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.
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.
Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to challenge negative traditions, and create to new ones.
America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic – not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels – the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams.
We do not read in order to turn great works of fiction into simplistic replicas of our own realities, we read for the pure, sensual, and unadulterated pleasure of reading. And if we do so, our reward is the discovery of the many hidden layers within these works that do not merely reflect reality but reveal a spectrum of truths, thus intrinsically going against the grain of totalitarian mindsets.
It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen’s novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.
How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination.
The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.
Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that it exists.
Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark,” Baldwin said in an interview in 1961. “Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.