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Below are several musings and blog entries written by Azar Nafisi

DISPATCHES FROM MY REPUBLIC OF IMAGINATION

July 6, 2016

I begin many of my talks, expressing my debt and gratitude to books, for connecting me as a reader and a writer to people I have never met before, whom I call ‘intimate strangers,’ people I connect to not because of where I live, what I do, or other exigencies of life, but because of a shared passion, the universal urge to know, and through imaginative knowledge to empathize and connect to others. I often add that books are like our children, you go through so much anxiety, pain and labor to bring them into the world, but once the child is born, there can be no better reward than the feeling of joy, pure unadulterated joy! You think you are in control of your child’s destiny, but then discover how much they have to offer you, what amazing places they take you to and what wonderful ‘intimate strangers’ they bring into your life.

My last book, Republic of Imagination, addressed many of the issues we are facing today. During my travels in the US and abroad the people and places I visited and had exchanges with illuminated those issues, introduced many new ideas, created new connections. There was and there is so much I want to talk about, to share with you, the ‘intimate strangers,’ about places my books have taken me to and people they have connected me to. So I decided in celebration of books, I will every once in a while post some “Dispatches” From My Republic of Imagination.

I’ve already begun sharing some events from my first dispatch, Paris, where I went to launch the French translation of Republic of Imagination. It was one of the most intriguing and thought provoking experiences I have had in a while. The interviews and reviews, the conversation with Thierry Grillet, at the Bibliotheque Nationale co-sponsored by Columbia University’s Global Centers, and other exchanges reminded me once more of how passionate the French are about ideas, how curious, how so full of insight. I’m looking forward to sharing more of this trip and others over the next couple weeks.

REFLECTING ON AMERICA IN 2015 WITH A TAPESTRY FROM IRAN

December 30, 2015

In 2015 we witnessed too many acts of violence & terror the world over, names of countries & cities associated with life & joy, Tunisia, Cairo, Paris, Istanbul, Yemen, Lebanon, again Paris, San Bernardino. We have seen the Syrian refugees, victims of their own regime & of terror, being once more victims of so much indifference & fear around the world & in this country, where many, especially some among the political elite negate the words promised by the Statue of Liberty replacing them with a most vulgar & cruel rhetoric against refugees, illegal immigrant, Muslims, & minorities. As an Iranian American under the new visa waiver law approved by both the administration & houses of congress, my family & I like other Iranian Americans also feel more vulnerable in the generous country we made our home, escaping persecution by the regime in our beloved country of birth. This arrogance is only possible because of the ignorance that feeds it. Although Donald Trump has the privilege to represent the current reign of ignorance, the rest of us, especially among the political elite are not free from responsibility.

We need to take action against the dominance of fear, terror & ignorance by refusing to enter that domain, refusing to act out of the same sense of brutality & entitlement. This is where the curiosity, empathy that imagination and ideas evoke is essential to our survival. I remember Henry James, advising a friend who had lost her husband in the terror of First World War, that she should “repine & rebel” against this horror & “Feel,feel, I say–feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour & celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride & inspiration.”

In order to begin this rebellion of feeling against the rule of ignorance & arrogance I want to share with you, at the start of the new year, the beautiful tapestry at the top of the post. It is a Persian carpet at the United Nation, gift of Iranian government, that is adorned by a poem by Saadi the great 12 century Persian poet. Today more than ever do we need to remember these words. Emerson admired Saadi to the point where he compared his poetic language to that of Bible and also wrote a poem called Saadi. This is how cultures from such different times & places reach out to one another, find a common language, celebrate their common humanity. This is also how we become intimate with strangers, this is how we share our common humanity.

Happy New Year!

BOOKS, FILM, AND ART THAT INSPIRED ME IN 2014

December 31, 2014

This is not a recommended reading list or my choice of the best books of 2014. I just want to share with you some of the most memorable books I have read or reread this year. Afterall what better way to celebrate and share the New Year than share your favorite books. Apart from books I also want to mention a few other items from the Republic of Imagination.

Gabriel, a long elegy for his young son, by the great American poet Ed Hirsch, published in 2014. There is no consolation against death, no real closure, especially when one mourns the death of one’s young son. But poetry can be a way to respect, to celebrate,  to continue to love, & in one way, perhaps the only way, defy death, resist & protest its absolutes, its indifference. This is what Ed Hirsch does, without an ounce of sentimentality or self-pity, or self flagellation. It is celebration of a life & mourning for an irretrievable loss in which through the poem life wins even the mourning will continue.

Conference of the Birds, (2011?) by the great Check born illustrator & artist, Peter Sis, who by the way created the tapestry for Vaclav Havel in the Prague airport & for Seamus Heaney in the Dublin airport. I so love this book. I especially love the hard cover version because it is so very sensual. Peter Sis has turned the mystical Persian poet Attar’s (born in mid 12 century)  famous poem, Conference of the Birds, into a festival of color & imagery. Images are so lyrical, so filled with movement. Seldom have I felt the poem within and through the image in this way…a feast for the senses.

