‘A world without books is a world… orphaned beyond hope’ – a conversation with Azar Nafisi

This month Azar Nafisi’s new memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About is published in the UK by Random House. In the following interview with Sarah O’Reilly she talks about her first – the best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

The Secret of ‘Durable Pigments’

Azar Nafisi talks to Sarah O’Reilly

Your book has sold over a million copies worldwide, has been translated into 32 languages and spent an amazing 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Did you anticipate such success?

It is very difficult to determine why a book becomes popular. I certainly did not expect mine to be so. But I can draw some conclusions from my interaction with readers, and their responses to the book. I think its success is mainly due to two factors, the first being readers’ love of books. On one level Reading Lolita in Tehran is a celebration of both the act of reading as well as writing: I wanted to show how the two acts are connected. The enduring value of books is as much due to writers as it is to readers from different times, places and perspectives, who are constantly reinterpreting books and giving them new life. I would like to believe that is one reason for my book’s popularity. Linked to this idea is the fact that many readers, when learning about literature classes in Tehran through my book, discovered a new way of relating to a people who they felt they had very little in common with. This shared passion for literature provided a mutual space, connecting a young girl who had never left the Islamic Republic to, say, a woman in the United States or Italy who had never visited Iran. This common passion became a means of communication and empathy between seemingly different cultures and peoples.

A second reason for the unexpected popularity of Reading Lolita in Tehran is, I believe, the fact that it provided an alternative view of Iran to the dominant political one. The main characters in the book were not the political elite but ‘ordinary’ people who, through their creative resistance to repression, demonstrated that while their leaders can be very banal and predictable, they, on the other hand, are not so ordinary after all.

In general, the book hasn’t fared particularly well in our multimedia age. Why, in your opinion, should we read? Why is it important?

No experience can be simply replaced by another. New means of communication should complement and not eliminate the unique means we already have at our disposal; they should help broaden our horizons and sharpen our senses rather than diminish them. Reading a book has an important physical component to it that is both tactile and visual and cannot be recreated through the virtual reality of the Internet (for example) which minimizes the actuality and intimacy required by the act of reading books. Like the separate imaginative worlds they contain, books gain a character and specificity of their own through the ways each reader treats them. Because of this physicality they become an organic part of our actual world, both public and private. For me, a world without books is a world that is mutilated and orphaned beyond hope.

Reading is an exchange, a constant conversation between the reader, the text and the writer. It is a way of interpreting and connecting to the world. We read because of our urge to know, because we are curious about others and aspects of ourselves that we have little knowledge of. Through this curiosity we gain the empathy that defines us as human. While reading is a private and intimate act it also becomes a way of connecting and empathizing with those we have never seen; it makes it possible for us to belong to a community of invisible interlocutors who engage us in endless conversations, constantly providing us with new experiences.

One of the themes in Reading Lolita in Tehran is exile: your sense of being an Iranian exile in the US, but also of being alienated by your own country after the revolution. Where is home for you? And what meaning does the word hold for you – is it the place you were born, or does it refer to something less tangible?

I learnt very early in life how fragile what goes by the name of ‘home’ could be. Revolution and the war are only the extreme examples of that fragility. The place I was born in will, in one sense, always be my home, but the only way I can preserve it is through memory – and the best way to preserve that memory is through language and literature. I have learnt to rely only on what Nabokov has called the secret of ‘durable pigments’; that which can be preserved through the portable home we create out of our memories and imagination. In that portable home, none of us will define ourselves by our given identities: nationality, geography, race, religion, class or gender. This is the home I feel most at home in.

You’ve said that you’re interested in ‘how we retrieve through writing, through imagination, what we lose’. What did you lose in Iran?

I lost my parents, friends, students and the land that I had been born in. But I also discovered that because nothing endures, and because we are constantly betrayed by time, loss is at the heart of life. Real loss is when we forget; I agree with Tzvetan Todorov that, ‘Only total oblivion calls for total despair’. One reason we write is to resist and to protest the inevitable sense of loss and despair that comes with the realization of life’s transience.

Can you describe what effect taking the veil had on you?

Because the veil has become such a politically charged issue I would like to reaffirm that for me – as for many Iranians – the issue of the veil is not about whether it is good or bad. That belongs to the domain of free debate and discussion. I also believe we cannot argue against a person’s religious beliefs if they do not harm others. But in countries like Iran, the veil symbolizes the confiscation of religion and its use as an ideology to control the citizens. In Iran, the state took the veil and imposed it on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, in the same way that communist China or the Soviet Union imposed a uniformity of appearance upon their citizens. That is why so many women who had worn the veil before the revolution objected to the state using it for its political purposes; for them this protest was not against the veil. It was about the freedom of choice.

For me, the imposition became a symbol of the state’s attempt to redefine and reshape me in its own image, denying my individuality and personal integrity. In one sense, through confiscating religion, the state has taken away the rights of both those women who wore the veil because of their faith and those who did not wish to wear it. One of the worst results of such an attempt is that the victims become complicit in the crime committed against them: for traditional Muslim women, their veil became a political and not a religious sign. For those who did not believe in wearing the veil it meant accepting a lie, participating in a lie, becoming a lie.

