- So much of our modern life is built upon simplifying the complex.

We reduce social interactions to likes and follows on social media and dilute the news in our favorite echo chambers, but today's guest warns that life is not simple, and the complexity found in great literature is ultimately liberating of the mind and essential to the health of our democracy.

She's best-selling author Azar Nafisi, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes fro the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with The Providence Journal.

- This week, we're sitting down with Azar Nafisi, whose new book I can describe as an extended love letter to reading, books, poetry, complexity, and ideas and is titled "Read Dangerously: the Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times," and it's excellent.

Azar, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- Yeah, so really, congratulations on "Read Dangerously."

I read it and was absolutely enthralled with it.

For our audience who maybe hasn't read it yet, could you give us just a quick overview?

- When I was getting a little bit desperate and frustrated with the direction that the country has been going, especially since the last elections in 2016, and I usually vent my frustrations in writing, so I started writing letters like Saul Bellow's "Herzog" to everyone that I could think of, and some of them to people like Donald Trump even, telling him what I thought of him, and to my father, who has been dead for 12 years.

Well, at that time, he was dead for 12 years, and I was particularly worried about the polarization in the society and how there was no room for conversation.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I started by writing these random letters, but that's what they were, random.

They couldn't be turned into a book, so then I started writing to the writers that I had chosen to talk about, and that didn't work either because I wasn't intimate with them.

I couldn't know about their private lives.

We didn't have a relationship in that way.

So I was talking to a friend and complaining about it, and she said, "Why don't you write to a third person?"

And immediately, my father came to my mind.

He and I had a long history of communicating through two things.

One was through stories and another one through conversations and letters, and I felt that he was the best person to listen to me, so I turned the book into five letters, each covering some writers and some aspect of the main theme, which was how to deal with the enemy, how to deal with the circumstances during turbulent times, and so that is how the book began its journey.

- You know, the book is an incredible tribute to these authors as well that you highlight.

Salman Rushdie, Plato, Ray Bradbury, Toni Morrison.

The list goes on and on.

Did you know, you know, before you started writing, the particular authors that you would wanna include in this, or did some of these emerge to you in the course of writing?

- They emerged in the course of writing.

First of all, I found an excuse to read and reread because now, it was my duty to do it for my books, so I had a lot of fun for the reading part.

The agony came when I started to write, and there were a lot of writers that I had considered, for example, Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," Nathanael West's "Cool Million," and I even wrote a chapter on Mario Vargas Llosa's "Feast of the Goat," and it was a very difficult choice, but I found the ones whose work really suited to the themes that I wanted to talk about and the ideas that I wanted to talk about.

- So Azar, what makes a book dangerous?

- Well, not any book is dangerous.

It's usually, when I was talking about fiction, I was talking about great fiction and what it does because fiction is democratic by nature, I mean.

The good writer has to give voice to every single character in the novel.

It has to bring them to life through getting under their skin, and even the villain, even the characters the writer might not like have to have their voice, and there is constant discourse between these characters, and the plot moves through these different discourses.

So that in itself, the democratic aspect of the novel, is very dangerous.

The second thing is what we see, especially nowadays, that more totalitarian mindsets, whether they are in a theocracy like Iran or as trends within a democracy like United States, the first thing they do is to fabricate reality, to empty reality of its realness and replace it with their lies, and the duty of fiction, and some of the writers in my book directly address this.

They call themselves witnesses.

The duty of the writer is to tell the truth, and truth is always dangerous because once you hear it, you cannot remain silent, and if you do remain silent, you become complicit, so reading dangerously is reading without the complacencies that makes you question (audio cutting out) but not yourself.

You yourself become suspect, and you go into the book without imposing your own presuppositions and the prejudices on the book.

- So what do we, as individuals and as a society gain by reading dangerously?

What's the value?

I mean, there are some people who would say we don't wanna read dangerously precisely because there are truths that we either don't believe or don't wanna confront or face.

What's the value, I mean, what would you say to people who might not want to read dangerously?

- Well, the whole point about it is, you know, one of the problems with our society today is that everybody wants to be comfortable, and that can especially manifest itself in reading and writing.

Keep hearing the word comfortable, that I'm not comfortable with this, that it (audio cutting out) you.

Well, I agree with James Baldwin, that art is here to disturb.

The whole idea of not is to let you know about things that you don't know, is to take you to places you haven't been, to introduce you to people you haven't seen, and look at the world through the alternative eyes of these people and of these places.

So when we do not (audio cutting out) reading dangerously, we are eliminating, we are depriving ourselves of a branch of knowledge that is so important to our survival as human beings.

