by Azar Nafisi
If there is a climax to Huck’s adventures, it is this. No other scene so poignantly and so perfectly captures Huck and his mate Jim. But the story doesn’t end here; we have the Phelps farm to deal with. Once Huck discovers that the duke and the dauphin have betrayed Jim for a paltry $45 and that Jim is now locked up at the Phelps farm (which happens to be home to Tom’s aunt Sally and her brood), he decides to go there to free Jim.
18
“If I were teaching Huck Finn . . .” I began.
“You are teaching Huck Finn,” Farah said. “And you have been teaching him ever since your first class in Tehran.”
“I am not happy with that anymore,” I said.
We were in her living room. She had been feeling unwell and was lying on the couch, with one hand covering her brow. She asked me to move closer so she could see me better. The French windows framed her beloved garden. Before we talked about Huck, she had me pick a tiny lemon from a small tree and put it into a huge bowl. She wanted me to smell its fragrance. She told me that among the things she regretted most was not spending more time on the garden.
That was when she first told me about her desire to get a small dog. She said she felt the dog would motivate her to bear the pain better. Her husband was opposed to this and her siblings worried that looking after a dog might be too much of a burden to her. With a faded smile, reminiscent of the smile forewarning you of some form of subtle guile, she told me her plan to convince Habib to let her have the dog, engaging her two children to conspire with her so that Habib would be confronted with the inevitable presence of the dog. She had spent months trying to choose one and thinking of a name for it.
I told Farah that I didn’t want to teach for a while. I felt I needed to take time off, to think things through.
“This is not a marriage you are talking about,” she said. “And you are not twenty years old, with time on your hands. Even if you were, you never know how much longer you will live.”
“I feel we’re all too accustomed to the usual way of teaching these books,” I said. “I want something more. I want to create a new course called Creative Reading. What my students need is not another lecture on Huck Finn. I don’t want simply to bring up the questions we all know we have to ask, about slavery, humor, even Americanism. Those questions should not be posed—they should emerge organically from our engagement with the text.” I reminded Farah of Twain’s statement that education “consists mainly in what we have unlearned” and told her that I wanted to do a little more unlearning. After all, Huck himself flees the stifling world of cultured indoctrination. He escapes the Widow Douglas’s civilizing mission and sets off to shape his own education.
“Maybe I should ask my students, before they write on Huck, to write about their most sensual encounter with nature, to express how it feels to touch, to listen, to see, to taste and, of course, to feel. To become conscious of the world around them, because that is what I keep missing: the sensuality that at all periods of my life, no matter where I have lived, I could evoke through a poem, a painting, music or a story.”
“Let it be, Azar,” Farah said gently. “You and I enjoyed this beauty without seeing the reality that gave birth to it. That was how we were young, and this is how they are young. Just let them be.”
“When I give speeches,” I said, “the people who come to listen are more frank with me than my students, partly because there is a relationship of trust between readers and writers, some shared intimacy. And of course they are not talking to their teacher but to someone who, despite the curious and immediate feeling of closeness, will leave, after which they will in all likelihood never see them again. The combination of these two elements, of intimacy and distance, conspires to create moments of immense frankness. I feel as open with the audience as they are with me. Teaching is a funny business; you want to share these glimpses of something real and profound, but half the time students want only to know their next assignment and what they will need to study for the test. I wish I could persuade them to be a little less dutiful.”
“You might feel this way for a while,” Farah said, “but you won’t be able to stop teaching for long. It’s in your blood.” And that was that; she wanted to talk about her garden again.
Before we said goodbye, I said, “By the way, I am thinking of a new subtitle. With all this talk of ‘sivilizing’ and all that, how about ‘Unlearning Huckleberry Finn in America?’”
“That’s even worse,” Farah said. “Take your own advice: being concrete is good. Stop worrying about the subtitle and write the damn book.” She was becoming more and more like my real editor.
19
In June 2009, I was officially called on to perform my role as citizen of the United States of America: I was summoned to jury duty. Every morning for more than two weeks, I would take the Metro to Judiciary Square and enter the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, where the main part of my day would be spent with eleven other jurors in a courtroom for the trial of a young African American man named Vincent—known as V—for the murder of another African American man who was just thirty but still older than the accused by ten years. I would avidly write down my questions, my doubts, my “verdict,” which kept changing, in the notebook provided by the court, even though, to my chagrin, we had these taken away from us each time we adjourned. That notebook was all I had to write my impressions in, and I was not used to being unable to perform that task.
As I avidly told Farah later that week, a different Washington from the one we lived in was taking shape in my mind, one that I knew existed, that my husband—who worked in northeast Anacostia—had talked about, but I had never felt its existence the way I did during those two weeks. The experience would forever change my view of the city and make me, in a sense, more committed to it, more its citizen than before. The case was about what had happened on the corner of H and 19th streets, among a group of young, mainly male African Americans drinking Grey Goose vodka and at times breaking into fights. But then it was about so many other things, too. It was about gun ownership and inequality, and it was about jobs and dreams and what happens when you have neither.
