In October 2016, both of the nations to which Azar Nafisi belonged were in critical condition.
Her native land, Iran, was brutally suppressing widespread protests while her adopted country, the United States, was on the verge of electing a psychopath as President. So she decided to write a letter to her father, Ahmad Nafisi.
Azar’s father, whom she calls Baba jan, had died twelve years earlier. The former mayor of Tehran, he spent four years in the 1960s in an Iranian detention center for “political reasons” before being exonerated on all charges. She poured her thoughts into that letter, and many more that followed. Read Dangerously continues the conversation Nafisi wants to have about “the subversive power of literature,” as the book’s subtitle states. It’s a theme she also explored in her 2003 bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which recounted her experience teaching a private literature class for young women in Iran, using a syllabus that included not just Nabokov’s Lolita but also One Thousand and One Nights, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice.
In Read Dangerously, Nafisi presents the letters she wrote to her deceased father from late-2019 to mid-2020. Here the reading shelf includes works by James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
“You, Baba jan, would like this book,” she writes about Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which led to a fatwa being issued against the author. “It is not about comforting clichés, but ideas that question and disturb and attempt to change the world—which makes not only writing but also reading it so dangerous.”
Literature, in Nafisi’s world, is inherently subversive. “What choice does the king have but to kick the poets and storytellers out of his republic?” she asks at one point. “And what choice does the poet have but to destabilize the philosopher king’s power by speaking the truth?”
Nafisi compares the rise of Donald Trump to that of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran: Trump “understood how to captivate the media, and to use their obsession with him to his advantage.” Khomeini “similarly mesmerized people with his talk of God and spirituality.” She also reflects on “what Trump shares with the leaders of the Islamic Republic: cruelty, incompetence, and a reckless disregard for the lives of the citizens of his country.”
In writing about Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nafisi shares, “You, Baba jan, with your sensitivity against racism, would have appreciated Hurston. Instead of presenting a generalized portrait of African Americans as victims, I believe she wanted to rescue them from stereotypes imposed on them and restore the individual dignity and humanity that slavery and racism had stolen from them.”
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Azar Nafisi
One of the remarkable things about Read Dangerously is the extent to which Nafisi’s father emerges as a vibrant and fully developed character, years after his death. She effortlessly resurrects his intellectual presence, as when she writes, in regard to David Grossman’s 2008 novel, To the End of the Land, “Baba jan, I can almost hear you say, ‘But the fictional facts that create Grossman’s novel are as important as the real facts.’ And you would be right, for in fiction, as in reality, we need to experience the ‘facts’—in this case, through our imagination—in order to understand them.”
The book repeatedly cites Baba jan’s example of seeking to understand and not just condemn one’s oppressors, so as not to follow in their footsteps. “The more they dehumanize us,” Nafisi writes, “the more we should humanize them.” In discussing James Baldwin—whose landmark 1962 essay, “A Letter to My Nephew,” she notes, was first “published in The Progressive magazine”—Nafisi muses, “I feel that Baldwin’s writing has illuminated my inarticulate anger, reassuring me that my experiences in the Islamic Republic have a universal context.”
Read Dangerously lives up to its audacious title, demonstrating the subversive and transformative power of literature. It should start many a book-based conversation, among the living and the dead.