Azar Nafisi Tavaana Interview Transcript What motivated you to start writing, and how has this motivation changed over time? It s very difficult to talk about motivation when it seems like something you were born with. It s like falling in love. You could give very detailed reasons as to why you fell in love with someone, even though you really never thought that you would want to live with them or that you would love them. Writing was just like that for me, it was like eating, although of course writing is very much a tradition in my family. There were many times when we could communicate through writing my father would often do that with stories for my brother and me, through telling stories or through writing, and so writing became a way of expressing myself. Of course, that has changed a great deal over time from when for example, even when I came to America, I still have the diary I would write in when I was twelve years old, the first diary I ever kept, and you know, I would write about myself and my family and my friend who wasn t speaking to me. Well, that changed, and later on, when you go to college, writing becomes part of a person s life. However, when I returned to Iran and officially started working, I was teaching as well as writing, and as time went on, that love became more and more engrained in my life, so that it s no longer a diary but a way of looking at life. What was the experience of writing in English like, and was it an important change? I first began learning English when I was six or seven years old, and as a result, I grew accustomed to both languages in a way. It s difficult for me to say, by which I mean I
don t remember in what way [interjecting] can we do something about this, that s not a problem? Writing seriously in Persian after I returned to Iran was more difficult. Since all of the work I had done had been at the university level, all the papers I would write and all the subjects I would do projects on were invariably in English. As a result, when I returned to Iran and had to write articles or books, I initially felt that I had to forge a different kind of relationship with the Persian language, rather than the relationship that had previously existed. Well, that took a while, because I even had to establish a different sort of connection to my physical and geographical environment. Writing is very much related to the connection you have with your experiences, and you build your language on the basis of that experience. When you returned to Iran, how did you encounter the political climate? What effect did that have on your writing? At first, in terms of published writings, yes, but once again my only refuge was what I mean to say is that if I, in truth, want to talk about a turning point or a juncture, the turning points were all in Iran, and especially Iran after the revolution, because prerevolutionary Iran was a dream for me. From the time [my family] sent me first to England and then to America, my dream was to come back, and the Iran that I had created in my imagination was obviously different from the real Iran. The revolution suddenly put me face-to-face with a different kind of reality, and I took refuge in writing in order to make sense of this reality, although not writing to be published. My husband Bijan will still tell me that when people want to leave Iran, they might fill their suitcases with pistachios or rugs, but we were four people and each brought two suitcases full of papers and photos with us. After the revolution, the volume of my memoirs increased several times over, it wasn t even comparable. Nevertheless, it took a while for me to want to publish anything. As you put it, there needs to be a motivation that drives you and bothers you and forces you to talk about it. The first article I wrote
wasn t actually in Persian but in English, and concerned the situation of women in Iran. I published it in the New Left Review, not under my own name but as AZ, my initials, because it was a very painful time for me, you know, it was a time of transition and one could see how the revolution was slowly losing its luster. It was very important to me that the world and those friends abroad that I had left behind, people I was close to, that they know what was happening to us. After that, the first thing I published in Persian was about literature. I became totally absorbed in Iranian literature. I tried to examine politics and society through their literature, and just about everything I wrote in Iran came from this need. Iranian novels in particular provided me an opportunity to, as the saying goes, look inside society and reexamine history. In your opinion, what is the relationship between literature, political struggle, and political activism? There isn t a direct connection between writing and political struggle. Now, I can speak about this in a somewhat more expansive framework that encompasses my own writings as well. For me, political struggle that is to say when I became more of an adult - since earlier, when I was in college, I thought I didn t have the maturity of thought to view politics as part of life. I always saw it as being separate and one-dimensional. However, when I returned to Iran, I realized that I was entering a struggle that had no connection with my political positions, meaning it wasn t initially the case that I wanted to, for example, go and overthrow the Islamic Republic, or that I wanted Mr. so-and-so to replace Mr. Mousavi in office, or that I liked the Shah more than these people. My main issue was feeling that politics had called into question all of those things that give my life meaning, and all of those things that give me, as an individual, the desire to live. It was at that point that I felt, as a teacher, a writer, a woman, and as someone who holds a deep conviction to certain principles and values, that my very existence was being called into question.
