If you could invite any character or personality to Thanksgiving dinner at your house, who would you invite?
I am certain you have heard this question before and until recently, I frankly thought it was dumb. How could you pick only one person? And wouldn't it depend on your mood? Who else would be sitting around the table? Should your answer be considerate of your other tablemates? What is the criteria for choosing? Someone who is funny, interesting, smart? Someone who you have a lot of questions for or someone who would have a lot of questions for you? How could you choose only one person?
After reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof in the fall, I decided he was my guy. You may have heard of his New York Times column focused on a vast spectrum of globalization and humanitarian concerns. Regardless of political leanings, you cannot deny he is daring, insightful, whimsome, and brilliant if you have ever read him. A few days into the revolutions erupting across the Middle East, I just happened to catch mention of him on the ground in Tahrir Square in the middle of the action as I walked by the television. "Of course he is," I audibly vocalized to myself. Whose desire for knowledge, story, and inspiration would not be satisfied by hosting him at your table?
Having finally finished Reading Lolita in Tehran, I've discovered another must-have guest in the book's author, Azar Nafisi. The Thanksgiving question must allow for at least two personalities to be invited to the table, right? I know I've written about this book in one of my earlier entries, but in sum, it's fabulous. Read it. Read it if you like history, literature, culture, freedom, dreams, psychology, or courage. You'll reap a harvest from what has been sown into these pages. Instead of my words on the book and the subject matter, I've transcribed some incredibly articulate and enlightening snippets straight from a Q&A with Nafisi included at the back of the "deluxe edition" of the book.
On her book...
"In terms of my own perspective on the book and whether things in Iran have changed, I have two things to say. One is that my purpose in writing this book was not to talk about just politics. What I really wanted to investigate was how people cope when they live under an oppressive reality. How do they create for themselves open spaces through their imaginations? That is really the main theme of the book - imagination's role in opening spaces, in resisting tyrannies of both politics and time."
On defining fiction...
"Every great work of fiction not only reflects the themes and the events that it explains but it also, at the same time, resists and questions them. Fiction explores not just how reality is but how it could or should be. The whole structure of the novel is democratic. I think that fiction is based on what has been called "Democratic Imagination," because it is multi-vocal."
On writing and reading in general...
"Now, I believe the whole point of writing and reading is to learn about things and people that you don't know... for me, writing a book always becomes a journey of discovery... and for readers, when they open a book, there are two faculties, two miraculous faculties that the act of reading and writing depend on, which form the basis of the imagination. The first one is curiosity. We read because we want to know what we don't know. Both science and literature have that magic about them, that idea of discovery. And the other great thing is that as soon as you enter this world that is both familiar and unfamiliar and you set out on this journey of discovery, then you discover empathy. Empathy is as much an integral part of writing as curiosity is, because this is the only way we communicate as human beings... Stories put us inside the experience of others and make us feel and see what we have not felt or seen before."
On the veil...
"The question of the veil in a country like Iran is not whether the veil is good or bad. The issue of the veil is that the veil should be a symbol of faith. And as such, every woman should have the right to choose whether she wants to wear it or not. For [my grandmother] the veil was a symbol of faith, but if every woman was forced to wear it, whether she believed in it or not, then it would become a symbol of force and a political symbol of the state. "
On home...
"I understood that the only way I could keep my home with me was by preserving it through memory- because no one has the power to take away your memories- and through maintaining a connection to its language and literature."
Dr. Nafisi, if you're reading this, please know you are cordially invited to my family's 2011 Thanksgiving celebration.
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