Opinion: Book bans signal the dangerous direction society is moving

February 14, 2022 | The Washington Post

“First they burn books, then they kill people!”

That line often came to mind when I was living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, every time the regime closed a bookstore or a publishing house, every time it censored, banned, jailed or even killed authors. It never occurred to me that one day I would repeat the same sentiment in a democracy, in my new home, the United States of America.

I’m aware that the United States is not Iran. Its government is not an Islamist regime, and it is not a totalitarian state. But totalitarian tendencies are unquestionably on the rise within segments of this country. We see this in the attempts to curtail women’s rights, in the rise in racism and antisemitism, and in the assault on ideas and imagination best exemplified in the banning of books.

Books are a threat to those who seek to rule through absolutism. Especially dangerous to the totalitarian mind-set are great works of fiction — such as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” both perennially challenged — because fiction is democratic in structure. Written well, it cannot be reduced to a preconceived message or ideology…

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Moniro

2021 | An adapted version in Read Dangerously

I first met Moniro Ravanipour the Iranian writer in Tehran. She for a while attended some of the meetings of a literary group I was at the time a part of, run by the prominent Iranian writer, Houshang Goshiri. She was introduced to us as a new young writer. Except for her stories I knew little about her. One thing I remember well: she seemed to be in constant motion, making me feel as if within her thousands of darts were moving in different directions. Even when she was sitting and stationary I had the impression that she appeared on the periphery of my eye, then quickly disappeared, materializing at a different location.

At the time in Iran we were too overwhelmed by what was happening to us on an everyday basis to pay attention to our stories, our own or others.’ Fear was a household companion, within that literary group most of us had something to be afraid of, not just political offenses, remember, refusing to wear the mandatory veil or listening to music could be considered a punishable offense. Moniro like the rest of us, would not divulge her stories there, too dangerous.   

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Azar Nafisi on Finding Herself in the Writing of Vladimir Nabokov

November 11, 2019 | Lit Hub

It all started with this book. I mean the way I have written my other books has been shaped by the process of writing this one. Like a life story, a book has its own murky history, shaped by complex circumstances, unexpected events, and strange coincidences. In this case, the story of those diverse factors, coming together at a specific time and place can provide a reasonable answer to the question, why Nabokov? Why write a book about Nabokov in a country now called the Islamic Republic of Iran, that was once called Iran and before that Persia? What makes Nabokov relevant to life in the Islamic Republic?

I could, of course, count all my connections—real or imagined—to Nabokov, beginning with the long and tumultuous history of the relations between Iran and its northern neighbor Russia, and Russia’s influence on shaping Iran’s modern history and culture. There is an undiminished sense of humiliation and grievance among Iranians about their country’s devastating defeats in the 19th century at the hands of Russians, which led to Iran ceding the Caucasus and half of the Caspian Sea to Russia, and then there is Russia’s and later the Soviet Union’s immense influence in shaping Iran’s modern political ideologies as well as its literary taste and tendencies—influences in the best and the worst sense of the word: great literature and Communist ideology. Iran seems to have followed Russia—thankfully, on a smaller scale—in its rebellion against political dictatorship, creation of a short-lived liberal interim government, and finally a violent ideological totalitarian revolution…

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In these heartless times, The Little Prince reminds us what it is to be human

July 22, 2016 | The Guardian

Do you remember the fox? Not just any fox, this one is a sage; the one that reveals the truth to the Little Prince, who reveals it to the pilot, who reveals it to us, the readers. As he says goodbye to his friend, the fox tells the Little Prince, “Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” When as a child I first heard my father read me The Little Prince in a sunny room in Tehran, I was not aware that the story, along with tales from Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, Pinocchio, the work of Mulla Nasrudin, the Alice stories, The Wizard of Oz and The Ugly Duckling, among others, would become one of the main pillars of my “republic of imagination”.

