By Abdee Kalantari
For those who have been following the Iranian writer Azar Nafisi's many talks and commentaries since her bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, was published three years ago, her Wednesday night appearance at the New York Public Library didn't offer anything fresh or interesting.
Except this observation (whose relevance to the themes of the program - the loss of country, forging identities, alienation and resistance- didn't quite register with me): "Back in 1960's, in Lancaster, England, it was very damp. If you were too close to the heater you got burned, if you got a little far from the heater, you would die of cold! So you'd go under the cover with a bottle of hot water. They said the continental people had sex; the British had the hot water bottle. I always wanted to write an essay about the importance of hot water bottle."
A champion of something called 'imagination,' as a moral and political space where resistance to tyranny and ideological straitjacketing could be more effective and the role of the writer more subversive than most political acts, Ms. Nafisi wants us to read more novels and talk less political clichés. In the process, her own repetitive moralizing antics, always rehashing the same anecdotes, the same mandatory quotes from Nabokov ('Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form') and Adorno, the same seemingly non-political, non-ideological high standing, have turned into so many stale and boring clichés in their own right.
It seems the organizers of Wednesday night's program had had second thoughts. The sold-out event, with more than 700 guests in attendance, was originally billed as a panel discussion with Azar Nafisi, Shirin Neshat, Roya Hakakian, Marjane Satrapi and Shohreh Aghdashloo, moderated by Lila Azam Zangeneh.
Ms. Zangenh is a French-Iranian writer-critic who also speaks and writes fluent English and Italian. She is the editor of the new literary anthology My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes. The volume includes pieces by the present panelists.
As it turned out, the organizers had changed the format, giving more than half of the entire program to a one-on-one talk between Ms. Azam-Zangeneh and Ms. Nafisi, lumping together the rest in a panel discussion which in many ways sounded more interesting and insightful than the first part, but too short and hastily conducted to be of much significance. Satrapi and Aghdashloo were absent and the replacing panelist appeared to be a literature student, the only reason for her being there was the fact that she was a former student and a protégé of Ms. Nafisi's. Another insightful and very able writer, Gelareh Asayesh was also absent.
Lila Azam-Zangeneh, quoting Rilke, referred to the fact that how when losing everything, the 'loss' itself becomes a new possession. With exiled writers, a thing that is lost becomes more vivid and more real; collectively in their work, the loss becomes a parallel country, in this case a 'republic of imagination' against the Islamic Republic. Along those lines, Azar Nafisi reiterated her usual condemnation of fascists and communists (and Islamists) who stifle freedom and persecute writers and artists; and her conviction that the best way to resist tyranny is the pursuit of curiosity through reading works of imagination. One must not feel at home in her own homeland, a moral Adornian motto, is what we need to remind ourselves. Don't generalize, don't categorize, and don't polarize!
Of course, Theodor Adorno would have never endured more that five minutes of such commonplace moralizing clichés.
Azar Nafisi has been unjustly labeled as a 'Neocon' by many leftists. Many Iranian expatriates call her a poster lady for unabashed Western values. There are academics in the Middle Eastern departments who are asking for her blood because, apparently, in a time of 'total war' between US imperialism and the indigenous people of the Middle East, she stands for the 'colonial subject.' She does not believe in cultural relativism or 'Islamic feminism' as alternatives to western secularism. As she likes to say, she doesn't want to be reduced to a 'semiotic sign' because she is a friend of Paul Wolfowitz's. "That sort of vulgarity," she said, "I don't want to be involved with."
Most detractors don't bother to read her book carefully from the beginning to end. Nativist sentiments, academic envy or defensive nationalist pride, and a peculiar sort of 'post-colonial studies' zealotry have fueled this hostility.
In reality, Ms Nafisi sounds more and more like a transplant from the ancient cold war literary debates of the 1950s. She has become a preachy 'anti-ideology' ideologue, a bad imitation of Susan Sontag. When it comes to Nabokov and the business of professional literary criticism, Lila Azam Zangeneh herself appears more authoritative and knowledgeable than what Ms. Nafisi has written on the subject, both in Farsi and English. (I was wondering what the French 'intellectuel engage,' Bernard-Henri Lévy, who was sitting on the second row directly facing Ms. Nafisi, would make of such "I'm so beyond politics" trash talk that followed the hot water bottle anecdote. With his just published American Vertigo, Mr Levy is now actively intervening in American politics.)
Also unfortunate was the patronizing posture of Ms. Nafisi towards Ms. Azam-Zangeneh and other panelists, two of them, the artist Shirin Neshat and the writer Roya Hakakian are accomplished professionals in their own fields none lesser than what Ms Nafisi is. Were they given more time in this conversation, the program would've been a lot more enlightening.
With little time left for the second leg of the event, Shirin Neshat talked about the paradoxical position of an artist in exile where on one hand, she's expected to represent her culture, or be a sort of 'ambassador' for it, where she can never fulfill such grand impossible task; and on the other hand, facing so much political misrepresentations, she cannot remain 'private,' shunning politics altogether.
Roya Hakakian dismissed fashionable jargons of identity politics. As an Iranian Jewish woman writer, she felt no urge to belong to a certain tribe or category. Being on the margin or an outsider is what she found more convenient. She said when it comes to the plight of Jews in Iran, it is misleading if we use the Holocaust as a point of reference; which is what most Americans understand by anti-Semitism. Not to trivialize the horror and hardship that Jews in Iran have suffered, it still needs to be said that they fared better than a lot of other minorities such as Bahai's, secular intellectuals, leftist activists, heretics and religious or sexual outcasts. With a leftist sensibility and a self-deprecating sense of absurdist humor, her book, Journey from the Land of No, under the guise of a coming of age memoir, presents a complex, multi-layered literary construct where she questions all manners of orthodoxies, traditional or modern.
With her journalistic sharp eye, Azadeh Moaveni, the author of Lipstick Jihad, recalled a couple of episodes about middle class Iranian mores, a corrective to the hyper-intellectualism of Ms. Azam-Zangeneh (" 'the sexualization of gaze,' the 'dual conundrum' of identity, the obsession with 'morbidity and sexuality' in the Islamic Republic "). Ms. Moaveni reports from Tehran for the Time magazine.
The highlight of the night was a performance by Iranian-American singer-songwriter Sussan Deyhim who sang two pieces, one by Rumi and the other written by herself called the Cradle of Loveless-ness. Her signature husky growling is in part spiritually uplifting and in part animalistically menacing.
If for no other reason than saying something fresh and different in years, Azar Nafisi must write that essay about the importance of a hot water bottle.
Abdee Kalantari
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