One Book for Greater Hartford

http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hc-onebook1021.artoct21,0,1105159.story

Author: Freedom Must Be Treasured

Iranian Expatriate Says Americans Blasé

By CAROLE GOLDBERG
Courant Books Editor

October 21 2005

Azar Nafisi has a message for Americans who disagree over current political and religious issues: Stop shouting. Start debating. And don't ban books - discuss them instead.

"Banning books does not banish ideas," Nafisi said in a telephone interview. "We need to debate - to talk - not just take sides." She deplores the "sanctimonious and self-righteous" on either side who maintain they are completely right and others are completely wrong.

"By demonizing others, you give them power," she points out.

Nafisi, who taught literature courses at universities in Iran during the oppressive fundamentalist revolution, knows quite a bit about living in a society that bans books and seeks to control individual expression. She led a clandestine group of former students who met in her apartment weekly for two years to read and discuss classics of Western literature, in defiance of Islamic leaders who forbade the reading of such books. In 1997, she left Iran for the U.S., and now teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

From the secret reading group, in which the women explored works by Jane Austen, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov and gained insights about themselves and their society, came her widely praised 2003 best-seller, "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books." Her combination of memoir and literary analysis is this year's One Book for Greater Hartford community-reading project selection.

Nafisi will visit Hartford Saturday to give a free talk at 7 p.m. at the Hartford Public Library, the main sponsor of the program. Seating is limited, and doors will open at 6:30 p.m.

Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford and honorary chairman of this year's One Book for Greater Hartford program, will give the opening remarks, and Louise Blalock, chief librarian at the Hartford Public Library, will make the introductions

Also on Saturday, an International Book Bazaar, with displays, performances, discussions and games, will also mark the culmination of the annual reading project. The resounding success of "Reading Lolita" amazed Nafisi, who says she is always "hard on my own work. I tried not to expect anything, so it was very, very surprising." She says she hardly expected the response to its detailed literary analyses.

"Who would be interested in `Lolita' and `The Great Gatsby'? she laughs.

Nafisi is now director of Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies' Dialogue Project in Washington, which presents programs to combat misconceptions about Muslim and Western cultures. She sees important similarities - and differences - in the students she has taught here and in Iran.

"Young people everywhere are young people," she says, "and the way they react is similar."

But in Iran, "students were frightened by the concept of authority" and were deprived of the freedom to read as they chose. The young women who met with her had to photocopy hundreds of pages so everyone could read them because copies of the books were contraband.

"For them, Nafisi says, "the act of reading took on a magical color. It was like in Eastern Europe." The women, she says, felt "excitement and eagerness" at reading books their government condemned.

"Here, students are far more blasé," she says, and too many take their liberty for granted. "I appreciate the way students can express themselves here," Nafisi says, but she finds it ironic that some demonstrate that freedom by choosing not to pay attention to the very things that make it possible.

Reading fiction and history, she says, can help students, especially young women, to understand that "what we gain we can also lose."

"Read your own history," she advises, pointing out that women in American have not had their current rights for very long. Some young women here, she says, "are too self-absorbed in matters of the moment. Past days are very far from them."

Despite fears about Iran's use of nuclear power, Nafisi holds out hope of a peaceful resolution to the problems. Iran, because of its own dynamics, has a powerful civil society that is very resistant to oppression, especially among its young people, she says. She believes that civil society and American goodwill can create positive change through nonviolence. "It's what the opposition in Iran is working for," she says.

Nafisi, who confesses a love of mysteries, including the work of Elizabeth Ironside and Lawrence Wechsler, says she looking forward to speaking in Hartford.

"I feel I have always had almost a mission," she says, "to spend time promoting books and the act of reading."

In her Hartford talk, she says, she will discuss what made the works analyzed in her book "important to us, and how reading opens up spaces for us that were closed."

Reprinted with permission of The Hartford Courant