- Great writers have an ability to transport their audience to other worlds simply by the conjuring of words and imagination.

Today's guest not only moves her readers, but she offers a defense of democracy and a celebration of reading great books at the same time.

She's a Azar Nafisi, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

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

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

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also at Salves Pell Center.

- This week we're sitting down with acclaimed author and human rights activist Azar Nafisi, who you may know from her books, including "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and most recently "Read Dangerously."

Azar, it's a thrill to have you here.

Thank you so much for being with us.

- Absolute pleasure to be here.

- We have you in Rhode Island because later tonight we're going to honor you at Salve Regina University with the Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square.

Congratulations.

- Thank you.

- This is really a testament to your entire body of work over the course of your career, but we wanna talk to you a little bit about the broader issues as well as the books.

And I know, you and I had dinner last night, and we were talking a little bit about 2014.

You published "The Republic of Imagination."

- [Azar] Yeah.

- And you were picking up on something that the rest of us maybe were not at that point, but this authoritarian, autocratic tendency in American politics.

You see this as a threat to the West in general, and globally.

What cued you in that there was something afoot with this new rising appeal to authoritarianism?

- Well, first of all, it's amazing to be here today.

Thank you.

Well, you know, I think this is one of the advantages of being an immigrant, because you look at your new home through the eyes of the old one.

And so I became sensitized to certain trends here in United States that I had seen happen already in more extreme fashion in Iran.

And it wasn't actually, it didn't start with censor.

It started with the indifference that I saw in people.

You know, Ray Bradbury talks about you don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.

All you have to do is to make people not read.

And that is what was happening.

There was this sort of utilitarian attitude towards imagination and ideas, whereby we were advising our children to go into science and technology and mathematics, not because they were in love with it, not because they were passionate with it, not because they would gain more knowledge, but because it would make more money.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- And so this corporate attitude alongside of ideology that I saw almost when I came back to United States in 1970.

- Did you, you mentioned the experience of the Islamic Revolution in your native Iran.

How much, though, does literature, in your love of books and all the reading that you've done contributed to that sensitivity that you have to these broader trends in society?

- Well, you know, literature is one of the most dangerous things to an authoritarian mindset because literature and arts, imagination and ideas, they're after the truth.

And truth is always dangerous because once you know it, you become complicit if you don't do something about it.

And it is one of the, literature becomes in this way not politicized, but in an existential way it becomes the enemy of authoritarianism, because authoritarian trends, whether they're in the Islamic Republic or as trends in United States of America, they survive on lies.

They are enemies of truth, and they confiscate our reality and refabricate it, so that is why literature becomes so dangerous, you know?

- So what is it about literature that makes it dangerous in terms of tyrants, being an enemy of tyrants?

What is it?

The reading experience?

Talk about that.

What is essential in reading and in literature?

- Well, to begin with, reading and literature are based on two very important human traits.

One is curiosity.

I remember Nabokov would be saying curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

(Jim and G. Wayne chuckling) - That's a great observation.

- Yeah, because once you become curious, you, you become curious, you have to get out of your skin and go under the skin of others.

Curiosity is about the thirst for knowledge.

And that is dangerous to any authoritarian mindset, whether here or in Iran.

And the second thing is empathy.

You do go under the skin of other people, and that is how you connect, that is how you survive through these connections.

Now, take the structure of novel.

I'm not talking about what the novel talks about, but structurally a novel is democratic, it is anti-authoritarian because the writer has to give voice to numerous characters.

Even the villain gets a chance to talk.

And that goes against the basic structure of authoritarian thinking, you know?

So just reading novels trains your mind to look at the world through diverse voices.

- So, you talk about empathy, and I think we would all agree that there is a lack of empathy among many people in this country, in your native country and really around the world.

Is that something that stems from human nature?

Where does that lack of empathy come from?

Or is that something that is forced on people depending on where they?

Maybe force is too strong a word, but is a result of where they live.

I mean, talk about empathy, I guess this is what I'm asking.

- As you were talking, I was thinking that empathy, the interesting thing about it is that it is needed for our survival.

You know, without empathy, as human beings we cannot live for one moment.

So, what is good is essential to the nature of empathy.

I mean, it is to our advantage as human beings to be empathetic.

You know, before the show we were, you were talking about how electric cars are more cost effective than the other kind of cars, and that is why the corporate is now going after electric cars.

Well, it does good for us to have electric cars, but the reason for it is because it is good for them as well.

Now, that is the truth about empathy.

It is good for our survival.

And that is why I think we need it.

We won't survive without it.

- You know, I've, I absolutely am moved by your writing on a regular basis, and I find myself sort of drawn into the world that you've created in between the covers of your books.

In doing so, it's for me in the moment a very singular experience 'cause it's me and your book.

But you've described reading as a communal experience as well.

And I wonder if you could just speak about that a little bit.

