Azar Nafisi is a celebrated Iranian-American writer. Years ago, I read her best-selling book Reading Lolita in Tehran. I loved it. So did many other people; it was a bestselling book here (117 weeks on the New York Times‘ bestseller list) and in other countries. She became a professor of English literature in Iran after earning her degree at the University of Oklahoma. She came to the U. S. in 1997 and became an American citizen in 2008.
Because I have always loved her writing, I invited her to lecture at Wellesley College in my annual lecture series. We have become close friends, and I admire her and love her.
She wrote the following essay for TIME in early February, when many people were protesting the regime in the streets, before the American-Israeli war on Iran.
She wrote:
When a friend asked Henry James how he endured the devastation of World War I, the writer replied, “Feel, feel, feel all you can.” His exhortation contains the essence of what it means to remain human. Totalitarian regimes try to dismantle our capacity to feel, render us numb, confiscate our humanity, the way censors black out passages in books.
When I think of Iran, I think of light. I think of the play of light on leaves, on water, on mountains. I was born in Tehran, and when I looked out of the window of my living room, I would look at Mount Damavand, our tallest mountain peak, covered with a halo of snow. I think of that. And I think of our poetry nights in Tehran. I think of the writer and editor Houshang Golshiri teaching us classical Iranian poets during our poetry nights. I think of reading Ferdowsi and Nizami in our living room and the living rooms of my friends.
In December, the Iranians rose up in protest. The Islamic Republic spoke its only language: violence. And again the morgues and graveyards of Iran received fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. For me, as for millions of Iranians, this struggle is not political. It is existential. The first thing the Islamic Republic did, like any totalitarian system, was take away our right to live. They did it by literally killing people. And they did it by trying to reshape the citizens, turn us into figments of their imagination, to create a new Iranian.
I was teaching in Tehran during the revolution in 1979. I didn’t know myself at the time.
The Islamic Republic made me understand a lot of things by taking them away. They were confiscating my history and my identity as a human being. They were depriving us of contact with the world, making us believe that nobody cared about us. I felt the isolation they imposed upon us was a trap we could only escape by feeling, living, and resisting.
When I was leaving Tehran, my mother followed me around the apartment. “Tell them,” she kept saying, “tell them.” Tell the world what is happening to us. I had to write, as Primo Levi put it, “in order to rejoin the community of mankind.”
Last night I could not sleep. I kept thinking of three people. The only way I can repay my debt to them is to keep them alive through their stories. So I will tell you of Dr. Farrokhru Parsa. She was the principal of my high school in Tehran. She was very strict. She would stand at our high school door, checking the length of our uniforms. We would make poems and stories about her. She became, along with my mother, one of the first six women to be elected to the Iranian parliament in 1964. She became the minister of education, changed the representation of women in school textbooks, and significantly advanced the education of girls and women in Iran.
The Islamic Republic came for her. They charged her with crimes from “propagating corruption andprostitution” to “violating Islamic morality.” A revolutionary tribunal in Tehran declared her a “corruptor on earth” and sentenced her to death in May 1980. The legend is that they put her in a sack because you are not supposed to touch a woman and killed her by shooting at the sack. Some say they just hanged her or stoned her. It was a time when I felt immense despair. Many Iranians quote, what is believed to be Dr. Parsa’s last message from her prison cell to her children: “I am not going to bow to those who expect me to express regret for fifty years of my efforts for equality between men and women. I am not prepared to wear the chador and step back in history.”
I stayed in Iran. And that brings to me my second story, my second person. He was my student at Allameh Tabatabai University in Tehran, where I was teaching English literature during the war with Iraq. He had fought in the war and was very active in the Muslim Students Association, which worked as an instrument of ideological conformity and state control on campuses. He had the power to throw me out of the university. Or worse!
One day, as I was teaching Henry James, we heard this noise in the hall outside. Two students rushed in with the news: this young man had brought two cans of petrol with him, doused himself, and set himself on fire. “They have betrayed us,” he shouted. “They have betrayed us.” Some of my students made jokes when his body was being carried out. It made me very unhappy. I scolded them. “You don’t know what he has done,” a student retorted.
I realized there is another kind of death. The regime shapes us into its likeness, hardens the heart. I tried to convey that to my students through the teaching of the novel. A great novel is multi vocal and speaks on behalf of many. The novel threatens the lies of a totalitarian regime like the Islamic Republic. The novel nurtures curiosity and empathy.
My third story is about Razieh. I only remember her first name. In 1979, I was teaching contemporary American fiction at a small girls college in Tehran. Razieh was my student.
She was a practicing Muslim. Her mother was a cleaning lady. Her father was dead. She was a thin, small girl, with her veil framing her face. She was serious. I can see her face. Razieh would walk with me to the university gates and we would talk about Henry James and Jane Austen. She fell in love with Henry James. She loved the independent women in his stories. These women sacrificed their happiness but they did the right thing, she would say.
Razieh was curious. Curiosity, the desire to know another, is “insubordination in its purest form,” as Vladimir Nabokov said. You don’t accept just what is but seek what could be or should be. After that term, I moved to Tehran University. I saw Razieh once on the street. She gave me a sign not to talk to her. It was the year after the revolution, and the repression had started. Some years later, Mahtab, another former student of mine, came to see me at Allameh Tabataba’i University, where I was teaching at the time. She had been in jail but had been released for good behavior. She had met Razieh in jail.
Razieh and Mahtab had forged a bond in prison over their love of literature. Razieh would talk about Henry James; Mahtab would talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald. At a certain point in her telling, Mahtab paused. “You know, Razieh was executed.” I can still see her. Even in prison, even while waiting for her execution, Razieh chose life. She reached far beyond her prison cell through literature. Her bond with the novels and stories of Henry James transcended death and reaffirmed life.
When I lived in Iran my father would tell me that this country is very ancient and was invaded many times. What gives us identity and continuity, he would say, is our poetry stretching back hundreds of years to Ferdowsi, Hafiz, Jami, and Saadi. When this regime came to power, they did more than arrest and kill poets and writers.
They tried to erase our cultural memory. They tried to destroy the statue of Ferdowsi, our epic poet, and rename the street honoring Omar Khayyam, our poet, astronomer, and philosopher. But Iranian women stood in front of that street sign and would not let them change it. It was one small victory among countless defeats. The regime would call our cultural traditions pagan, but Iranians still make pilgrimages to the shrines of our poets.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is the Soviet Union of the Muslim World—a modern theocracy with imperialist ambition—and it is an ideology, a system that has failed. When I look at the younger generation in Iran, I see hope. The protests are both new and rooted in our history. Women have been fighting for freedoms, gaining ground despite oppression. What gives me hope is seeing women and men, the merchants and the retirees, all sections of Iranian society come together in the recent protests.
I have been thinking of Vaclav Havel, who wrote, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The protesters in Iran show us that freedom is an ordeal, and you even pay for it with your life. As told to Basharat Peer