My father’s democratic way of introducing me to these stories shaped my attitude towards works of imagination as universal spaces, transcending the boundaries of geography, language, ethnicity, religion, gender, race, nationality and class. I knew that although this fox and his prince were products of a Frenchman’s mind, and although the book was written in a language foreign to me, at a time before I was born and in a place I had never seen, by virtue of hearing and later reading it, that story would also become my story, that Little Prince and fox belonged as much to me as Scheherazade and her 1,001 nights belonged to the French, American, British, Turkish, German and all other readers who would in reading cherish them and “tame” them, the way the Prince learned to tame the fox…

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Over the the years I have often thought of Alice as my ideal reader

July 12, 2015 | Salon

It all began one Friday morning, a weekend in Iran, over breakfast. My father had promised me the night before that he would tell me a new story instead of taking me to the movies, which was our usual weekend treat. That was when he first introduced me to Alice. I think he made a fair amount of it up as he went along, as I never found many of his Alice stories when I was old enough to read the books myself. But I can still remember his describing how Alice, having taken a big gulp of a special potion, began to grow smaller and smaller. “And then,” he said, “she discovered a hooka smoking caterpillar.”

Now I was quite familiar with caterpillars -- in those days we could buy them in cocoons from street vendors with a handful of leaves and watch them turn into butterflies -- and everyone had a cousin or uncle who was overfond of a hooka. But Alice, who had never seen a hooka-smoking caterpillar, quite naturally asked him, “Who are you?” And the caterpillar threw the question right back at her, saying: “Who, Who Who are Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu?” …

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Surveillance States

June 11, 2015 | The New York Times

For a while, every time I borrowed a book from my local library in Washington, D.C., I was greeted by an Orwellian poster: “Big Brother Is Watching You!” I often wondered if others paused to reflect on the implication of these words, if they understood how profoundly living under surveillance distorts a society. It transforms your perspective, your manners, your relationships with friends, colleagues, students, with every waiter and cabdriver you meet. It changes your relationship with yourself.

When I lived in Tehran in the 1980s, I kept a diary in an idiotic secret language I can no longer decipher. To write about my relatives and friends who were imprisoned or on the run, I’d fictionalize them and make myself a character: a westernized woman who, alienated from her traditions, sees everything in black and white. My mother developed elaborate codes to evade the censors while talking on the phone. Her conversations were almost nonsensical. She would say, in Persian, “Agha marizeh” (“The gentleman is ill”) to signal that things were going badly for the regime, and then whisper anxiously, “Do you understand? Do you understand?”…

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Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, book of a lifetime: Passionate writer captures an essential aspect of life in America

October 30, 2014 | The Independent

I first read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain in my sophomore year of college, when Giovanni's Room got me hooked on Baldwin. It broke my heart and made me want to jump up and down, unable to fully articulate my own response towards it.

It is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of one day (his birthday) in the life of the poverty-stricken 14-year-old John Grimes, mostly spent roaming the streets of New York and reflecting on the various demons ruling over his life: his violent preacher stepfather, his church, and the racist society into which he had the misfortune to be born. It captures an essential aspect of life in America, its contradictions and seductions, that bittersweet mix of love and hate that so many feel towards the country…

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My Father’s Shahnameh

February 28, 2012 | National Museum of Asian Art

I have two books in front of me. One is Dick Davis’ Shahnameh, The Persian Book of Kings. The other is a much thinner book, designed for young readers. On its cover, above a Persian miniature painting of men on horses, is written in Persian: Selections from Shahnameh by Ahmad Nafisi.

In his introduction to this selection, my father mentions that the idea for this book goes back to the time he started telling stories from Persia’s classical literature, beginning with the poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, to my brother and me when we were no more than three or four years old. My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature and especially in their poetry. Our country has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture, and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home…

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Iran’s Women: Canaries in the Coal Mine

December 9, 2010 | Huffington Post

The battle for emancipation is part of a proud tradition that will shape the future of the regime and Islam itself.

Last month, Mohammad Javad Larijani, the head of the Iranian High Council for Human Rights, in New York for a UN session, was asked by Fareed Zakaria on CNN about stoning for adultery and the case of Sakineh Ashtiani whose death sentence by stoning has attracted worldwide outrage….

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Foreword: Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings

2006 | Penguin Books

I have two books in front of me. One is the galley for Dick Davis’s Shahnameh, The Persian Book of Kings; the other is a much thinner book, designed for young readers and on its cover, above a Persian miniature painting of men on horses, is written in Persian: Selections from Shahnameh, by Ahmad Nafisi. In his introduction to this selection, my father mentioned that the idea for this book goes back to the time he started telling stories from Persia’s classical literature, beginning with Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, to my brother’ and me when we were no more than three or four years old and later to our children. My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home. Citing the poet Ferdowsi and how, after the Arab invasion of Persia, he rescued and redefined his nation’s identity and culture through writing the epic of Persian mythology and history in his Book of Kings, my father would say, We have no other home but this, pointing to the invisible book, this, he would repeat is our home, always, for you and your brother, and your children and your children’s children.