A little after I started jury duty, Iran broke into an uprising against the rigged presidential election won by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and for the first time since I had returned to America, attention was being paid to the Iranian people, as well as to the regime. Farah was very excited and got involved, although she was also very sick. For the first time in a long while, our conversations turned to politics and conditions in Iran. Almost every day, she would call her cousin in Tehran to get the news, and we would spend most of our time together listening to the news, reading the news, talking about the news on Iran. I felt that I was participating in two kinds of justice: one in the court of my new country, and the other played out by the people in the streets of my country of birth. In both, the results could not be foreseen, but there was no doubt about the necessity to participate as engaged citizens.
We felt a great deal of frustration over Obama’s hesitation to support the uprising. It had been only a few months since his election, which so many thought of as a turning point, not just for America but for the world. I remember, at the time of the inauguration, a friend sent me a photograph of Barack Obama published in a Persian paper, with a caption reading, “Why can’t we have someone like this?” The paper was promptly shut down, and now, less than a year later, Iranians protesting their own presidential elections were chanting, “Obama, Obama, are you with them or are you with us?” It was a question Obama could never fully answer, no matter what he might have felt in his heart of hearts.
Farah had participated energetically in the American election campaigns. She was especially excited about Obama and had convinced me, despite the fact I could not vote, that I should participate in fund-raising events in his honor. She asked me to tell her in minute detail about one of these, a meeting organized by Jonathan Safran Foer, with Ton
i Morrison, Samantha Power, Tony Kushner and Jhumpa Lahiri. And so I dutifully related Samantha Power’s story of how Obama had called to praise her book on genocide and then offered her a job in his office. “This is going to be a new era,” Farah whispered in excitement. As always, I was far more skeptical of politics and politicians, and therefore less surprised when neither Obama nor the uprising turned out in our favor, although in Iran, at least, I knew that the regime would not have the last word forever.
I believe that Farah never recovered from the defeat of that uprising, though despite her disappointment in America’s lukewarm support, she still harbored a great deal of hope for Obama. Her cancer spread like wildfire soon after that, as if she had lost her will to fight. I have not, as yet, wiped out her phone numbers and e-mail address from my computer, and every once in a while I visit her Twitter account and hover over her last message: “Iranians in Wash. DC support our brave country men and women inside fighting for all of our rights. Our hearts and minds are w/ you.”
20
“Whatever the literary establishment might think, a good story always has a good ending.” So says Jessica Fletcher, that knowing and wise fictional murder mystery writer and amateur sleuth of the television series Murder, She Wrote who has never failed at solving a crime. And she is right about this particular good story. Only the good ending is not quite what we would expect it to be. Unlike many readers, including Hemingway, who have found the last ten chapters of Huckleberry Finn unnecessary, I believe the trip to the Phelps farm is central to the main theme of the book: the triumph, as Twain would put it, of the “sound heart” over a “deformed conscience.”
From the moment Huck steps onto the Phelps farm, all of the movement, the variety, the dangerous magic of the river disappear, and we find ourselves once again in the oppressive atmosphere of the opening pages. Phelps farm is a reentry into the real world, where attempts will be made to make Huck complicit in recapturing Jim.
Huck’s description of the farm exudes melancholy and boredom. When he gets there, the air is “still and Sunday-like.” His mood and the tone of his voice, even his words—“lonesome,” “dead,” and “spirits”—echo his description of the widow’s house. This feeling is reinforced when, a paragraph later, he informs us that he “heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again; and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead—for that is the lonesomest sound in the whole world.”
The Phelps farm is a place where reality and illusion are tested. This becomes clearer when Tom arrives and, since Huck has been mistaken by Aunt Sally for Tom, disguises himself as his younger brother, Sid. When Tom finds out that Jim has been sold to the owner of the farm, he devises an elaborate scheme to free him, ignoring Huck’s repeated protests, deriving inspiration from various adventure novels he has read. He ends up treating Jim in a most cruel manner and terrifying the people at the farm by playing pranks on them. When Tom’s plans go awry and he is wounded, Jim decides, at great personal cost, to stay on and help. Only then does the reader realize the consequences of Tom’s frivolous and self-indulgent desire to impose his fantasies on other people, when the violent words he uses are not games anymore.
Then we learn that Tom knew Miss Watson had already freed Jim. It is conceivable that a highly religious person such as Miss Watson, when preparing to meet her maker, would set Jim free, perhaps in a moment of sudden charity, perhaps to earn more points in heaven. But her pardon does not count for much. It is, as the saying goes, too little too late. It does nothing to erase the deeper prejudice bolstering the whole institution of slavery. Twain knew only too well that slavery could be abolished and blacks would still be deprived of their rights. For as long as the attitude that condoned and justified slavery remained, there would be lynching and segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, and, as our own more recent experiences show, that same attitude can reappear clothed in different guises: as fascism, communism or Islamism—or patriotism, for that matter, when it is wielded like a cudgel.
