For years, Azar Nafisi sheltered an island of transgression in the very heart of the Islamic Republic. In her living room in Tehran, she received young women passionate about literature to whom she introduced the great Western authors after having been banned from teaching at university for having refused the compulsory veil in Iran in 1981. She recounts her precious hours in Reading Lolita in Tehrana global bestseller published in 2004. Twenty years later, Zulma Editions reissued the work, which will soon be adapted for the cinema with Franco-Iranian actresses Golshifteh Farahani and Zar Amir Ebrahimi.
Azar Nafisi, 69, has also just published with Zulma Read dangerouslyan epistolary novel where she addresses her deceased father. Written during Donald Trump’s first term, the work recounts the fears that invaded her while her adopted country, where she has lived since 1997, is the scene of growing radicalism, and of a “more mentality more totalitarian”. From the Islamic Republic to the United States, she denounces the pernicious censorship that undermines democracy. Interview.
L’Express: Your latest work, Read dangerouslyis a call not to let the mind fall asleep, to revive democracy and to dialogue with those who have opposing opinions. To what extent has the United States become a society where no one can talk to each other anymore?
Azar Nafisi: In all my books I have expressed my concern not only about totalitarian societies, but also about democracies. When you are an immigrant, you look at your new home through the eyes of your old one. And we can realize: what happened there can happen here. America is obsessed with the absolute pursuit of mental comfort, people do not want to be disturbed in their beliefs. But of course the others bother us! Because they look at the world not through our eyes, but through their own eyes. And they reveal things to us that we didn’t know and maybe didn’t want to know. To quote Canadian-American writer Saul Bellow, who says that in a country like the Soviet Union, in a totalitarian system, murder and brutality are blatant, but in a democracy, we don’t kill dissidents, we don’t imprison them.
But what constantly threatens us is the atrophy of feelings and of our sleeping consciousness, the temptation of the comfort of the mind. We want not to listen to the voice of our conscience. We don’t want to be in touch with reality. An attack on fiction is taking place right now, not just in totalitarian societies, but here in the United States. Books are prohibited. People sometimes tell me: “I don’t want to read this book because it troubles me.” But damn, life is confusing! If you can’t meet these challenges, how are you going to maintain democracy? Increasingly, when I talk to Americans about totalitarianism and the dangers it poses in a democratic society, they tell me it’s happening in Iran but it won’t happen here. I usually answer that if you think it can’t happen here, chances are it’s already happening.
How do you feel as a writer about these book bans?
This is what I call totalitarian mentalities. And I deliberately use the term mentalities because it is not just a political question. The fight against a totalitarian system is not political. It’s an existential question. You are fighting for your life, and “they” are fighting for your hearts and minds. That’s how it is. Books like Bluest EyesOr Beloved by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin’s books, are disturbing because they show aspects of ourselves that we don’t like. A totalitarian system is based on lies: whether you live in the Islamic Republic of Iran or the United States of America, totalitarianism begins with lies.
They attack three groups first, women, those who work on imagination and ideas – writers, poets -, and minorities. Literature reveals the truth. These men and women, these writers, these poets and these artists who are in prison or who have been killed by totalitarian systems or whose books have been banned, have no other weapons than the words they possess. And yet, these words are so dangerous for totalitarian mentalities that a powerful man who has all these military forces, militias and bombs, like Ayatollah Khomeini [fondateur de la République islamique, qui lança une fatwa contre Salman Rushdie] cannot be at peace as long as a man of only words, like Salman Rushdie, is alive.
How can we combat this mindset, in a totalitarian place like Iran?
For more than forty years, the Islamic Republic has tried to do two things. The first was to get women to accept its rules, its norms, and the second to ensure that writers, artists, poets and filmmakers write what the regime wants. They failed. In this kind of system, you try to defend your identity as a human being. When I was in Iran, I did not fight politically against these people. I was fighting because as a woman, as a human rights defender, as a teacher, as a friend, as a mother, I was ashamed of what they wanted. I become.
