The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  Somehow we never properly introduced ourselves, perhaps because the occasion had made such formalities irrelevant. I knew he was Arab, because I had overheard him speaking on his cell phone, but I don’t know how I discovered that the man to my left, who was not very receptive to joining in the conversation, was from Latin America.

  I listened to my new co-conspirator but did not say much. What did I have to say? Should I have told him that I was becoming an American citizen because of Huck Finn? Should I have mentioned Melville, Ralph Ellison, Sherwood Anderson, Kate Chopin and Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Should I have talked about the elections and added that I had some hope, but also many doubts? Should I have asked him if he watched Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, Law & Order or Seinfeld? Did he like Howard Hawks and the Marx Brothers? What about Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler? Did he listen to the Doors, the Mothers of Invention, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane or Miles Davis? Did he really like Edward Hopper? Nothing I could have said, I told Farah later, would have matched his pure, unadulterated joy, his complete immersion in the moment, transforming the gaudy room, the familiar images and the anthem and the staff, all dressed up, into a magical initiation ceremony worthy of Harry Potter. He was like an ecstatic bridegroom just before his wedding, telling a perfect stranger about his good fortune, about the years he had stolen glances at a picture of his beloved, taking it out every once in a while, and now this!

  I left the building and immediately called my husband to let him know that I was now the first American in the family. As I walked down the street, a car stopped and my Arab friend rolled the window down to ask me if I wanted a ride. I thanked him and declined, already a bit nostalgic as I watched the car move on and disappear. I had been too overwhelmed by his feeling of anticipation, his pride at becoming an American, to pay attention to his nationality when he was called up. We had not spoken about the homes we’d left behind. Our brief relationship, if one could call it that, was based not on our shared past but on the present, on becoming American. He had offered me his excitement, his trust, his hope, and what did I have to offer in return except a pair of attentive ears and an approving smile? Could I tell him about my doubts, my arguments with myself, my joy, my guilt? Could I tell him that it seemed to me that in this new place, the past was still very much alive, demanding a space all its own?

  And yet there was another aspect to becoming American: I could be an American without casting off Iran. In fact, to be an American you do not cast off the past, but assimilate it into the present. At the time, it seemed that the person of Barack Hussein Obama confirmed my belief that you could cultivate new roots in this land with seeds from another country, that it was possible to not be paralyzed by your past. This was in part Huck’s message, or rather what Farah found so appealing about Huck. He left his family, his home—to the extent he had one—and became a stronger person once he was free of the destructive weight of conventions and expectations.

  16

  Farah arrived in the United States on August 30, 1982. “This country offered me a home,” she told Mahnaz. “I cannot remain indifferent.” The way she confronted the hurdles in this country and overcame what Saul Bellow called the “sufferings of freedom” was to my mind every bit as heroic as her struggle in the face of those other ordeals and hurdles in her country of birth. Writing about Farah, I am reminded of the fact that the United States is a country founded as much on broken dreams as it is on hope and promise; we cannot dismiss one in favor of the other. People come here bringing unbearable pain and anguish with them, and for every story of new beginnings there is one of crushed dreams.

  Farah spent the first three months living with her mother in Monterey, California. She told me that those first few days and months in the United States had at times seemed like an extension of her nightmarish escape from Iran. She had tried to busy herself with the simple effort to survive but also to divert herself from the reality of Faramarz’s fate, thousands of miles away. She would write letters and place phone calls to Iran, desperate to discover his fate. At the same time, she would later tell Mahnaz, she secured all the necessary forms of identification for her new life—a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a library card. She found a child care center and began attending word-processing classes at the local high school. “I tried not to disrupt my mother’s life too much,” she said. Nema, her son, was born on September 25, less than one month later.

  When the government finally announced the arrest of the Amol group, families were allowed to meet with prisoners. Faramarz’s family had told him about Farah’s escape with Neda and about Nema’s birth. The fact that they had seen him gave her hope. Perhaps it was a sign that the trial would be delayed. Perhaps he would be spared. Having heard that the jailers could be bribed, she started raising money for that purpose. Farah knew this was wishful thinking and that she was being unreasonable, but “reason,” she told Mahnaz, “had nothing to do with the state of my mind.”

  I thought of Farah when I first heard on the radio that a number of her former comrades had been arrested. For days I collected the newspaper clippings with their photographs, hiding them by using them as shoe trees in my closet. I watched their show trials with Bijan in silent, inarticulate dread. Faramarz was among them. We, like so many others, had learned not to speculate about their fate. A time comes when even hope is dangerous.