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, Meghan Daum (2014) beautifully written essays, self-deprecating in a good funny way, in the way of people who are self-confident, and who know what they are doing— in this case writing. She has insight but unlike some who have insight but are too full of themselves to let go, she is clearly enjoying what she writes. So the essays have an airy manner about them, while being quite serious.  

My Uncle Napoleon, (1973) by Iraj Pezeshkzad, just in case you want to read a tender, funny, heartbreakingly comic, lovingly critical novel from Iran. I have written this before and I still believe in it: best recommendation for those who take foreign policy seriously enough to pay attention to a people’s culture. The book became an all time best seller, turned into a great and popular television series before the Islamic Revolution and even after the revolution although it was banned it enjoys enormous popularity. Anyone interested in great Persian literature, classical and modern you can go online & check out the Mage Publishers. They are the best, from great Persian Cooking and wine to poems, history, fiction… 

This year I took time off to watch some classical films, a sort of private festival, which happened to have Humphry Bogart stat in them: Casablanca with Ingrid Bergman, The Big Sleep, Have & Have Not, with Lauren Bacall, & Maltese Falcon with Mary Astor. I also taped & watched Love & Death, with Woody Allen& Dianne Keaton, discovering that I still enjoyed watching that film.

By the way if you live in DC or are visiting, don’t forget the museums. We saw an amazing exhibition of Andrew Wyeth at the National Gallery, Freer has Nastaaligh, & of course the one & only Philips Collection,  their current exhibition on neo-Impressionists is fantastic. 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: WHAT IS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOK OF YOUR CHILDHOOD AND WHY?

September 14 , 2014

Dear Readers,

As you know, no matter where we are from, we are born citizens of the Republic of Imagination (ROI), the portable world found in books and other forms of art. Unlike our  physical homes, the portable one accompanies us no matter where we go. My childhood, for instance, was defined by the stories read to me by father and later discovered at the library & bookstores. Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, stories from the great Persian epic poet, Ferdowsi, The Little Prince and Pinocchio took me to new places and taught me about curiosity & empathy, about how to change and be changed, how to connect to others & how to discover new terrains.  Even now, I turn to these & other tales as I reflect on complex questions ranging from personal dilemmas & relations to public policy, education, and foreign affairs.

With my new website, I want to create a platform for ROI citizens to share their experiences while responding to the questions: how and why are imagination and thought central to our lives today? In what practical ways do they help us understand and find answers to the current crisis both at home and abroad? To start things off, I would like to collect and share answers to the following question: as a child which book most influenced you? Was it a classic fairytale, a mystery book or perhaps a piece of non-fiction? How has that book contributed to where you are in life, where you hope to be, and your vision for America?

Submit your thoughts on the above question (250-300 words) along with a short bio in the “Contact” section under “send a message to Dr. Nafisi” and I will select content to be featured on the blog alongside my thoughts on the subject. The cutoff date for submissions is October 1.

As members of the Republic of Imagination it is questions like these that we must strive to derive meaning from together. For is not our childhood one of the most fruitful times of all for the cultivation of the imagination?

Happy Reading!

Azar

THE IMAGINATION LIST

September 4 , 2014

This is a list of books, articles and sometimes videos that Azar is thinking about and recommends. Check back often, as this list will be continually updated. Happy reading!



READERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

September 3 , 2014

Dear Reader,

It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the Republic of Imagination, a forum for discussion and the growth of ideas central to the question I attempt to answer in my book by the same name: can there be a democracy without a democratic imagination?

I hope that all of you will engage with me and each other on the blog as well as my Facebook and Twitter accounts, for each and every one of you is a crucial part of the Republic of Imagination. Stay tuned for more discussion topics and blog posts, and please use the form on the contact page for any queries or comments for me.

Check the events page for information about my speaking engagements, as I hope to meet many of you along my travels this fall!

I sincerely look forward to this journey of learning and exploration that we will embark on together; I couldn’t do it without you—those other readers, intimate strangers and fellow citizens of the Republic of Imagination.

Happy reading!

Azar

IN THE EYES OF THE WORLD, A REIMAGINED IRAQ

November 25, 2008

Iraq seems to have entered the world’s consciousness mainly through violence _ through murderous coups, brutal suppression of Iraqi citizens and, for the past three decades, wars and invasions. Today, five years after the start of the U.S.-led invasion, whenever Iraq appears in the news, references to suicide bombs, casualty numbers, the military “surge” and terror usually accompany it.