Tom is the only white character in the book who has any hold on Huck. He reads books, he uses big words, he knows all the formulas. He is not a religious fanatic and does not seem to be really bothered one way or the other about slavery. He is, in a sense, more dangerous than an outright racist. He is the ultimate sinner, a dangerous fantasizer who acknowledges no consequences. The difference between Huck and Tom becomes clear in these last chapters: what distinguishes Huck is not just his regard for Jim, but his innate repulsion to cruelty. Yet this does not mean that he is not influenced—or perhaps a better word is intimidated—by authority, especially Tom’s authority. Huck feels himself inferior to Tom in terms of knowledge and learning. His courage is rooted in his heart, and he responds to an inner authority he does not know how to define.
Tom is the only one who knows that Jim is a freeman, that Miss Watson freed him on her deathbed, and yet he is prepared to add to Jim’s suffering by playing games in order to entertain himself. Huck is the exact opposite. He cannot bear for others to suffer, even if they are murderers or charlatans. All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy. Miss Watson, Pap and Tom offer up variations on this theme, which I would go so far as to say is a not just a central theme of Huck Finn but a structural element of the novel since its very inception.
Huck wondered all along why Tom, with his respectable upbringing, would commit such a “wicked” act as freeing a slave. He discovers that Tom did in fact act according to his “upbringing,” as he knew that Jim was a freeman. And yet in the end it appears as if Tom, who has inflicted so much pain, is also the happiest character. He has learned nothing from his own or others’ experiences. Left to his own devices, he tells Huck, he would do the same thing over again, only more elaborately. Before we say goodbye to him, Huck informs us that “Tom’s most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is.”
Parallel to Tom’s unpardonable cruelty, there is Jim and his unforgettable generosity. Although we see Jim mainly as a captive of his white masters and Tom’s whims and fantasies, he takes over the story by refusing to act as they do, by refusing to be blind toward others or to be motivated by self-interest. When Tom is wounded and Huck leaves the two of them to fetch a doctor, Jim has a chance to run for freedom. Instead he remains with Tom and, at great risk to his own life, helps the doctor save him. This is where hope lies: not in a rosy future for Jim, whose next step, like everything else in the novel, is left unresolved, but in his refusal to act vindictively, thereby gaining true freedom from his oppressor. Freedom, like happiness, has to be pursued. There is no end to this struggle, so there can be no end to this story. In fiction, as in life, what matters most is not the beginning or the end but the path that leads from one to the other.
In the end, Huck is not yet completely cleansed of his racist conscience, nor is his future necessarily brighter than it was at the start of his adventures. But whatever might happen, no one can erase the bond between Huck and Jim.
21
In the morning, I stepped out onto the balcony for a few minutes. The air was crisp and fresh, the sun hovered over the water, the boats silently made their way up the river and a jogger ran by, her body in a determined pose, as if slashing through some invisible obstacle, like a swimmer pushing through water. I heard the sounds of cars, motorcycles, a plane. . . . Life was out there, and I wanted to join in. I wanted to become a part of it all. Soon I would dress and go to Borders to meet Farah, who of late had been feeling pretty good. She’d said we should take advantage of it until the next round came. The next round!
I was impatiently making my way through The Washington Post when I heard her familiar voice behind me saying, “What’s up?” She was late, as usual, and smiling. She looked good, with her very short hair, her bright lipstick. She used to turn around for us to show off her figure and say, “Look how thin I have become, model thin!
”
As soon as she sat down, she said, “Tell me, Azi!” Almost every time I saw her she would say, “Tell me, Azi, tell me!” She wanted to know about my classes, my talks, my travels. More than once she told me she had no public ambition of her own, that she lived vicariously through Mahnaz and me. In fact, she was much more social than either one of us. Farah was one of the most active people I knew. She had what you might call an amazing appetite for life. Cancer had spurred her to take trips with the people she loved—to Northern California with Neda, to Paris and Spain with Habib, to St. Michaels with Mahnaz, Hamid and the family. All of us in her close circle would confide our stories to her, and she participated in our personal dramas so energetically that at times we forgot that she was the one who was facing real obstacles and fighting real demons.
I told her about my morning experience and the fact that, in order to feel at home in a city, I need to have some connection to nature as a point of contact, some mental image to take away with me. In Tehran, it had been the Elburz Mountains, and now, today, I felt I had finally entered a new stage with D.C.: the Potomac River! Every morning when I wake up now, I walk out onto the balcony and pay homage to the river.
“Huck’s influence,” she said with a twinkle.
“No,” I said, “his river is so different, and he lives not by the river but on the river. I am a far more domesticated creature.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Now tell me,” she said again, “tell me all about it.”
That’s how it was in that last year. Every time I gave a talk, went to an event or traveled, I had to give her a full account. It was the same with Mahnaz: she was curious about the minutest details of her sister’s activities and would interject as if she herself had been present. “Your lives are public, and they are exciting. I cannot live that kind of life, so this is how I experience it,” she said. It didn’t matter that she could have, at any point, lived that kind of life had she chosen to.