Email
Print
FeedFinally, I’m in Buffalo! … Babel’s Azar Nafisi
Those four words were definitely not what I expected to escape Azar Nafisi’s lips upon reaching the podium at Kleinhans for 2010’s first installment of Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Babel Series. After Mike Kelleher finished his three pages of introductory notes—including naming three of the four authors to be stopping by this great city next season, listed below—the Iranian-born novelist took the stage and spoke enthusiastically about the children she visited earlier at City Honors. They gave her great insight and enthralled her enough to stay thirty minutes past her scheduled visit. But considering the passion she showed tonight—and the length at which she spoke—that does not surprise me.
Nafisi's brand of humor—she bashed Twitter and other youth-centric new technologies with wit and intelligence—shaped the evening, and made it one of the most insightful and entertaining lectures I’ve seen in the series. Perhaps it seems that the event keeps getting bigger and better each time, even if it felt like a long time since the last lecture, featuring Ha Jin. (It was four months ago.) Her book Reading Lolita in Tehran told the story of informal literature classes she held at her home for a select group of girls. Here, they read international works, took off their scarves, and for a short time, felt as free as the women of Iran were before the Islamic Revolution. For the members of the class, reading the book served as a physical example for Nafisi's main point of the night: using imagination to help breed empathy.
Nafisi remembers a time when wearing the veil was a religious duty, not a political mandate. She remembers women having an opinion and speaking it. Unfortunately, that time is gone for the moment. But she says to pigeonhole the region as being synonymous with the horrors going on now “would be like saying Fascism is the culture of Europe and slavery the culture of America.” Nafisi belives every nation has a moment of time to be ashamed of, but they also have the ability to change. Just because we look upon Iran at present and see persecution, veiled women, and “Ahmadinejad smirking as though he broke the neighbor’s window and got away with it” doesn’t mean that the nation wasn’t progressive and at the forefront of women’s rights at the start of the last century.
But despite her love for Iran and the hope to one day go back and visit the Caspian Sea with her daughter—the last two times she returned revolution broke out, so she isn’t too keen on going back quite so soon—Nafisi now calls America home. But she has not forgotten her past: “All we are left with really are memories ... the most important resistance to tyranny is to not give up what they want to take away from you—to live life."
As for the 2010–2011 season announcement; here are the first three speakers:
10/19/10
Trinidad and Tobago’s V.S. Naipaul with his novel A House for Mr. Biswas
12/2/10
American Maxine Hong Kingston with her novel The Woman Warrior
3/25/11
Haitian Edwidge Danticat with her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory
Subscriptions will be on-sale April 16 at this season’s final event with Salman Rushdie.