  Farah recalled the trials with almost clinical detachment: “Officials had packed a large hall with relatives of the guards who had fought or been killed in Amol. The walls of the hall were draped with slogans against the defendants, who were seated on a stage facing the rowdy crowd that shouted insults at them and demanded their execution. They were not allowed a lawyer.” The judge was known as the “hanging judge,” because of the number of men and women he had sent to the gallows. All of the defendants were accused of corruption of the earth, fighting against God and (of course), to crown it all, cooperating with the Great Satan. All of the defendants confessed to being communist and to mounting a plot against the regime. They said their actions were wrong. After three weeks, they were all condemned to death.

  Mahnaz went to visit Farah in Monterey and finally brought her back home with her. On January 24, the anniversary of the Amol uprising, Farah and Mahnaz went to Clyde’s, in Georgetown, for lunch. Farah thought that the execution would happen then. “People were eating and watching the Super Bowl on TV,” she said. “The whole place was feverish with excitement. I felt so alien. The world with which my life was interwoven and the world in which I found myself were far apart.”

  The morning of the twenty-fifth came and went with no news. The next day, Mahnaz got the call from Iran. She hurried home to tell Farah and by the time she reached the house she was crying. Mahnaz later told me that what shocked her more than anything was Farah’s reaction. She asked if something had happened to their mother, their friends—she thought of everyone, Mahnaz said, but Faramarz.

  At last, she realized that her sister’s tears were for her. “The baby was taken away. I was given a tranquilizer. I had depended so much on [Faramarz’s] presence. The days became real only when I had recounted every detail of my experiences to him each evening. But part of the experience of losing him involved carrying alone the burden of raising and supporting the children, a burden that would not allow me my time of mourning.”

  In her quiet and determined way, Farah refused to let Faramarz’s death destroy her. She would not give the regime that satisfaction. She moved to Berkeley a few months later and got a job working at a friend’s printing press. Then she moved to D.C. in the fall of 1984, found a nursery and a child care center and went to work. Within a year she had found a job as an editor.

  “I have learned and grown and found a new identity for myself,” she told Mahnaz. “The experience has hardened me. But it has also made me self-reliant. I have grown as a person. I have searched within myself for every ounce of initiative, every resource, ever
y strength in order to empower myself not only to survive but to become whole for my children. I am proud of what I have been able to accomplish. My children are attending good schools and are cheerful, friendly, and optimistic people. I have a successful career. I am not bitter about the past. I think of my years of political struggle not from the vantage point of the tragedy that ended them but from that of the idealism and camaraderie which marked our goals and relationships.”

  Within two years of arriving in the States, Farah owned a home, had a profession and was raising two healthy, happy children as a single mother, without social stigma. The experience persuaded her that the American myth had a certain reality. “I have come to appreciate the United States in ways I never knew before,” she said. “But I have yet to feel completely at home here. . . . I have retained my ethnic identity and nowhere do I realize it more than in my children’s clear identification of themselves as Iranian Americans.” She claimed she no longer felt implicated by Iran’s troubles, and she could not care in the same way about political life in her new home.

  “You feel at home when you start grumbling,” I muttered when Farah tried that one on me. And, truth be told, she did begin to participate in the political life of this country. After almost twenty years, she finally made peace with her lost love, fell in love again and married another man, who was finally able to give her the home that had eluded her for so long.

  17

  Sometimes I felt as if my conversations with Farah had a life-and-death quality to them—they had become so necessary both to Farah and to me. They led every time to surprise endings and new questions, and old questions in new contexts. We were reenacting our childhood, the secret exchanges that would fix us for hours to a corner of the living room or under the shade of a generous tree. Our conversations did have a conspiratorial aspect to them, although what we talked about was no secret. We weren’t even gossiping when, on that day that we met at Kramerbooks, we both felt kind of dizzy, I with my apple martini and she on her second cup of tea.

  I told her I had this strange feeling, difficult to put into words, that although teaching Huckleberry Finn in Iran was both rewarding and revealing, and although my students as a whole loved it, they focused mainly on the repressive aspects of the book, wanting to find fault with a society with which they were at war. In my classes in Iran, I had spent a fair amount of time discussing the confinements of life in a “civilized” society and made a point of drawing parallels with Iran, with its rigid structures and conformity, where everything was done by the book—and it was always somebody else’s book. In America, my focus had shifted to morality, a topic my students returned to both in class discussions and in their journals.

