Azar Nafisi’s latest is an ode to literary America, from Iran, with love
In the fall of 1979, during the early days of
Iran’s Islamic revolution, the 24-year-old Azar Nafisi was teaching her
students at the University of Tehran the virtues of two American books, Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby.
At the same moment, in the courtyard below, Islamists were shouting,
“Death to America!” and the nearby U.S. embassy was under siege by
screaming, murderously passionate anti-Americans.
“The new regime,” as she remembers it, “was leading a bloody crusade
against Western imperialism, against the rights of women and minorities,
against cultural and individual freedom.” That was the program of the
Islamic Republic of Iran. And she, through literature, was doing her
best to teach the reverse.
“Suddenly a new regime had established itself, taking hold of my
country, my religion, my traditions, and claiming that the way I looked, the
way I acted — what I believed in and desired as a human being, as a woman, a
writer and teacher — were all alien.”
Under pressure at the university, she continued her classes at home,
meeting discreetly with a few students who weren’t worried about official
dogma. Eventually Nafisi left Iran and ended up in Washington as an American
citizen and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. Her experience with private
teaching in Tehran led eventually to Reading Lolita in Tehran, published a
decade ago, in which she described what free literature meant to women living
sharply circumscribed lives. She imagined that with luck her book would sell
9,000 copies; it sold 1.5 million, in 32 languages. It outraged Iranian critics
and made her famous.
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| Image courtesy of National Post. |
Since then she’s discovered America through the artists whose work
touched her — Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, Miles Davis and Edward
Hopper, the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen. James Baldwin, a great essayist and
an interesting novelist, attracted her particular admiration: “One of his
greatest artistic achievements was to seamlessly weave together the private and
the public, the personal and the political and the social.” She has come to see
literature as a “moral guardian” of a society, a nice thought though it may
occasionally lead to over-simplified analysis.
These figures, people with free minds and free imaginations, became her
heroes, “the founding parents of the America I felt I knew and belonged to,”
Her most recent book, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books,
extends her literary and political pilgrimage. No doubt she would like readers
everywhere to follow her ideas but she seems mainly concerned with helping
Americans to recover their greatness. She wants to teach them that real
democracy depends on a democratic imagination. She’s written a paean to a
certain kind of America, the America she locates in three favourite novels, Huckleberry
Finn, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,
by Carson McCullers.
Nafisi’s tone is urgent and rhetorical, marked by an anxious desire to
deliver a message but softened by a sentimental account of friends and literary
discoveries. Her strategy is autobiographical. She writes about her father
reading her The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She recalls the books that mattered to
her as she became an adult and the books she shared with a long-time friend. She
tells her readers about the thrill she experienced when her daughter discovered
the special joys of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. Nafisi and her life as former
Iranian who became an American remains at the core of her writing.
Her new book is an attempt to broaden the appreciation of the novel as a
means of understanding life. She admires the way Sinclair Lewis in the
1920s satirized proud materialism and (Nafisi’s term) “the
commodification of our souls” in the imaginary Midwestern town of Zenith. She
believes America has come to believe in economic efficiency as its central
goal, a utilitarian attitude that dismisses imagination and considers a passion
for knowledge irrelevant. She thinks that Babbitt can help a reader to see this
policy for the blunder it is. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter she concentrates
on the way it accommodates and celebrates characters who in many cases would be
considered odd and dismissed as misfits.
Of course, Huck Finn himself might be categorized in just that way. As
Nafisi says, “Huck was a mongrel, an outcast, uneducated and unmoored, and
since his creation countless Americans have recast themselves in his image.”
What she most admires about him, however, is his courageous ability to defy the
slave-owning society of the South. He knows it’s wrong to act outside the law
and help Jim to escape recapture, but he breaks the law anyway. His conscience
demands that he obey the law but his heart tells him otherwise, and his heart
wins. Mark Twain himself described that decision: “A sound heart & a
deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers defeat.”
In a letter Mark Twain declared that “Delicacy — a sad, sad false
delicacy, robs literature of the two best things among its belongings:
Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.” Huck Finn expresses this in
his rejection of Aunt Sally because she wants to “adopt me and civilize me, and
I can’t stand it.” Rejecting a Sunday-school teacher’s version of civilization
and politeness gives Huck the ability to act as an independent spirit
when a situation tests his moral sense.
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