Books do not make policies, but they help the mindset.

They help to create mindsets that makes those policies, and books teach us how to become independent.

Imaginative knowledge is not something you have today, and tomorrow, you have your iPhone, so you don't need it.

Imaginative knowledge is a way of perceiving the world, relating to the world, and changing the world, and if we don't, we remain stagnant.

We wither and literally die.

- So we're recording this during the third week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and reading and reading dangerously, of course, it comes immediately to mind both for people within Ukraine and other parts of the world, but also within Russia.

I'm sure you've given that situation and the value of reading dangerously, and not just books, but also other media.

What are your thoughts on that?

- Yeah, first of all, a quotation from Henry James comes to my mind during World War I, that he opposed vehemently.

He wrote a letter to a friend and said, "Feel.

Feel all you can as a way of resisting against the war," and fiction puts us in that place because it deals not with general ideas but with concrete individuals, and if the writer does her job well, she will make the reader also put herself or himself in the experience of those people, and the other thing about fiction is that it teaches us to not become like our enemy.

It is so easy.

You know, heaven's sake, you see these children dying on the television set, and you hate the perpetrators.

You want to do something terrible to them, as they're doing something terrible to these children and their parents, and then through the eyes of fiction, and through the eyes of empathy, you realize that you're becoming like your enemy, wanting their death because of the death they're causing your people, and look at what Ukrainians did.

Putin killed their children.

They contacted the mothers of the Russian soldiers, asking them to come and collect their sons.

That is how you save yourself from becoming like the enemy.

The enemy can deprive you of life in two ways.

One is physically kill you.

The second is to make your mindset totalitarian as well, and we see that within our own society, how people we disagree with, people we oppose, become enemies in a sense that we try to eliminate them rather than at first understand them.

- Azar, you grapple with just really profound issues and questions that sort of cut to the core of what it means to be human.

One of the passages early in the text, you write, "It's not only censorship that is dangerous to the wellbeing of a society, but also the mindlessness created by the constant demand for entertainment and sensationalism, a desire to remain on the surface and avoid the complexities and difficulties presented by ideas and imagination."

It strikes me that so much of what you're doing is challenging all of us to be courageous in what we're reading.

Can you speak to those two points about mindlessness and the need for us to be courageous?

- Well, yes.

You know, Ray Bradbury had said that you don't need to burn books to destroy a culture.

All you need to do is to get people not to read them.

In democracies, we don't act the way that totalitarian societies act.

We don't, well, we do censor and ban books, but we don't jail authors.

We don't torture them.

We don't even sometimes kill them.

We don't do any of those things, but there is something very lethal about indifference.

We destroy writing and reading through not paying attention to them, through being too complacent, through being too comfortable.

End of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," I have said that, with a quotation from Saul Bellow, that Stalin, in the totalitarian society, what he did was naked violence.

It was obvious to everyone.

He said what threatens the West is our sleeping consciousness and atrophy of feeling, and that goes exactly against the grain of writing, any kind of writing, not just fiction.

It is an investigation.

It is an (audio cutting out) discovery, and therefore, it is an awakening to life.

Our five senses become alive, and I ask you, if we are indifferent towards ideas and imagination, if we think that reading a book is disturbing, therefore we should read it, how are we going to face the (audio cutting out)?

Imagination and reality go hand in hand.

Fiction prepares you for the difficulties you inevitably face life.

Fiction is ambiguous, contradictory, unruly, paradoxical because life is unruly, paradoxical, ambiguous, so to live a little bit more, we go to (audio cutting out), and we have to start this from early childhood.

We have to start it with our education system, and our education system today is going the exact direction of what I'm talking about.

- Well, that's one of the things I wanted to ask you about because there has been a movement in recent, hell, months, if not years, around the country to (sighs) stifle ideas, to silence the voices of authors, to eliminate books from elementary school, middle school, and high school libraries.

Toni Morrison is one of the authors that you mentioned.

Some of her works have been put on banned books lists in public schools in certain parts of the United States.

Could you put that current American experience into the challenge you've given to all of us to read dangerously?

- You know, every totalitarian mindset, the first things that they target are the things that they are most afraid of, namely women, minorities, and culture.

So books become indicators of how democracy is doing in any one country.

You know, the saying they first burn books, then they kill people, so censorship.

May I make my point with an anecdote?

- [Jim] Please.