To reverse the tide of violence in Iraq we in the Western world need to change not just our political positions and military tactics but our very perception of Iraq and its people. And that perception cannot be shaped by the claims of the tyrants who once ruled the country or the extremists who are currently trying to gain control over it. Instead, we need to look at the similarities between Iraq’s culture and ours, and understand that the people there want the same basic human rights that we in the West enjoy.

For many years another, more peaceful, Iraq existed in the book market on Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. Then, on March 5, 2007, the book market was devastated by a car bomb. Salim al-Kushalli, who lost five brothers in his family’s print shop, was not surprised by the attack. “Of course we were expecting Mutanabi Street to be targeted one day,” he said in an interview on National Public Radio, “because anyone targeting Mutanabi Street is targeting Iraq’s civilization.”

Named after the revered 10th-century Arab poet Abul Tayyeb, Mutanabi Street was a democratic space where books by Shia ayatollahs, Sunni theologians, Communist theorists and Western writers lived side by side in a sort of republic of imagination that transcended the boundaries of nationality, religion or ethnicity. Here, people from different backgrounds lived in peace, and poets, philosophers and even fundamentalist clerics, could express their ideas on the pages of books without retribution. With its bookstores, print shops and cafes, Mutanabi Street resisted the idea of invasion or totalitarianism.

If the Bulgarian philosopher Tsevan Todorow was correct when he said, “only total oblivion demands total despair,” then it is places like Mutanabi Street that protect the Iraqis against despair. Such places also remind the rest of the world that Iraq is represented neither by Saddam Hussein nor by the Iraqi Shiite leader and cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, that Iraq cannot be defined by either its political elite or its invaders. Another Iraq had existed before them and would continue to exist in the imagination of its people, in the same books that were destroyed on that March day when a bomb murdered the booksellers and their customers.

The country we now call Iraq _ which was carved out of the Ottoman Empire by the British and the French in 1921_ was once part of the Cradle of Civilization, with a history going back to ancient Mesopotamia and Sumer. It was a land in which different ethnicities and religions lived and the Islam it boasted of was not that of the ideological extremists, but of the rich civilization that existed during the 8th and 9th centuries under the Abassid caliphs.

A country’s past reminds us that if things were once different, then there is some promise that the future can also be different. That promise once thrived on Mutanabi Street.

Why do people who live under the threat of guns and bombs care about books? Would books save the woman who walked the streets without the veil from getting raped or killed? Would they save her children from bombs? Would they protect the universities where faculty and students have died? Would they save the religious and ethnic minorities from being murdered or driven out of their homes?

What Mutanabi Street offered was a sense of security that was just as important as national security: It restored to the Iraqi people a dignity that was not steeped in violence. After all, the most important arsenal democracies have is not military but cultural. Tyrants are terrified of the kind of perception that allows every individual to regard the right to life, liberty and happiness as their birthright.

I was against the war before it started, but that has not prevented me from feeling the responsibility of what has happened and what is happening there. There were people who supported the war not because of their affinities with the U.S. administration, but because they had been frustrated by the world’s silence in the face of monstrous crimes committed by Saddam Hussein: the relentless persecution and execution of Iraqi citizens, the use of chemical weapons on the Kurdish. These atrocities occurred when the world’s leaders averted their gaze, carried on business as usual with Saddam and encouraged him in his war against Iran. Only a few human rights groups, activists, Iraqi dissidents and journalists showed empathy with the Iraqi people.

Are we not paying for that silence today? This was the wrong war, at the wrong time and in the wrong place, but the concern for the rights of the Iraqi people and the Kurdish minority was not wrong and remains valid today _ especially when elections in a country without democratic institutions are celebrated as a sign of democracy, and factional wars between Shiites and Sunni are defined as part of the Iraqi people’s cultural inheritance.

Whether we are against the war or for it, whether the United States pulls out of Iraq or remains, we know that in a democracy not just the governments are accountable. We, the people are all implicated. Our silence implicates us and does not protect us from the violence that happens in other parts of the world. A secure and democratic Iraq will make the rest of the world a more secure and free place.

We can support the besieged civilians in Iraq by joining the organizations that support the rights of Iraqi women and minorities and by lobbying their government to help relocate Iraqi refugees. We can help by rebuilding universities, restoring museums and libraries, by supporting the new institution that was almost immediately built after the destruction of Mutanabi Street, the Iraq National Library and Archives. Through our support and empathy, it will become easier to answer the question: Where will the Iraqi people go to restore their confiscated dignity, which they need in order to resist the violence that is imposed on them by both domestic terror and foreign invasion?

Perhaps to a street named after a poet who lived more than 1,000 years ago, whose nickname, al-Mutanabi, meant “the man who wants to be a prophet,” and who wrote poetry so close to the original language that it became untranslatable. That is where you go to regain your pride; that is where you go to remind yourself and the world that killing women because they do not wear the veil, butchering one another in the name of Islamic factions and bombing civilians and streets that are named after poets are not the only things the world should remember of Iraq.