            Thus it was that like so many other Persian children my brother and I and later our children grew up with the Shahnameh and in the kingdom of imagination our father had created for us. Rostam, Tahmineh, Seyavash, Bizhan and the other fictional characters in Ferdowsi’s stories because our brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbors. Ferdowsi’s devoted readers throughout the centuries rewarded him by creating their own legends around him. When I was a married woman with children of my own, my father, in the same manner he used when I was a small child, would tell my children of the conflict between the noble poet Ferdowsi and the fickle king, Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi. Dick Davis gives us the factual historical account, but we heard the popular one, the one that like the stories in the Shahnameh, while more akin to myth, revealed an important truth…

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Chapter: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

2006 | My sister guard your veil; my brother guard your eyes by Beacon Press

The story I want to tell begins at the Tehran airport, decades ago, when at the age of thirteen I was sent away to England to pursue my education. Most friends and relatives who were there on that day will remember that I was very much the spoiled brat, running around the Tehran airport, crying I didn’t want to leave. From the movement I was finally captured and placed on the airplane, from the movement the doors were closed on me, the idea of return, of home, of Iran became a constant obsession that colored almost all my waking hours and my dreams. This was my first concrete lesson in the transience and infidelities of life. The only way I could retrieve my lost and elusive Tehran was through my memories and a few books of poetry I had brought with me from home. Throughout the forlorn nights in a damp and gray town called Lancaster, I would creep under the bedcovers, with a hot water bottle to keep me warm, while I opened at random three books I kept by my bedside: Hafiz, Rumi, and a modern female Persian poet, Forugh Farrokhzad. I would read well into the night, a habit I have not given up, going to sleep as the words wrapped themselves around me like aromas from an old spice shop, resurrecting my lost by unforgotten Tehran.

I did not know then that I was already creating a new home, a portable world that no one would ever have the power to take away from me. And I adapted to my new home through reading and revisiting Dickens, Austen, Brontë, and Shakespeare, whom I had met with a thrill of sheer delight on the very first day of school. Later, of course, I would begin to discover America through the same imaginative sorcery—the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Mark Twain, Henry James, Philip Roth, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and Ralph Ellison…

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Liberal Education and the Republic of the Imagination

Summer 2006 | Liberal Education

Some assume that the only way academics can engage the politics of the day is by coming out of their ivory tower and protesting in front of the White House. But in conveying knowledge, the academy has a far more important and subversive way of dealing with political issues. Knowledge provides us with a way to perceive the world. Imaginative knowledge provides us with a way to see ourselves in the world, to relate to the world, and thereby, to act in the world. The way we perceive ourselves is reflected in the way we interact, the way we take our positions, and the way we interpret politics.

Curiosity, the desire to know what one does not know, is essential to genuine knowledge. Especially in terms of literature, it is a sensual longing to know through experiencing others—not only the others in the world, but also the others within oneself. That is why, in almost every talk I give, I repeat what Vladimir Nabokov used to tell his students: curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. If we manage to teach our students to be curious—not to take up our political positions, but just to be curious—we will have managed to do a great deal…

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Iran’s Peculiar Election: The Voice of Akbar Ganji

October 2005 | Journal of Democracy

Akbar Ganji has come to represent the democratic movement in Iran, not simply because of his enormous courage or the originality of his views, but because he has revealed the "true face of the system in the Islamic Republic of Iran." Alhough he has been in prison since the year 2000 and has been gravely weakened by illness and a two-month-long hunger strike in the summer of 2005, he still stands out as the strongest figure in today's Iran.