- Well, just think of a book, any book, and just think of how many thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people are simultaneously reading the same book, you know?

So, a book does two things for us.

First, it's a very private experience.

I mean, I go to bed with my books.

I like their smell.

I like to touch them.

So it is a very private experience.

But at the same time, I'm sharing it with all these other readers whom I don't know.

I call them intimate strangers because while we don't know one another, we do know one another through this deep passion that we have for reading, and so it becomes a very unique experience.

- Is that experience different in a repressive authoritarian society than it would be in America?

In "The Republic of Imagination" the book begins with your encounter with a fan, someone who was there at a book signing who himself was an immigrant from Iran who describes sort of the desperate nature of being able to get photocopied texts of books that were banned, otherwise banned in the country.

Is that experience of that communal shared experience of reading different in the United States?

Because by and large, though not exclusively, we'll talk about it.

We still have free access to the things we wanna read.

- Oh, definitely.

Definitely there's a different feel to it for both the reasons you mentioned and also for the fact that when we have, when we live in a society that gives us no space to think, to feel, to live, you know, the spaces that fiction creates become as important as bread and water.

They're basic to us, you know?

And there are also means of communicating with the world that was taken away from us.

When we lived in Iran, we had almost no access to the outside world.

So we started creating these underground spaces where we would read underground books, we would listen to underground music, we would watch underground art, and we knew that we could pay heavily for it.

This is a country that kills, literally kills its writers and poets.

From its inception, the Islamic Republic has been attacking and killing and trying to destroy, so it has a different meaning.

But where we go wrong in a democracy is to think that because we are a democracy we don't need imagination or idea, while a democracy is built on imagination and ideas.

Bloody hell.

I mean, I tell my students sometimes, I used to when I was teaching, tell my students this is the most poetic country in the world when its Declaration of Independence says "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness."

You know?

And how could we forget this?

So, yes, I feel deeply about that.

- So we're gonna get into book banning and censorship efforts today in the United States, but I wanna go back to when you were in Iran, taking that great risk, and many other people with you, to read forbidden books, to view forbidden videos or movies or whatever it was at that time.

What gave you and the others who participated the courage to take that risk?

I mean, the risk was real.

It wasn't just like, well, I might get a fine.

It could be I could be locked up or I could be killed.

- You know, there's something magical inside you.

You know that you have to pay the price, but you see, the way an authoritarian system wants us to live is a kind of death.

They confiscate your history, your traditions.

They confiscate the way you feel, the way you think.

They want to refabricate you, they want to reshape you.

So these readings or listening to music or the arts was a way of surviving that imposition, surviving the fact that they wanted us to not be who we are.

And, you know, right now in Iran as we speak, in Iran young people are coming into the streets against the compulsory hijab and asking for freedom.

They get killed and they know that they get killed and they come into the streets.

One trick that the regime uses encountering the protestors is that they use the kind of BB guns where they shoot into the eyes of the protestors, blinding them.

And they come into the streets again saying, "We gave an eye for freedom."

- [G. Wayne] Wow.

- So my- - How brave.

- Retaking the risk to read is nothing compared to what these young people right now as we speak are doing for freedom and for life.

- You know, one of the things that I have found compelling about your work is not just that democracies do require imagination, but that democracies are not immune to some of the more authoritarian tendencies in people.

We're celebrating you against the backdrop of this rise in censorship and book banning in the United States.

There's a long list of titles that we could cite, but I'm mindful of the graphic novel "Maus."

- [Azar] Yes.

- About the Holocaust, which has been banned in some public school libraries because it's said to normalize, and that's a quote, normalize sexuality, vulgarity and violence.

It's about the Holocaust.

There's another movement to censor portrayals of Michelangelo's "David."

- [Azar] Of "David."

- As indecent.

What does that kind of censorship tell us about America in 2023?

And what's the risk in that kind of censorship?

- It sort of takes me back to Iran covering "David."

You know, in a church in Iran, they cover the Jesus because he was so, you know?

They turn these things into absurdities.

The tragedy is that absurdity is the way we live, you know?

And so it scares me a great deal.

In United States there is a cult now celebrating ignorance.

And I always remember Baldwin saying, "Ignorance allied with power is the most pernicious enemy of justice that justice can have."

And we have people in the Congress who don't know the difference between gazpacho and Gestapo, and these are the people who want "Maus" banned, because they don't understand Holocaust.

It's just a word for them to bandy about, you know?

As insulting is when they talk about wanting these freedoms as Nazism, fascism, while they themselves are being inspired by fascistic thinking.

- So you've used the term ignorance, and and I think it's spot on and completely accurate.

My question would be, how do you counter that?

How do you counter that?

Is this an issue for schools, grammar, elementary schools, high schools for teaching?

Is it larger than that?

How do you counter that?

Because it clearly is dangerous.

- Yeah.