In Iran, exposing your girls to ‘illicit’ literature, and creating a space in which to discuss it, put them in danger. Was this something that troubled you?

The kind of danger you mention was part of our daily life. When we were most ‘ourselves’ – acting the way that we wanted to, listening to music, having parties, watching the forbidden videos and films – we became dangerous, and therefore punishable. Our class was not political; its subversive nature was defined by our attempt to create an atmosphere in which we retrieved what we lacked in public, open spaces and open relations. It was an assertion that life had not stopped because the state had ordered it to. This existential resistance to the imposition of power is also one of the most potent ways of resisting tyranny. It is much easier for the state to arrest and destroy political groups, but how can it arrest and eliminate millions of citizens, those who resist through being who they are?

Your book reveals the dangers of using religion as ideology. When you look around the world today, particularly the Middle East, do you fear that this danger is only increasing?

I do see the dangers of the abuse of religion as ideology which has lead to the current politicization and polarization of private and civil spaces. But that does not mean that I am without hope. I agree with Hannah Arendt that even in the most repressive societies our hope rests with the endless potential of human beings to find creative and inventive ways of resistance. Iran is a good example of this: after 27 years of ideological rule and repression, the young Iranians, the children of the revolution and the old revolutionaries, the former ardent Islamists share the same passion for an open and secular society. They have realized that the only way to create such a society is not only through a change of the regime but a change of minds, and that democratic goals can only be realized through democratic means. I am hopeful because for the majority of people, the urge to resist repression is not merely political but existential.

After you were first sent away from Iran, aged 13, you say that it was ‘the point to which all my desires and dreams returned’. But in post-revolutionary Iran, where did your dreams and desires go? To another country, as Nassrin’s did? Or to somewhere interior?

I greatly appreciate my present life in a generous country that has provided me with the opportunity to express myself freely; we need that openness in order to fulfill and articulate our interior world. But that does not mean I have no criticism of this other world, or do not feel restless living in it. Freedom, like happiness, is never achieved; it is always pursued from one stage to another. For this reason my main source of nourishment and strength is that interior space.

Did you benefit from having an inspirational teacher when you were growing up?

My first teacher was my father. He told my brother and me stories from the moment we could understand them and rewarded us with books. My best childhood memories belong to the time he made up stories with me or told me stories. Another early influence was my husky-voiced, cigarette-smoking English teacher, Mrs Weaver, when I first came to England.

Have you visited any book groups yourself since Reading Lolita in Tehran’s publication?

Yes! I had no idea about the range and potential of book groups until I published this book. I learnt many things through my exchanges with them – including the fact that my class in Tehran was one! I believe we need to create subversive book groups everywhere, including the academy. The idea that groups of people put aside a portion of their time to simply enjoy books is a fantastic one that can be turned into a subversive activity against the reigning imaginative and intellectual dementia.

When you left Iran you moved to a society where literature is more marginal. Do you have any ideas as to why this is the case?

As Bellow reminds us, in repressive societies brutality and banality are obvious and tangible but in democratic societies what threatens us is ‘our sleeping consciousness’ and the ‘atrophy of feeling’. Within these societies imagination and thought, like freedom, can be taken too much for granted. It is easier to live in a hazy forgetfulness, where a form of tabloid intellectualism and reliance on sound bites replace the challenges of imagination. Thought and imagination demand from us that we take risks, to pose not just the world but ourselves as question marks. They become marginalized by the smugness that shuns thought and questioning, the polarization and politicization that represses debate and genuine political interaction, the commercialism and lazy mentality that chooses short cuts and ready-made solutions.

Can you describe your life now – what’s changed since you left Iran?

Now I feel more in control and, in a sense, more fulfilled. But our past never goes away; both the nightmares and the dreams have remained with me. Nor do I wish to forget them. Forgetting would mean negating experiences that – despite the pain and the anguish, or because of them – have been so central to the shaping of my life. What I value is the new freedom to express both the nightmares and the dreams, the space through which I can have conversations about them openly and without fear.

Are you still in touch with ‘your girls’?

I have been in touch with most of them. My book in fact has provided me with the opportunity to reconnect to my other students as well.

You seem drawn to write from a place where fiction and reality meet. Can you talk a little about why this is the case?

Well, perhaps the most obvious reason is the fact that literature is a meeting and a confrontation between imagination and reality, a manner of retrieving and rearranging reality. I am curious about how this relationship works. Fiction’s influence on reality is invisible and intangible but essential. How can fiction open the spaces that reality closes to us? How dangerous is it when we replace reality with fiction, when we impose our fictions upon reality? What does the inability to produce genuine works of fiction imply about our inability to cope with reality?  These are some of the questions I constantly return to.

Read more about literary classics – old and new:

• Moby Redux by author Leviathan, Philip Hoare
• Mark Johnson’s Secret Weapon, Le Grand Meaulnes
• Netherland
• Has The Catcher in the Rye lost it’s importance?
• Press Books: Publisher of the Noughties