Among the former revolutionaries who have questioned the Islamic Republic, none has shown the intellectual and moral courage that Ganji has demonstrated in interrogating and holding accountable not just the Islamic regime but also his own former self. His resistance to the regime's tyranny is at the same time a statement against the young Islamist militant who once eagerly helped to bring about the Islamic Revolution. His transformation from militant Islamist to courageous dissident and staunch defender of democracy and human rights shows how thoroughly the Islamic Revolution has failed to reach its goals. Ganji's transformation gives us a little more hope in ourselves and in Iranian society's potential for change…

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The Quest for the “Real” Woman in the Iranian Novel

Fall 2003 | Social Research: An International Quarterly

Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel, Tuba va Mana-ye Shab (Tuba and the Meaning of the Night) (1989), begins with series of interesting images. It opens at the end of the Qajar dynasty, at a time when Western thought and new ways of living directly begin to influence and change the traditional closed society of Iran. The heroine’s father is an adib, a poet-scholar, a simple man who is preoccupied with philosophy and poetry. One day as he walks the streets immersed in his thoughts, a foreigner on horseback runs him down. The insolent foreigner whips the adib across the face. Later he is forced to go to the adib’s house to apologize. This incident is the adib’s first and last direct encounter with the Western world. The seemingly incongruous but most important result of the meeting is his startling discovery that the earth is round. Before, he had been vaguely aware of the earth’s roundness, but had preferred to ignore it.

For several days the adib contemplates what the roundness of the earth means for him. He instinctively realizes the connection between the foreigner’s presence, the roundness of the earth, and all the changes and upheavals yet to come. After several days he announces his conclusion: “Yes, the earth is round; the women will start to think; and as soon as they will become shameless” (Parispur, 1989).

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Words of War

March 27, 2003 | The New York Times

These days I am often asked what I did in Tehran as bombs fell during the Iran-Iraq war. My interlocutors are invariably surprised, if not shocked, when I tell them that I read James, Eliot, Plath and great Persian poets like Rumi and Hafez. Yet it is precisely during such times, when our lives are transformed by violence, that we need works of imagination to confirm our faith in humanity, to find hope amid the rubble of a hopeless world. Memoirs from concentration camps and the gulag attest to this. I keep returning to the words of Leon Staff, a Polish poet who lived in the Warsaw ghetto: ''Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.''

I think back to the eight-year war with Iraq, a time when days and nights seemed indistinguishable, and were reduced to the sound of the siren, warning us of the next air attack. I often reminded my students at Allameh Tabatabai University that while guns roared and the Winter Palace was stormed, Nabokov sat at his desk writing poetry…

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Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Probelm

February 1999 | The New Republic

I would like to begin with a painting. It is Edgar Degas’s Dancers Practicing at the Bar, as reproduced in an art book recently published in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Under the heading “Spatial Organization,” the book gives a two-paragraph explanation of Degas’s placement of the ballerinas: “The two major forms are crowded into the upper right quadrant of the painting, leaving the rest of the canvas as openspace…”

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Tales of Subversion: Women Challenging Fundamentalism in the Islamic Republic of Iran

1999 | Religious Fundamentalism and the Human Rights of Women

I will begin with a tale. Its plot centers on a woman and poet known as Tahereh. Tahereh was not her real name; it was the title bestowed on her by Bab, a religious leader and the precursor of the Baha‘i faith in Iran. It means “the pure.”Tahereh was born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1814, to a well-known and influential clerical family.

She lived at a time in Iran when clerics and despots shared power and the “law” was religious law. Perhaps the best way to judge that time is by its rules regarding women. Women were veiled from head to toe, and when talking to men who were not members of their immediate family or their husbands, they had to hide behind a curtain. Polygamy was an accepted practice, women’s age of consent for marriage was nine, the punishment for adultery was death by stoning, and women’s public education was banned…

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Imagination as Subversion: Narrative as a tool of civic awareness

1997 | Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation

This is a story about the power of stories to shape reality and to teach what responsibility has to do with imagination.

Shahrzad’s famous story goes like this: Once upon a time there were two brothers who each ruled over a different kingdom. One brother, Shahzaman, decided to visit his elder brother, Shahryar. On the way there Shahzaman realized that he had left behind his present for Shahryar, and turned around. Back at his palace Shahzaman foudn his queen making love to a slave. He killed both and with a heavy heart traveled to his brother’s palace. There the brothers caught Shahryar’s queen also making love to a slave in an orgy attended by other slaves. The two disappointed kings left their kingdoms and roamed the countryside.

One day, wandering by the Gulf of Oman, they noticed the sea part and a black column rise from it that turned into an ifrit (a demon). The ifrit opened an iron trunk out of which climbed a beautiful young woman whom he had abducted on her wedding night. Frightened, the two brothers tried to hide up in a tree…

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