Read Dangerously by Azar Nafisi

Read Dangerously by Azar Nafisi

Author:Azar Nafisi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-01-10T00:00:00+00:00


The Fourth Letter:

Atwood

MAY 11–26, 2020

Dearest Baba,

This morning I woke up around five, earlier than usual, and since I couldn’t get back to sleep, I got up, made myself some coffee, and took my cup to the balcony to salute the Potomac. It was still dark, and I could feel the river rather than see it. I was experiencing two kinds of silence simultaneously. One was the silence of the river at early morning, its beauty and calm, the trees shadowlike in the darkness. Then there was the other, inner silence; the feeling I get whenever I think of the virus, disturbing and insidious. There is a silence to the coronavirus, like that of death, as if the dread of the virus wraps itself around me like mist. This silence is charged with menace, of the kind that won’t go away with tranquilizers. It is more existential. Unlike during the Iran-Iraq War, the threat does not come with loud noises, but follows me, encircles me, cold and clammy.

Then there is the silence of the book I write to you about today, Baba, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It occurs to me that in The Handmaid’s Tale, the author creates these two kinds of silence side by side: beauty and death, the kind you and I experienced, living in a totalitarian society, feeling the danger in the air even in moments of relative peace and calm.

I had always wanted to talk to Margaret Atwood about The Handmaid’s Tale. Before her book became a runaway success and was made into a popular television series, it seemed as if the American people had instinctively associated Trump’s mindset with that of the rulers in Atwood’s Gilead. When I first met her at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, held at the Harbour Front Center, where we spoke briefly, she told me that her books had been translated into Persian. At the time, I thought of telling her about my experience of first reading The Handmaid’s Tale—about how difficult it was for me to read, about how it blurred the boundaries between her fiction and my reality, collapsing one into the other so that, at first, I reacted to her fiction as if it were my reality. But I didn’t tell her any of these things back then; there simply was not enough time for me to explain myself.

Now there has been a surge of interest in The Handmaid’s Tale, and in its 2019 sequel, The Testaments, in my adopted home country, America. Though I no longer live in Iran, reality in Trump’s America is becoming more and more not just unreal or surreal, but irreal, tinged with anxiety about where this country is headed. You, Baba jan, might tell me that this America is not that Islamic Republic. And you are right, but there are also signs and manifestations of a totalitarian mindset in Trump and his supporters that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Now that The Handmaid’s Tale has become a bestseller again in America, I became curious to know how it had fared in Iran.



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