That was when I became aware of what could be called a very subversive role of writing in relation to politics. I m not using mokhareb with its negative connotation. It s an English word, but it doesn t have exactly the same meaning as its equivalent in Persian. I always use it as subversive in English because if you want to stay faithful to what you are writing, you re obligated to express the truth and reality at any given moment, even if you re expressing them in different ways, and the truth is often unpleasant, sometimes even for the person writing it. [This is] because the pen s sharp point doesn t always go up against outsiders or the world but also comes back to oneself. That is what I discovered in writing, that merely writing in itself led the Islamic Republic to see a person like me as a threat. That is why, if you recall the beginning [of the regime], the Islamic Republic, like the Soviet Union and like fascism, directed the brunt of its assault against women, against intellectuals, universities, anyone that worked in writing - although not just writing, anyone working in literature and art - and against minorities. These three [groups] always felt the sharp point of the Islamic Republic against their back; the Islamic Republic government always counted them as tied to the West, and for this reason, I always felt as a writer that they would call what I wrote Western or Westoxified. Never mind the fact that even the word roman the novels that these very friends themselves write - has no roots whatsoever in Persian, or cinema or film or any of these [terms]. As a woman, those values that not just I believed in but my mother believed in, and my grandmother s generation had started the fight for, were being called into question and everyone was saying that these [values] weren t Iranian. This is why being a writer anywhere in the world --even in America, a democratic country --can be a dangerous thing, since it exposes things that many would like not to be exposed, since when you encounter the truth, you re forced to do something about it. If you believe and write that women in Iran have the right not to be stoned, then you can t stay silent. You have to announce it and speak out against it in some way. For this reason, not just writers but also readers become committed to doing something after they ve learned the reality. It s also because of this that, especially in totalitarian countries but also in democracies, simply reading and writing, merely having knowledge and a belief in knowledge, is in itself dangerous to all totalitarian mentalities, not just to the regime.
Talk about your own political past and your point of view before, during, and after the revolution. You have a book where you honestly write that you were a Maoist. Have these beliefs changed? Can you tell us more about that? One of the reasons why I wrote critically, as it s called, about my own [political] history was that I felt we, in truth, don t write about our own past or those of others because we want to whistle-blow or confess our sins or in some cases, to cover them up, so to claim to have always had the same leanings and have always been right (as some friends profess). The reason why there is a need for a person to talk about their past experiences is that the way forward becomes clear; understanding the past helps us better understand the present. The greatest lesson I received about my own past was that the wishes and desires of those like me - and there were many of us - for a more open society in Iran, the slogans we would chant about that society, were very justified and still are. It s true that dictatorship under the Shah was in no way like the sorry state we now face under the Islamic Republic, but it was our right to speak out against the lack of political freedoms and to have complaints. However, the means of expressing yourself and the way you deal with these complaints show how democratic you are. What happened to the students movement abroad, and for many in Iran s revolutionary movement, was that their own mentality, including my own, was dictatorial. For that reason, we often used the same methods that we were criticizing the Iranian government for using. I m not saying we had guns in our hands or prisons, but for example, anyone whose ideological view differed from ours was considered to be outside of the democratic movement. As a result, this thing that many have talked about after the revolution, about insiders and outsiders, that really existed in the revolutionary movement before the Islamic Republic. We all need to take responsibility [and acknowledge] that the Ayatollah Khomeini along with a group of his followers did not establish the Islamic Republic on their own, so that
the opponents of this government [can take] this issue not that they confess, but that they learn something from it and place that [lesson] at the service of the youth who are losing their lives in Iran today. You know this state of affairs isn t a joke. Some friends [people] think that this story is an argument between you and me, so for example there is one group that is being very verbose, with one saying you re bad, another saying you re bad, and then one [of them] saying no, I was very good. This isn t the case. We are responsible to the people that are fighting in Iran, and one of our responsibilities is to transmit the experiences of the past to them. How are those experiences transmitted? By me saying listen, I, as a Marxist, was an absolutist that didn t see those who were religious as people. Anyone who, for example, said that overthrowing [the regime] wasn t right, someone like Ahmad Shamlou, whose poems I had loved since I was a child, who had played one of the greatest roles in shaping my interaction with literature we would question that person as to why he didn t shout slogans for overthrowing the regime during the Pahlavi era, meaning that we gave ourselves permission to do this while not believing that anyone else had that right, not for being against us but for thinking differently than us. This was why I thought that I couldn t write about everyone, criticize the Islamic Republic, criticize the monarchy, criticize the left and the right but to treat it as if I were pure and blameless. You know, being pure and blameless isn t all that interesting either; think about which people in the world or in Iran itself call themselves innocent. The first step on the road to democracy is not just questioning others, but also [questioning] yourself. I may or may not have been very successful, and the readers will be the judges of that, but I at least wanted to start this discussion. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, I once again brought up the issue, which offended some people, some of them wondering why such things had to be said and some others saying that, at a time when the Islamic Republic is lashing out at everyone, why do we have to levy criticism amongst ourselves. They said this about the Shah s era as well. You know, we have to criticize ourselves because we are not the Islamic Republic. We have to criticize ourselves in order to learn what kind of interaction to have, because we don t just want to replace a regime. For me, just replacing one regime with another is not an important event, what s important is that this mentality doesn t come to rule over society. I don t
