Azar Nafisi

In Iran, like all totalitarian states, the regime pays too much attention to poets and writers, harassing, jailing, and even killing them. The problem in America is that too little attention is paid to them. They are silenced not by torture and jail but by indifference and negligence. I am reminded of James Baldwin’s claim that “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” In the United States, it is mainly we, the people, who are the problem; we who take the existence of challenging literature for granted, or see reading as solely a comfort, seeking out only texts that confirm our presuppositions and prejudices. Perhaps for us, the very idea of change is dangerous, and what we avoid is reading dangerously.

the society was fast becoming polarized—too much ideology and not enough discourse

the structure of great fiction is based on multivocality, on a democracy of different perspectives where even the villain has a voice, while bad fiction reduces all voices to one voice, that of the writer, who, like a dictator, stifles all the characters in order to impose his message and agenda. Great works of literature—works that are truly dangerous—question and expose that dictatorial impulse, both on the page and in the public space. As I sat down to write my father on that day in October, reading dangerously had never felt more important.