Azar Nafisi, the internationally renowned Iranian author and scholar whose bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran has been translated into more than 30 languages, possesses the rare ability to extract meaning and beauty from life’s ugliest fragments. And, as Nafisi demonstrated somewhat unexpectedly to Tuesday night’s sold-out crowd at the Al Green Theatre, she is also funny. Settling breezily into her chair opposite interviewer Eleanor Wachtel, Nafisi’s first action is to crack open a Tetra Pak. “This is water,” she jokingly assured her audience following a lengthy swig, “not wine.”
Still, Nafisi is serious when it comes to the subject of literature and her beloved “dead white men,” whose words once posed a very real threat to her existence. Reading Lolita in Tehran detailed the author’s experience as a teacher of banned Western classics to a group of female students in Iran, and since the book’s release she has not returned to her home country. The risk is too great, she says. One never knows what might happen.
As Nafisi explains, the current state of Iran is “not just a political struggle, but an existential one,” a crisis borne of conflicting narratives and stifled ingenuity. Nafisi points out that the number of journalists in jail is higher in Iran than anywhere else in the world, and the voices of artists and writers are constantly being stifled. This is the problem of totalitarian regimes, says Nafisi: “[They have] everything at their command but imagination.”
Literature is the antidote to a crisis of imagination, and Nafisi’s veneration for both the written word and the material history of the book, as artefact, bears an almost childlike fervour. She refers to a series of book portraits taken by Slovak-Canadian photographer Yuri Dojc with admiration, noting how these books—which, photographed in an abandoned Jewish school in eastern Slovakia, had remained untouched since the moment in 1943 when the school had been emptied by invading Nazis—had preserved history by defying death. “You want to hug these books,” she says.
For Nafisi, books are a connective tissue between past and present. Nafisi still keeps in touch with some of her former students from the clandestine reading group profiled in Reading Lolita in Tehran. “Books connect you to who you should be connected to,” Nafisi explains. “That is the miracle of writing and reading, the way you keep the connections.”
—Kelli Korducki
