Azar Nafisi

I read Reading Lolita in Tehran while in prison. My notes on that may appear here some here someday, but let me say here it gave me an appreciation for Lolita I did not have before. Professor Nafisi also improved my attitude towards Henry James. I thoroughly her book.

The Rumpus interviewed her under the headline READING FICTION AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE: A CONVERSATION WITH AZAR NAFISI. If you are interested in books or writing and/or their importance to us as human beings, please read the full interview. Meanwhile, chew on this:

Nafisi: When I was just beginning to write this book, I was so afraid of what was happening. There were little warnings here and there. I am very concerned when we either ignore or are indifferent towards ideas and imagination. Ideas and imagination are not simply things in the classroom or within a book we read. Imaginative knowledge is a way of looking at the world, relating to the world, and changing the world. That is how I see literature. I feel we sorely need it when the attitude at this time is so anti-democratic, so anti-literature.

What has burned me the most after I began regaining  my lucidity was how I gave up the fight for the things that make us better people. Since then I have been attempting to atone for my cowardice. Ms. Nafisi points the way, I think:

At the end of my book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, I include a quotation from Bellow. To paraphrase, he said what is dangerous to a democratic society is our sleeping consciousness, our atrophy of feeling. That was what worried me about the US—that we have become numb in terms of our consciousness and our feelings. We need the life-giving essence of art, literature, music to bring us back into the world. It brings us back the way Alice comes back from Wonderland with new eyes to look at the world.

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 3/8/22