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We could not openly articulate what we wished, but we could by our silence show our indifference to the regime’s demands.
In letters to friends, again and again he urges them to feel. Feeling would stir up empathy and would remind them that life was worth living.
He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his “independence of thought,” which enabled the artist to enjoy the “aggression of infinite modes of being.”
Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed.
The next night it was announced that Iraq would accept a cease-fire if it could fire the last missile. It was like a game played between two children—what mattered most was who would get the last word.
So, Nima asked, do you mean to say that both our lives and our imaginative lives are fairy tales? I smiled. Indeed, it seemed to me that at times our lives were more fictional than fiction itself.
Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream.
Their inability to dance well is a sign of their inability to adapt themselves to the needs of their partners.
It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen’s novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.
Manna used to say that there are two Islamic Republics: the one of words and the one of reality. In the Islamic Republic of words, the decade of the nineties began with promises of peace and reform.
I had concluded, dramatically, that this regime had so penetrated our hearts and minds, insinuating itself into our homes, spying on us in our bedrooms, that it had come to shape us against our own will. How could we, under such scrutiny, separate our personal woes from the political ones?
There was a raising of the right eyebrow, followed by a quizzical ironic look. “Tell me,” he said sardonically. “How exactly does the jilting of a beautiful girl relate to the Islamic Republic? Do you mean to say that in other parts of the world women are not abused by their husbands, that they are not jilted?”
Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.
Nor could they demonstrate any enthusiasm for what they were doing: to show emotion would be un-Islamic.
Love was forbidden, banished from the public sphere. How could it be experienced if its expression was illegal?
By now we should be used to all of this; these young girls are a little spoiled—they expect too much. Look at Somalia or Afghanistan. Compared to them, we live like queens.
Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.
“I never suggested that my experience should be yours. You can’t follow me in everything, Manna. I mean each one of us has to do what’s best for her. That’s all the advice I can give you.”
Other people’s sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?
“The worst fear you can have is losing your faith. Because then you’re not accepted by anyone—not by those who consider themselves secular or by people of your own faith.
If one day I lose my faith, it will be like dying and having to start new again in a world without guarantees.”
Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe, I said to Bijan that evening after the Thursday class.
You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.
Remember what Cary Grant said in that fabulous film: a word, like a lost opportunity, cannot be taken back once it has been uttered.
Does every magician, every genuine one, like my own, evoke the hidden conjurer in us all, bringing out the magical possibilities and potentials we did not know existed?
“I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions.