Because when I put on this obligatory veil, I disappeared. I hated myself because I was suddenly a figment of someone else’s imagination. What some have done, by contrast, in Eastern Europe or in fascist countries, is to express their freedom in an ever stronger way. These girls go out into the street and cut their hair, they know they could be killed at any moment, but they go anyway. The streets of Tehran were sometimes the scene of the sound of bullets. What are the Iranian people doing in response to this? He takes to the streets, in public places, in parks, and the Iranians sing and dance, to drown out the noise of the bullets. The regime did not succeed. And that’s what the Iranian people have finally discovered, that they have power. What will the regime do in the face of millions of people taking to the streets and singing? Can he really kill them all?
It seems that since the Islamic Republic existed, there have always been many people in Iran fighting it. What is your feeling about the movement born in 2022, “Woman, Life, Liberty”?
Two important things about this movement: it was built from the movements of the mothers, grandmothers and even great-grandmothers of these young people. We should not forget it. The second thing is that my generation never had faith in the Islamic Republic, but many Iranians believed that this system could gradually change through reforms. At each presidential election, the regime presented someone as a reformer and the people voted for them. But when they came to power, nothing changed. Young people today refuse to play this game.
Since I came to the United States, every time I talk about the situation of women in Iran, someone stands up and says, “But that’s their culture. You’re Westernized.” This really annoys me. These people are ignorant, they don’t know Iran. At the beginning of the revolution, as the Islamic Republic was beginning in Iran, there was a large demonstration by women against the regime. One of their slogans was: “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western. Freedom is universal.” If stoning, polygamy, marriage at the age of nine are my culture, then slavery, fascism, communism are the culture of the West. I think of Afghanistan too. Those who say such things cannot imagine living for a single moment under the Taliban. Our role is to reveal the true culture of these countries. These people are arrogant because they have the impression that freedom should only be the privilege of the West.
In your latest book, you say that Trump shares with the leaders of the Islamic Republic cruelty, incompetence and contempt for human life. You live in the United States today, how do you feel about Trump returning to power?
I feel anger and indignation. Not so much against Trump, but against ordinary, decent people who voted for him. We can be kind to our neighbors, but we can also be indifferent to the anguish of others, to the pain of others. That’s what it inspires me to do. Since leaving the Islamic Republic, I have carried with me anxiety and fear. Sometimes I feel like this anxiety flows like blood through my veins. The election of Trump revives it. But it also allowed me to learn how much power each of us has.
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You know, totalitarianism is very attractive. Democracy requires us to be responsible.
Trump won the popular vote in the United States. Many Iranians also followed Ayatollah Khomeini at the time. How do you explain it?
This brings us back to the beginning of our conversation about people wanting to live in a certain amount of moral comfort. You know, totalitarianism is very attractive. Democracy requires us to be responsible. Saul Bellow, always, says: “Those who survived the ordeal of the Holocaust, how will they survive the test of freedom?” Because freedom and democracy are very difficult tests to overcome. It is much easier to put ourselves in the hands of Trump, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or Hitler and tell ourselves that they are taking care of us. The people of my second homeland, America, have forgotten that this freedom did not always exist, that millions and millions of people died and are still dying today. For us to have this freedom, we must maintain and protect it. Unfortunately, we gave up on it.
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The facts have become very dangerous, no one wants to hear them.
Do you think social networks play their part?
Yes, I blame social media. Look at the role they played during the elections. I really pity today’s poor journalists because they find themselves in controversies they never asked to be drawn into. Just because they deal with facts, and facts have become very dangerous, no one wants to hear them. With social media you can spread so many lies and nothing happens to you. I think there should be control. However, in repressive societies, they become one of the ways to connect to the world.
In fact, the image of a young Iranian woman undressing on a campus in protest has gone around the world. How did you feel when you saw this video?
She broke my heart. She transformed her body, everything she is, into an act of silent protest. This goes beyond courage. It is a personal and existential question and those who reduce it to a single political expression are not doing us any good.
Do you still see the future with optimism for Iran or for the United States?
Vaclav Havel says that hope is not optimism. He says we do things in hope, not because we’re going to be rewarded and not because we know what’s going to happen next. We hope because it is the right thing to do. So I think it’s very important, to be resilient in the face of such a repressive mindset, to not give up, to not give up on yourself.
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