carry their ideologies, which they call ‘theory,’ like an Hermès bag, basking in its light, making others wow and bow.”

  Farah was too obstinate to be so easily sidetracked. “Don’t you mean Mark Twain’s progenies, instead of Huck’s?” she asked.

  I had meant Huck Finn’s. Twain had his own distinguished literary brood, but I was interested in Huck’s children, his descendants. I shared Hemingway’s theory—she had heard me many times on the subject—that all, or at least many, of the distinctive characteristics and preoccupations of American fiction could be traced back to Huckleberry Finn. I had even come to believe that America owed its most sacred foundational myth—that of restless individualism—to that orphan boy who’d left home to escape being “sivilized” by his aunt. This question of America’s founding myths had become a more urgent preoccupation to me, as all around us there seemed to be a contest going on to define who was more or less American.

  I had received a few weeks earlier a notice from the Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Virginia, informing me that I should present myself early in the morning in a few weeks’ time for my citizenship interview. If accepted, I would then be invited to swear an oath of allegiance, after which I would be an American citizen. What does it mean to be American? Is it a descriptive fact or a whole set of ideas and values that one can choose to believe in? Farah and I felt that if we did not define what it meant for us, then someone else would do it for us, and in so doing they would define us. We hadn’t come this far to let that happen again.

  My husband, Bijan, would watch the news obsessively when he got home from work, as he still does every night, and follow the news from Iran on the Web, which at that time was quite alarming. I paced around the kitchen in despair, talking back to the creeps on television lecturing us about the heroic, patriotic need to curtail civil liberties for the sake of “security.” I started to keep a little book of political euphemisms, just like the one I had kept in Iran. “Patriots” were those who don’t question the government’s new laws, “homeland” something that needed to be defended, and everywhere, even at school, we were being reminded of the need for “security.” “Have a safe day.” Safe? When did that enter into the equation?

  The Islamic revolution forever changed the meaning of words like “spirituality,” “religion,” “virtuous,” “decadent,” “alien.” These words became orphans associated with fear, danger, corruption and the state, in the same way that in the Soviet Union words like “proletariat,” “dictatorship,” “equality,” “freedom” and “revolution” had lost their original meaning. In democratic societies, words do not kill, but they are effective at numbing our hearts and minds, to the point that we become tolerant of things that go against our principles and values. The wealthy are “job creators” and the poor are “parasites,” unemployed teachers and firefighters should make “sacrifices,” members of Congress are “protecting our future,” candidates “package” and “repackage” themselves, and almost every public personality or “celebrity” has a “brand” or is in the process of “rebranding.” “Diversity” is an unimpeachable mandate, and everything is done and justified in the name of “the American people.”

  Why is it that American politicians feel they have a right to speak for the republic? Writers are left with the burden of reclaiming America, snatching it back from their grasp. While some shrug it off, others, like Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace, will seek to be the voice of conscience, or the voice of the heart, as Twain might have put it. I found myself digging through the books Farah had recommended to me (my homework, she called it) for different views of what it means to be American. One need only read the letters exchanged by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in the latter part of their lives to know that most of our public debates today are parodies of what once constituted the American political discourse.

  “Why not go back to the original myth?” I asked Farah, warming up. She was still feverishly reading American history, and I, as always, was searching for answers in fiction, so we made a perfect team. We joked that together we would come up with a new declaration of independence. We would save the idea of America from its more noxious defenders.

  That was when I dramatically announced to my close circle of friends that once I’d started watching more Law & Order than news, I knew the time had come to look a little more closely into what was going on. Law & Order was a good story, plausible and realistic, while the news appeared more and more like entertainment or fantasy—or horror, depending on your point of view. I had begun to have the uncomfortable feeling that we, as spectators, were playing a role in someone else’s script, or, more accurately, in someone else’s commercial.

  America’s commercialism has been a matter of cliché for some time, its dangerous seductiveness parodied in Kafka’s Amerika, the hyperrational insanity of it all, its manipulative crassness and good-natured cruelties, its simultaneous cultivation of compassion and indifference. How could a country so boasting of individualism be so conformist? How could people who view themselves as pragmatic be so prone to fantastical thinking? Commercials are bad enough, making you believe they are giving you what you want, but when most everything takes on the feel and texture of a commercial—when the news is there not to give you facts but to seduce and infuriate you—isn’t it time to do something? Surely there are other notions of what it means to be American than those offered up by Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck. When you trust Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert more than the so-called news offered up by Fox or MSNBC, when you find them fairer and more balanced, when those interviewed on Face the Nation and other serious news shows appear more and more like comic parodies, then the time must surely have come, I told Farah with a flourish, to defect in favor of a more appealing America, the one whose founding documents were written by poets and novelists, the one I’d taken to calling the Republic of Imagination.