- For a long time, the main censor for theater in the Islamic Republic of Iran was a blind person, literally blind, and he would sit in the theater, and someone would sit beside him and explain to him what the actors on stage did, and then he would decide whether they should continue doing it or not, and he told the script writers and the playwrights to read their scripts on tape without any emotion or dramatic dramatization, and then he would decide what to censor and what not to censor.

Later on, when he quit his job in theater, he went on to a new television channel.

So this blind censor for me became a metaphor for what a totalitarian mindset is essentially, as opposed to the mindset nurtured by imagination and ideas.

It does not need to see you because it has already defined you.

What he wants to do is empty you of your identification and replace it with its dogma, and the way we resist this is through reading and reading more.

I think in every library, in every bookstore, especially in every school, we should create subversive book groups, and we should read the banned books in order to understand it.

You know, they talk about Art Spiegelman's "Maus" as obscene.

(panelist sighing) Obscenity's in the eye of the beholder.

I mean, naked mice are called obscene, and they are drained of the meaning that Spiegelman was trying to put, the point he was trying to make, that they are naked because they are going to their death.

They will be exterminated.

That idea, that idea is vulgarized, actually, and made obscene through the eye of the censor, and it is our, we consider ourselves nowadays because of the war in Ukraine as leader of the free world, leading democracy, and I think that we learn two lessons from it.

One is that democracy or totalitarianism in other parts of the world matter to us, that people who live thousands of miles away from us, whose language we don't speak, whose people we don't know, democracy in their country will directly and indirectly affect democracy in our country, and the second thing is how can we become leader of the democratic world when we ourselves are questioning the basic tenets, which is freedom of expression, in our democracy?

- So- - Freed, yes.

- No, I'm sorry, but you began to address this, and you are talking about it now.

I'm wondering if you could just elaborate.

You know, people began reading, obviously, as children.

What would you say to young children, to their parents or guardians or people who have, you know, guardianship for them, and for somewhat older children who have, you know, some choice in what they read and to teach us, what would you say just in general about reading?

- Well, for children and adults, I always go to "Alice in Wonderland."

The whole idea of reading is discovering something that you don't know, and a good reader, a reader that is a reader who, like Alice, sees the world through the alternative eyes of imagination, so just doesn't see a white rabbit, but a white rabbit that speaks and has a watch, and she runs after that white rabbit out of curiosity, wanting to know.

She doesn't say, "Where is this white rabbit go?

Will I like the place he's going to?

What if I don't want to go there?"

She follows him and risks jumping down the hole, and lo and behold, once she jumps down the hole, she looks at the wonderland.

Children understand this very well.

I have been reading to my grandchildren, and I know that they instinctively turn everything that is ordinary into something extraordinary and magical.

It is the adults that we should train to allow the children's imagination develop and to not be afraid of obstacles, to not want to have something that allows them not to think because thinking, as soon as we start thinking, we start questionings, and as soon as we start questioning, we question not just ourselves but the world.

- Azar, you, as I mentioned, you cover a tremendous amount of important issues, but one of the themes that you come back to repeatedly is the idea and role of empathy in literature, and in the letter or chapter that you talk about the literature of war, you particularly emphasize the power of empathy over cold, hard facts.

That's actually something that's at the central inspiration for this show.

Can you talk to us about the power of empathy?

- Yes, actually I think in my works of imagination rely on two basic human traits.

One is curiosity, and I always remember Vladimir Nabokov saying, "Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form," which it is, because it brings us out of ourselves and makes us look into the mirror, and we might not like what we see, and alongside of curiosity, once we become curious about others, we have empathy because we, through curiosity, we have the ability to put ourselves in the place and under the skin of people we don't know, and even people we don't like and people we oppose and disagree with.

Now, without this empathy, we lose quite a bit of humanity.

Now, difference is very important.

We should celebrate difference.

We should bring others into our domain and go into their domain, but difference without empathy is very dangerous.

Look at all the dangerous movements in the 20th century, fascism and communism, or look at slavery.

They all talk about how different we are.

They all use this difference not to unite, not to connect, but to destroy and disconnect, to segregate, so empathy is a reminder of our common humanity.

We always, when we read a great book, we discovered not just how different we are, but how alike we are, how as human beings, how many areas we share that a mother whose son, children have been killed in the war in Iraq has something in common with the mother today in Ukraine, or with the mother who has lost her children through the tornado.

That Shakespearean expression, a question, "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

I think we all bleed, and because we all bleed, we need the power of empathy to understand that.

- Azar, this is a really important book.

- Thank you so much for being with us.

- [Azar] Thank you.

- She's Azar Nafisi.

The book is "Read Dangerously."

It's an exceptional read.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit PellCenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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