Nafisi: "Society cannot live without creating spaces for imagination and literature"

Azar Nafisi meets with students prior to the first Forum event.

WOOSTER, Ohio - Azar Nafisi, the acclaimed author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, opened the 2006 Wooster Forum last night with a passionate defense of the importance of great works of literature. "Society cannot live without creating spaces for imagination and literature," she told several hundred students, faculty and local residents. "No amount of political correctness is going to cause you to empathize with another. It is only through the eyes of imagination."

Reading Lolita in Tehran recounts the personal and intellectual exchanges among seven young women in a private literature class Nafisi held in her home after the Iranian government had barred her from teaching at the University of Tehran. The book was chosen as the required summer reading for Wooster’s class of incoming first-year students.

Nafisi urged her listeners to look beyond the media shorthand that reduces radically different nations to the common denominator of membership in something called "the Muslim world."

"Do we call the U.S. and France and England 'Christian countries'?" she asked. "Yet they have far more in common than Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan."

In particular, Nafisi lamented the one-dimensional view of her native Iran held by many in the West, "As if 70 million Iranians get up every morning and say, "Boy, we really need to develop nuclear weapons.'"

Iran is a nation with 2,500 years of history, she said, more than half of it predating the emergence of Islam; a nation where, before the 1979 revolution, women were active in all spheres of public life, including leading two government ministries. And it is a nation with a rich literary tradition. She told the audience of a poet who, 700 years ago, "wrote about hypocritical clerics who flog in public and drink wine in private, an exact description of those in charge of my country today."

People outside Iran seldom hear about ordinary Iranians resisting the government’s efforts to curtail their freedoms, Nafisi said, but they have been doing so for 27 years. That resistance takes forms both personal and political, and once again, literature plays an important role.

"To resist means to remember," Nafisi said, "And literature is the best safeguard of memory."

The College of Wooster is an independent liberal arts college, nationally recognized for an innovative curriculum that emphasizes independent learning. Each Wooster senior works one-on-one with a faculty mentor to create an original research project, written work, performance or art exhibit. Founded in 1866, the college enrolls approximately 1,800 students.