  All this boasting about the American dream—is this dream really as shabby as Dale Carnegie’s recipe for success? Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is worried because Mr. Burns has threatened him, saying he will destroy his every single dream, and Marge tells him not to worry so much, that when a man’s greatest dreams are seconds on dessert, the occasional snuggle and sleeping in on weekends, no one can destroy your dreams? “That is what we’ve come to,” I said triumphantly. “Hence Huck Finn!”

  “Hence indeed!” deadpanned Farah. There was a glimmer in her eyes, and I knew she was hooked.

  “We have Ferdowsi’s ‘Book of Kings,’” I said. “America has Huckleberry Finn. Only, while Ferdowsi resurrects Iran’s history and mythology going back three thousand years, from the dawn of history until the Arab conquest in the seventh century, Twain creates a myth of America in the making. His aim is not to recapture the past but in a strange way to retrieve the future.” Then I quoted for her one of my favorite lines from Rilke: “The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

  “Twain captured the spirit of the future,” I went on, “and from then on many great American novelists
, from Hemingway and Fitzgerald to Carson McCullers and Raymond Chandler, from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to Saul Bellow, have followed suit in their own way, speaking the language of their own times. That is what I mean by ‘Huck Finn’s Progenies.’ They are all spokesmen for the other America, not the rule-bound homeland conjured up by the phony patriotism of politicians, but the more open and inclusive land of our dreams.”

  Farah was still not convinced it would make a good title, but she was beginning to understand what I had in mind.

  14

  Farah stayed in the house with the large garden at the foot of Evin prison for about a month. Remaining in Tehran was becoming too dangerous for her and for Faramarz’s family, as well as for the friends who were giving her asylum, so she decided to leave Iran, along with Faramarz’s sister and her six-month-old baby, his brother and sister-in-law, and her own two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Neda. It was an example of her amazing willpower and levelheadedness that she put her feelings of anxiety and love for Faramarz, as well as her fears of being captured, on hold and tried to focus on how to save her child and herself rather than imagining what was happening to Faramarz.

  I have heard this story so many times, in fragments, mainly from Farah and from those who traveled with her, but each time the presence of that other person telling their own story somehow lightened the intensity of the experiences. But now, rereading Mahnaz’s account in the solitude of my office, without any hope of calling Farah and hearing her say, “What’s up, kiddo,” or “Hi, Azi-joon,” followed by the inevitable “What’s up?” suddenly I feel the intense grief and horror she must have gone through, and the loneliness.

  They were to be smuggled to Turkey and were told that they would be traveling by jeep. But that didn’t happen. They started with a jeep but soon were told to get out and run across a “plowed field” to meet the guides who would take them across, and that the journey was to be on horseback, riding two to a horse. “I sat behind the rider,” Farah explained. “I was forced to stretch my legs across the top of the gunny sacks, which left my belly touching the rump of the horse. Every step the horse took brought pressure on my belly; I soon lost all feeling in my legs, which were sticking out over the gunny sacks.” They rode through the night, moving over precarious and narrow paths while crossing the mountains of Kurdistan, one of the westernmost provinces of Iran, bordering Iraq and Turkey. “I kept asking [the smugglers] to stop to let me stretch my legs,” Farah said, “but they wouldn’t. At dawn I told them that if they didn’t stop I would throw myself down. Finally they stopped. I couldn’t move my legs to get off. Two smugglers had to lift me off the horse and set me down. Fatemeh [Faramarz’s sister’s pseudonym] and Simin [her sister-in-law’s pseudonym] rubbed my legs until I could move them again.” The smugglers threatened them repeatedly, demanding more money, which they wisely refused to hand over.

  Soon they reached a village. They spent the day there, because they could travel only at night. They were put in a stable, the only light a hole in the ceiling. The next morning, Farah insisted on having a horse of her own and was given one. That night, as they snaked their way up a narrow path that plunged into a precipice, she considered the nearness of death: “A slip and I could easily roll down into the valley. I put my faith in the horse. It was a strange feeling to have no control over one’s life. The smugglers could do anything they wanted with us. We moved in that twilight area at the edge of the law. No country wanted us. No country was responsible for us.”