want Ahmadinejad to go and then have a secularist who thinks just like him to come [to power] and kill all of the religious people first, before either killing us or expelling us from the country. I want someone to come who will listen to criticism and accept it, or sometimes even not accept it but still be prepared to give others space. This is an ongoing issue for many individuals and groups who are in opposition to the Islamic Republic, whether inside or outside the country. I think this may be felt more acutely inside the country, since people are faced with the reality [of the situation], and I at least reached this conclusion because of living in Iran. Living abroad, well, I don t think I need to say anything about it. We see how things are. In your opinion, how has the situation changed for the struggle of Iranian women between the time you were in Iran and now? This question you ask regarding the Iranian women s struggle, and the change and developments that have taken place within these efforts in the past, is a very interesting one. Of course, I think it could be a completely separate discussion, because we will see down the road that the struggles of Iran s women might be the most important influential factor in democratizing this movement, because women for the Islamic Republic, Iranian women were the most important symbol of everything that the Islamic Republic wanted to get rid of; women have always been starkly visible, meaning that the way you looked when you walk out the door and onto the street was considered a political act, and this is a very strange thing. Not to mention being out in the street how you dressed at home, the way you spoke, the way you shook hands with a stranger, these all took on a totally non-private meaning. This both makes women the first victims of the Islamic Republic and also gives them an extraordinary power, since even their being present in public, and being present in a way that the Islamic Republic never succeeded in imposing on them, meant that this ideology was defeated. It meant that this regime was unable, with guns and religious slogans and prison and whips, to mold women into the shape and form the Islamic Republic wanted, and this doesn t have a religious or a non-religious side to it. As I say
in my book, there were many believing Muslim women, like my grandmother, who had even more complaints about the Islamic Republic than I did, because women like my grandmother or my students who were really Muslims - meaning they believed in their faith - thought the Islamic Republic had damaged their religion. For them, wearing hijab had been a symbol of their faith, but now it had become a symbol of the Islamic Republic, so that you could tell who supported Mr. Khamenei from their hijabs. My grandmother, who wore the hijab and did not support Mr. Khamenei, was now always seen by others as a supporter of the government every time she went out into the street. This is why the issue of women is very profound. I wanted to say this first, say that the reason why you and also many others who are involved in the struggle place so much emphasis on women isn t just because we re women ourselves. The issue goes much deeper than that, which is why they were able to break out of that insider and outsider [mindset], because barriers were broken in this struggle. I remember that, for example, when the publisher of The Second Sex sent me either an e-mail or a letter, I don t remember which, saying that they wanted to translate two of the articles I had written about women from English into Persian, which they did. This meant that they were not only breaking down borders but also [the notion] that, because such and such person doesn t agree with our ideology, we don t accept them, even though it was clear what ideology each person had. Breaking [out of] this was a step forward for my generation. If we want to sum up how the struggle for women's rights has evolved over the last 15 years, I think that this evolution is one of the most important things that has been done, because those religious women who felt that they were not part of the feminist movement or that, if they sympathized, could not express it, they were drawn into the movement. Meanwhile, as you know, the One Million Signature campaign also helped women to find a voice outside of Iran. This meant that the international community stood behind these women because they saw these [discriminatory] laws. I remember one time when Mrs. Ebadi was speaking, and she said that if you wanted to know what kind of society or government a given government was, look at its laws. Because of that, Iran's women didn't have to lay out a minority-majority [argument] or say that this regime was not good and such; it was enough to tell the people that this
country has laws that carry out stonings, [laws] that this country changed the age of marriage from 9 years to 13 [only] after a long struggle by women. If such a thing as a marriage between a 13-year-old girl and a 70-year-old man happened in America, that man would be in prison now. In this way, it was through Iranian women that the international community because aware of what the situation was like inside Iran, aside from people like Neda Agha Soltan or Shiva Nazar Ahari, or the thousands of other names that I can t say or which I don t recall at the moment, aside from the way in which these people gave their lives, in the case of Neda and many like her, or the way in which people like Shiva linked the struggle of women to the struggle for democracy. Is it sectarian at all? Not to say that there is no sectarianism in the women s movement, but if there is any place where an anti-sectarian struggle, if there is any place in Iran where the anti-sectarian struggle started, one of those important places is the Iranian women s movement. How do you assess Iran s current political situation, and what options do you see for political changes in Iran? The situation that currently rules Iranian society, this strange suffocation, isn t appealing in the slightest, and when someone talks about hope in relation to this society, they must keep in mind the price we pay for this hope. What I mean is that, for me, it is very saddening that the hope I have for Iran s future goes along with this extraordinary violence, and I think that this is a very important issue which a person mustn t talk about without emphasizing this point. That aside, I have great hopes for Iran s civil society and Iranian society as whole, with a primary reason being that the Iranian people have learned, with their skin and flesh and blood, the meaning of individual freedom and democratic freedom. My generation suffered under political dictatorship, but it was a prosperous generation, and we generally didn t have many problems in terms of social and cultural freedoms. When I complained or protested, in Washington or even in Tehran, there wasn t this kind of violence, not to this extent.