  Some of my Islamist students were uncomfortable with Huck’s view of Sunday school, but, as one of them put it to me one day after class, “Huck is against not religion but established religion, kind of like what we over here call ‘American Islam,’ the kind that was prevalent during the shah’s time.” He handily overlooked the complicating fact that his own kind of religion had now become established. I felt there was little difference between the mentality of slave owners who were in the habit of reminding skeptics that the Bible approved of slavery and of Islamists who claimed that Islam approved of the repression of women and minorities and that the Prophet, after all, was of the view that a woman’s testimony should be worth half that of a man. But he seemed so happy with his find that I didn’t have the heart to disillusion him, at least not then.

  If society’s moral edicts are a sham, if they go against the purer lessons of the heart, what should we do? The lessons Huck learns and unlearns go far beyond the immorality of slavery. His trip with Jim is an education, countering the lessons of Sunday school. At every step, Huck is tested.

  In one scene in which Jim, having lost Huck, is frantic with anxiety, Huck pretends to have been there all the time. Upon discovering the prank, Jim tells Huck how he felt when he thought he’d lost his friend—“my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los,” he says—and how relieved he was to find him again. Jim goes on to reproach Huck. He says that, while he was thankful to see his friend safe, all Huck was thinking about was “how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.” Huck reports, “Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back.” It takes Huck fifteen minutes to “humble” himself to a “nigger,” but he tells us he did it and “I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.”

  The real test arrives when Huck contemplates the consequences of helping Jim find freedom. He sees this not as an act of liberation but as a sin, something for which he will be blamed. “I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way,” he says. As Jim believes he is nearing Cairo and freedom—wrongly, it turns out—Huck tells us, “My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever. . . .” He decides to give Jim up, and has a chance to do so when he runs across two men looking for five runaway slaves, but as hard as he tries, he cannot betray Jim. He reports:

  “I tried for a second or two to brace up and out with it, but I warn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says:

  “‘He’s white.’”

  Although he feels bad for doing the “wrong” thing, he figures he would have felt just as bad turning Jim in, and since he cannot understand why it is that the “wages” of doing the right things and the wrong thing are the same, he decides not to think about it and to just do “whichever comes handiest at the time.”

  This unresolved dilemma returns to haunt him, as he always seems to impulsively take the side of the “wrong.” When he learns that the duke and the dauphin have betrayed Jim for a paltry $45, Huck begins his longest fight with his conscience. He has another “long think,” sorting out different possibilities, and he tells us, “The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling.” He knows he could have gone to Sunday school and that there they would have “learnt” him that “people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.” He tries to pray, but the words will not come, because his “heart warn’t right.” So finally, deciding to do the “right thing,” he writes a note to Miss Watson, giving Jim up.

  Once he writes the note, he feels “good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now.” But his wayward heart would not let him off so easily. For immediately he starts thinking, and as he continues to think he tells us,

  I see Jim before me, all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

  It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

  “All right, the
n, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

  That is when Huck decides that he is “wicked” and will remain true to his wickedness, and for a start he will try to save Jim. In doing so, he will turn the civilized world on its head and, hopefully, also make his readers do some deep thinking of their own about words such as “right” and “wrong,” “wicked” and “virtuous,” “respectable” and “civilized.”

  While Huck Finn is the quintessential individualist, his individualism does not condone greed. With his rejection of the “Sunday-school” mentality, he also rejects the utilitarian view of religion as a system of reward and punishment. His moral choices are deliberate. He takes conscious risks and accepts responsibility. Huck will find a new home and a new source of moral power, where the authority of the outside world is replaced with an inner authority, one that will help him decide what to do with Jim.

  This is the kind of individualism that shapes my idea of America, the one I tried to share with my students in Tehran, explaining to them that moral choice comes from a sound heart and from a constant questioning of the world and of oneself, and that it is just as difficult, if not more so, in a society that appears to give you every freedom. In his study of life in concentration camps, Tzvetan Todorov argues that even under the most adverse conditions, when human beings are at death’s door, they still have a choice. Their ultimate choice lies in their attitude toward life and death. It is in this manner that Huck’s choice of hell and Jim’s decision to risk his freedom in order to remain loyal are essentially choices to be true to that inner self, the rebellious heart that beats to its own rhythm.