  Later Neda, Farah’s daughter, told me how frightened she was to be separated from her mother, sitting behind a smuggler on her own horse. She remembered clinging to her security blanket, and then dropping it and not being allowed to pick it up until she made such a fuss that they had to listen to her. Faramarz’s sister’s baby had to somehow be kept quiet as they passed through the checkpoints, and her desperate mother gave her a Valium to silence her. “She was holding the baby in one arm and holding on to the smuggler in front of her with the other,” Farah recalled. “At one point she felt her arm getting numb and she was afraid she would let the baby slip out of it. I used my scarf to tie the baby to her arm for the rest of the journey.” When they were told at last that they were entering Turkey, Farah turned back with a pang in her heart. They were halfway there. “It was painful to look back at the Iranian landscape, knowing I might never return to it, knowing also that I was leaving my husband behind.”

  On the border with Turkey, they were handed over to a new group of smugglers. Their new guides stole their belongings and abandoned them by the side of the road, in a “flat, desert terrain that seemed to stretch forever.” Without food, drink or shade, the baby and Neda soon faced dehydration. To avoid checkpoints, they had to walk in the dark on overgrown paths. They took turns carrying Neda and the baby. Once, when Farah was carrying the baby, “Simin fell flat on her face from exhaustion, asleep before she hit the ground.” Farah kept slapping her face to keep her awake. At one point she slipped on a rocky hillside and skidded on her belly all the way down, but at six the next morning, they finally reached the outskirts of Van. “Our clothes were torn and dirty; we could barely walk, and out of habit formed of our recent trek through the mountains, we walked single file, one behind the other, like the remnants of a ragtag army.”

  They went to a shabby hotel, and Farah fell asleep as soon as she put her head on the pillow. She woke up with a start some hours later, feeling as if she had stopped breathing. She tried to open the door and found it locked from the outside. Simin had locked the door to protect her. She became hysterical. She banged on the door, shouting for someone to let her out. “That moment was the closest I came to breaking down,” Farah later recalled. “It marked the beginning of my life in exile.”

  That image of Farah banging on the door has remained firmly etched in my memory. The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of so much that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed—of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity. Farah’s independence, I believe, began on that day in Turkey when she started beating against the door.

  15

  On December 1, 2008, I became an American citizen. It was an extremely cold, dry and windy morning, and after I had been asked a few simple questions, mainly on U.S. history, the friendly immigration officer told me I could take the oath if I cared to wait until two o’clock that afternoon.

  I spent most of my time before returning to take the oath at a diner next to the immigration office, looking out into a large expanse of land and reflecting on my old and new homes. It had not been an easy choice. Choice implies trust, a leap of faith, and it is difficult for a person who has lost her original home to make that leap regarding a new one. When I went back to Tehran in 1979, I would walk down the streets, feeling the pavement beneath my feet, and tell myself, I am here, this is my home, I am here, here. Soon those sentiments turned sour, poisoned by new memories of protests, tear gas, blood and public executions. Walking the streets meant averting my eyes, trying not to see, and hoping that I would not be seen or noticed. I started asking myself, Is this my home? The home I dreamed of returning to? Where am I, and who are these people now ruling the streets?

  Later, I told Farah and Mahnaz that sitting there alone in that diner, I revisited a question I had been asking myself for the past few years: What does it mean to be an American? I had concluded that to choose a new citizenship is like choosing a partner: it is a choice that binds you, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health. And it seemed to me that no time was as good as this to contemplate both America’s sickness and its health. The financial crisis crystallized much that was both good and bad about the country. For me, it never was just a financial crisis, but a crisis of vision and of imagination. You can (at least for a while) bail out the financial giants, but no one seems much concer
ned with propping up the Republic of Imagination. When I returned shortly before two and joined the long queue waiting to get naturalization packages, I was in a mildly elated mood, although mindful that joy is transient and should not be taken too seriously. I felt that I had the power to do a little “sivilizing” of my own, and this was for me the most exciting aspect of becoming American. We were handed our naturalization packages, which included a booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and a small American flag on a gold-colored plastic flagpole. We then filed into a rather shabby room and sat down. The national anthem played in the background, and a large screen projected images of the flag and of American landscapes.

  Soon we were at our seats; my seat number was 30, on my left was number 29, and to my right, number 31, a man with a salmon tie and a pink shirt. It was obvious that, unlike me and the guy to my left, he had taken some trouble with his appearance. He fidgeted and looked in my direction, the movements of a man who is dying to talk. I smiled at him encouragingly and he smiled back, pointing to the small flag in my hand. He waved his, saying, “For the past ten years I have kept an American flag in my apartment. I take it out, dust it and put it back again.” He paused and then said, “And now this!”

  Obviously he did not mean the small flag, but the occasion, the fact that the next time he took his flag out to dust, he would do so as an American citizen. He went on to describe what awaited us: first there would be the president’s message of welcome, some speeches about citizenship, then each of us would be called. “Remember to keep your flag in your hand,” he told me, “and smile, because someone will take our pictures.” But no one ever did.