- There's no question.

- It is both dangerous and it should be encountered in schools, in libraries, in bookshops, everywhere that there's an affiliation with imagination and ideas, but I think we need to go beyond that.

I always imagine these groups, some of them book groups that go beyond what schools teach them, do what we used to do in Iran.

Take care of our own education, read banned books.

We need to discuss these much more on a national level than we do.

Create cells in universities that will be talking about things, that instead of throwing speakers out, bring them in.

Bring even the ones that you consider your opponents or your enemies in.

Understand them if you want to even defeat them, you know?

So I want us to be disturbed.

- So we were talking before we taped about children and grandchildren.

We're all parents here.

You and I are also grandparents.

It seems that parents have a role.

- [Azar] Yes.

- In countering ignorance as well.

It isn't simply an institutional or an educational issue.

Parents in the family.

Can you talk about that?

I'm sure you agree, but talk about that.

- Yeah, yeah.

And this shows, when you have the parents on this level of ignorance, you have to think that our educational system, there has been something deeply wrong with it, that it creates people who have no idea, who are not interested in history.

I mean, had parents been reading history, they would know that all these rights that they so nonchalantly are taking away from us were gained at, lives were lost.

I talk about lives being lost in Iran.

Lives were lost in this country from its inception so that we will have freedom of speech.

And this is serious.

Some of these people are more serious about keeping guns than reading books.

You know?

They find that more American, the violence of guns more American than the beauty of books.

So we are in a very difficult, living in a very difficult crisis-ridden times.

- Very powerfully put.

- One of the things that I've admired about your writing and the way you talk about this issue is that it's not just up to society in some sort of abstract sense to respond, but it's up to all of us as individuals.

- [Azar] Yeah.

- To respond, to offer resistance to that authoritarian tendency.

What can we do as individuals?

What can our audience do?

What can people at home do if they are confronted by this creeping authoritarianism in their communities?

- Well, you know, fiction is the voice of the individual rather than the general.

It pays attention to details.

And it is about individuals, relations and interrelations.

So, you both define yourself, but you define yourself in relation to others.

Now what we can do is go back to imagination and ideas and make it a part of our lives.

Make it, be pragmatic about it.

Make it a part of our lives.

And I don't know where to start, but I think that it all starts in a democracy with individual responsibility.

And we are abdicating that.

By creating these authoritarian trends, we are telling ourselves that somebody else will take care of our ideas.

We don't need to worry about that.

We want, we use life as comfort food.

We use books as comfort food.

We want them to confirm us rather than question us and challenge us.

And as individuals, we need to accept to be challenged.

If we cannot take, if we are disturbed by "Maus," how will we encounter fascism in real life if we cannot confront it in a book?

Books prepare us for that reality, you know?

So we need to go back to ourselves and tell ourselves that we are as individuals aware of the ordeal of freedom.

We know that freedom is an ordeal, that you pay a price for it.

And we need to be disturbed and questioned, and in return question and disturb.

- So behind every book is a storyteller, obviously.

- [Azar] Yes.

- Talk about the power of storytelling, the creation of stories, and then telling them.

We're "Story in the Public Square."

But storytelling, even beyond books, has a big power, conversations when you tell stories.

What's the magic or the power of storytelling?

- You know, I don't know if we have the time for me to say this, but that just reminded me of a story.

- [Jim] You got about two minutes.

- Two minutes, okay.

- [Jim] Yeah.

(all laughing) - This is gonna be a short story.

(chuckles) - I'm talking about the mother of all stories.

"Two Thousand and One Night," "One Thousand and One Nights."

- [Jim] Yeah.

That story, if you remember, is about this king who loves his queen and who's a nice king, but then he discovers that the queen is sleeping with a slave, and so he loses all faith.

He kills them before he gives them a chance to defend themselves.

And from then on, every night he marries a virgin, and in the morning kills them.

And here comes the vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, who is a very wise person.

And she tells the king, she tells her father, "Take me to the king."

And on their wedding night, she says, "Before you kill me, at night I tell stories to my little sister.

Could you let me tell the story to her?"

And the king says, "Yes."

So she tells the story, and at dawn she leaves the story unfinished.

So for 1001 nights this king becomes curious to know what will happen next, what will happen to these characters.

And he empathizes with them now.

He finds out that not all queens betray their kings, and not all kings are good.

So he discovers empathy.

And that is what storytelling does.

Scheherazade doesn't go into the king's domain because going into his domain, it would mean killing him.

Instead, she cues him through bringing him to her domain, which is the domain of the stories.

We control our reality through telling our fiction.

- That is a powerful way for us to leave this episode, and it's why we're gonna give you the Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square tonight.

- Thank you.

- Azar Nafisi, people should go out and buy all of your books.

- Yes.

- Thank you.

- That is all the time we have this week, though.

We wanna thank you for being with us.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

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

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