“Strength is on the side of these Iranian women who remove their veil”

“Fiction, by its very form, is democratic”. This is Azar Nafisi’s theory, and it is for this reason that it seemed more relevant than ever to share, almost 20 years later Reading Lolita in Tehranan ode to the irreducible power of literature, five letters addressed to his father, which return to the intellectual situation of American society, scarred by the Trump mandate.

In Read dangerouslyshe evokes, by citing some of the authors of his personal pantheon (Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Plato, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Elias Khoury) the power of literature when it comes to thinking outside of prejudices and stereotypes, of multiplying points of view, and perhaps, above all, to arouse and nourish our capacity for empathy.

Was it urgent for you to write this book?

Most people think that a democracy cannot turn back to become a dictatorship, but that is exactly what I saw happening in Iran. The fact that people are not aware of the seriousness of the situation makes things particularly urgent for me.

You underline this dichotomy: in Iran, poets are tortured and imprisoned, in the United States they are ignored, they are ultimately two sides of the same coin.

As long as books were allowed in Iran, we didn’t really worry about it, thinking that this would always be the case. But democracy, it must be maintained, looked after. In America people have too much comfort, they don’t want to be bothered, so they get stuck in a simplistic ideology. I am often confronted with students who tell me: “ I can’t read this because it makes me uncomfortable, I find it disturbing”. And I want to tell them: “ But life is disturbing!« If we cannot tolerate someone else’s words, how can we tolerate their reality, or even their existence? If we cannot look at someone and say: “I am opposed to you, but I know that you exist”, we will become a totalitarian statewho wants to eliminate the opponent. In democracy, we do not eliminate the other, we exchange with them.

Speaking of disturbing books, you mention Margaret Atwood and The Scarlet Handmaid. You explain that Atwood’s fiction closely resembled your reality… We come to the universality of the experience of fiction.

That’s what makes fiction so great. It is written from a specific place, but it is universal. Sure, Atwood’s novel is a dystopia, but in a way, I lived it. When my Iranian friends told me they didn’t want to talk about it because they felt like they were going through this situation, I told them that this was precisely why we had to talk about it. That this is why Atwood is important. She carries the message victims of totalitarianism with other countries which are not (yet) totalitarian.

The book also addresses the issue of backlash, the fact that our rights are not a right but a privilege.

We are experiencing it right now, this backlash. I often tell my students that their rights were not given to them by the grace of God, that people died so that they can enjoy it. And it always annoys me how people living in democratic societies have no awareness of the fact that the rights they have can be taken away at any time. People like Trump today have our rights in their line of sight.

You quote Ray Bradbury, or Salman Rushdie, who says how literature tells the truth, when the State needs the false.

The writer reveals the truth to the world. But when we know the truth, we cannot remain silent, otherwise we become complicit in the crimes that are committed. The beauty of it is that it’s not just the writers who are involved in the truth. Readers are too. The truth is so dangerousthat the first thing that totalitarian systems do is attack the bearers of truth, women, minorities, and those who work in the domain of imagination and ideas. But the good news is that they are afraid. The fact that they use their weapons is not a sign of strength. Strength is on the side of these young Iranian women who take off their veils and take to the streets. The regime is not powerful. He is violent, but not powerful.

You also mention Middle Eastern writers like David Grossman. They talk about war, and for them, writing is a weapon of peace, pushing people to know the enemy, to understand their humanity.

It’s the hardest thing in life, look at your enemy like a human being. It’s so easy to let hatred possess you. Understanding your enemy means refusing to go to his territory, to bring him to ours. Writing is an act of love. We can hate, while writing, but the best writings are acts of revelation. To yourself and others. We write to be read. We get closer to people who are not like us, which leads to empathy.

Your father said that the whole world knows a lot about America, but America doesn’t know much about the world. We come back to curiosity.

Yes, my father was obsessed with Americahe looked at it as a phenomenon that he wanted to understand. For him, what put America in danger was ignorance. Not knowing the world, but still making a judgment on the world. My father gave me a taste for books and, thanks to them, I visited many countries before even setting foot there. I call it my “portable world,” and no one can take that away from me. Right now in the United States, we are in the heart of a hurricane. This hurricane can take everything you own. But neither he nor anyone can ever take me my imaginary world.

You cite the example of a young student, Razieh, “in love” with Henry James, to the point of talking about him until his last hours, locked in an Iranian jail. It also shows how literature travels through space and time.

Yes, literature transcends all obstacles that reality puts in our path. It transcends nationality, gender, race, religion. She takes us to a republic of the imagination where everyone is welcome. This is the ultimate democracy. I always say that libraries are the most democratic places in the world.