Azar Nafisi was teaching American literature in Iran at the time of the revolution in 1979. Because she refused to wear the mandated head covering, she was forced to leave the university. She continued to teach her students in her home. She moved to the United States in 1997. In 2003, she published Reading Lolita in Teheran, which was a huge bestseller. She became an American citizen in 2008. Please open the link and read the interview in full. It appeared on the website of American Purpose.

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Azar Nafisi has championed literature as an act of resistance against threats to freedom and imagination. To read dangerously, as Nafisi puts it, is to arouse curiosity and challenge the status quo. 

Sahar Soleimany sat down with the critically acclaimed Iranian-American author to talk about the importance of resistance writers at a time of heightened threats to democracy, parallels between her own experience in revolutionary Iran and the recent Iranian protest movement, and how the act of “telling” can help keep this movement alive.

Sahar Soleimany: You’re a writer, but you’re also an admirer of great authors. One that you cite often is James Baldwin. What about Baldwin’s life and work particularly speak to you?

Azar Nafisi: I first read James Baldwin in college. In the 70s, we were participating in all sorts of protests. Baldwin was part of those protests, but it wasn’t until many years later that I discovered that he was much more important than just being a leader in the civil rights movement.

When I returned to the United States in 1997 and started re-reading a lot of the writers that I had read during my college years, my attitude had changed. At that point, I had lived in the Islamic Republic for eighteen years and could understand the oppression and the humiliation and the outrage and anger that I found in Baldwin’s works. For Baldwin, the civil rights struggle was never just a political movement. The fight against racism was an existential one. His survival as a human being depended on it and that is what makes him so relevant to all times. Now in America, I see so many trends that move toward totalitarianism. I tell myself, thank God for James Baldwin, because his point of view is instinctively anti-totalitarian, anti-oppression.

SS: So many great works of American literature, including Baldwin’s, have become the subject of book bans across the country. You have written and spoken extensively about living under a totalitarian regime in Iran where authors were—and still are—often censored, jailed, or even killed for their work. What parallels can you draw from your own lived experience in Iran and how concerned are you about the state of democracy in the United States?

AN: One of the first symptoms of the totalitarian mindset is banning books because writing and reading entail a search for truth. Baldwin saw himself as a witness to truth and had to reveal that truth. Totalitarian mindsets, whether in the United States of America or the Islamic Republic of Iran, are scared of truth.

While we may not torture or kill writers and dissidents, there still is a totalitarian threat against liberal democracies—it’s what [Uguccione] Sorbello called “sleeping consciousness,” or atrophy of feeling. We have become intellectually lazy. We don’t want to hear or see or have any connection with those who are not just opposed to us, but are different from us. We want to be comfortable.

People keep saying, “I’m not comfortable with that.” These books that are banned—they’re not comfortable. They disturb us. But as Baldwin said, “Writers are here to disturb the peace.” Life is not about comfort. If you cannot tolerate being disturbed by a book, how can you tolerate being disturbed by life itself? In fact, imagination and ideas help us to confront the discomforts of life.

Right now, the most important thing for our democracy is to celebrate and return to the life of imagination and ideas, and accept that freedom is not something that’s given to you. Even when you live in a free and open society, you still need to nurture and pursue that freedom. You never reach it, but you constantly move toward it, and that is one of our great challenges today. Freedom and imagination go hand in hand. We are in danger right now from ourselves.

SS: Has there been any instance in your own writing where your right to free expression was challenged by a publisher or the public?

AN: I had that experience in Iran, but not yet in the United States. In Iran, when my first book came out, it was on [Vladimir] Nabokov, and it sold out pretty much the same year that it was published. They banned the book. They didn’t allow it to be reprinted. My friends tell me that now they can’t even find it on the black market. One of the reasons that I left Iran was because I wanted my freedom of expression. I wanted to be able to talk to my people without lying to them, without being censored. That was made impossible by the regime.

That is why I came here, and that is why I’m so sensitized about things that are happening here, because I have seen how it happens. It happens when we think it can’t happen to us. I remind people that in the last century, western democracies did not just bring us democracy. They also brought us fascism and communism. That can be repeated; everything that has happened before can happen again…..

Azar Nafisi is an editorial board member of American Purpose and author of the national bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), which spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated in 32 languages.

Sahar Soleimany is a Middle East research associate in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.