When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?
Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
There is little consolation in the fact that millions of people are unhappier than we are. Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.
The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.
The more we die, the stronger we will become.
Art is as useful as bread.
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.
Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran.
The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.
Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women’s dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.
In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women’s rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran’s culture.
I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture – as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine.
I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.
I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.
I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.
For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women’s struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.