My daughter s generation, because they wanted to wear colorful shoes, have the latestfashion sunglasses, watch videos, dance, fall in love they were tortured because of this, they were sent to prison for this, they were whipped for this. Such a generation doesn t forget individual liberty, and that is what is important for me. Another thing that is important is that there are very interesting discussions, the view on religion for example. Nowhere else in the region do you see this kind of critical view, not to say that you want to throw off religion, but meaning that there must be reform in religious thought, and nowhere else do you see the desire for the separation of church and state. This is no longer a slogan, the separation of church and state, this is something that the Iranian people have felt, and you can be very religious and still believe that the state should not interfere with what you do. The last point I want to state is that all of these things bring out the capabilities, so to speak, of this society, and it is because of this that I think Iran is truly I, from the moment that I set foot in America, from the first discussion I had in a book, not a book but an article, when I started writing, I talked about this issue that Iran, just as it changed the world with the Islamic Revolution in the year 1979 meaning that it essentially caused this issue of Islamization to come up and then formulated and theorized this thesis the effects of the defeat of this Islamic ideology in Iran will absolutely go beyond Iran s borders in the same way. Many ask me if these events that are happening in Egypt and other places have an effect on Tehran, and I tell them to remember that in the beginning, it was in Tehran that this all began. This capability of Iran, of the Iranian people and Iranian civil society, must not underestimate itself, because it will not only affect Iran, but I want to add at the end that it is a great danger, if we do not formulate these, if these remain solely at the level of capabilities and possibilities, because while it s true that these same circumstances have allowed us to obtain intellectual gains, they re dangerous because we have also become a reactionary society, because we are constantly reacting to a regime that has made it as far as our bedrooms. Because of this, we must think more, we cannot spend our entire lives just quoting Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper. Knowledge is not something that only involves reading others, which is problem I would see when I was in Iran, or I would see, for example, that I might become popular because I could discuss Nabokov.
We have to come up with new theses and theories based on current issues in Iran, just as Havel and Michnik and political and cultural activists in Eastern Europe did, or the same work that Hannah Arendt carried out in relation to fascism. Thought, the freedom of thought, doesn t only begin with the government. Freedom of thought and the audacity to have innovative thoughts takes a lot of daring, which has to come from inside and, well, the possibility is there. Now we have to see what the result will be. What is your final message to the people of Iran? Regarding my books, I know very little about what is and what isn t heard about them in Iran. However, I wanted to say that these last two books that I wrote came directly out of the experiences that I had in Iran, and what I wanted to accomplish in both of these books, a new means of expressing the connection between reality and the imagination, and the objective experience I had in Iran which I discuss in Reading Lolita, was that literature and imagination in societies and situations that are closed and in which we lose our ways of expressing ourselves, these create open spaces. The manner in which people, not because of those mythical traits that we assign to people that fight against the Islamic Republic I want to go back to the people that become the heroes of stories. The heroes of stories are ordinary people; they aren t superheroes with extraordinary bravery. They have an innate bravery. I saw it in my students, and in the people in Iran who I was in contact with. That innate bravery overtook me, and that was that you could stand across from those forces that were telling you that you could not be what you are, and what you believe yourself to be, and yet try to become more yourself. I was hopeful that people in Iran would take that up, and I really wanted to be able to create that connection with my readers in Iran. You know that my book has been translated into 33 languages, but it has not been translated into Persian. Well, this is personally very saddening for me, and I wanted to be able to establish a connection through these books because, in the same way that the characters in my books came from Iran, I was hopeful that its audience would come from Iran, and for this reason, if I
had a message, which I don t have as a message but as sympathy with my audience, I wanted to say that what I learned in Iran, I am hopeful that that is what I will see in society. Firstly, I hope that this work you do will bring about the creation of a different connection. The most important way for people, both not to be alone and also to have profitable lives, is to establish connections, and I hope that this work will be carried out more and more. Secondly: independence of thought. I don t think we will be able to achieve other kinds of independence, such as political independence, unless we are independent in our thinking, and just as I said, I am hopeful that new thinking will come from Iran and that it will be this new thinking that will spread throughout the world. It is not acceptable for them to only know Iran and innovative thought from Ayatollah Khomeini, and to think that it was from inside Iran that Islamic ideology was formulated. It would be fitting that it be from inside Iran that the ideology of freedom and democracy emerge, with the meanings that we around the world now know them to have.