The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi Read Free Book Online

gesture, letting on that she was manipulating you into doing what she wanted, making you complicit in a conspiracy against yourself. This was what made it possible for her to transcend and resist what her daughter would later call the “hurdles” in her life. Farah herself once good-naturedly complained that the gods above must have known her tolerance for hardship, because they kept “blessing” her with all manner of nightmares. She had survived a revolution and a war, had been smuggled across the border from Iran into Turkey, seven months’ pregnant, her two-and-half-year-old daughter in tow while her husband was being tortured in a Tehran jail—to name just one example among many.
    “I want to know,” I said, “just how low you will stoop.”
    Ignoring me, she said, “And don’t forget I am an editor. Pretend I am
your
editor.”
    She was a senior editor at the International Monetary Fund, not exactly the kind of editor I had in mind. But Farah and I had a long history.
    We were driving back to Georgetown from Chevy Chase, where we had spent over two hours at a Borders bookstore that no longer exists with Farah’s older sister, Mahnaz, jumping from heated discussions of the presidential race in America (this was 2008, and despite Obama’s victory in the primaries, we were still debating the comparative merits of Obama and Clinton) to gossip, shopping, the Iranian government’s machinations and my upcoming interview for U.S. citizenship. Because after eleven years in Washington, I had finally applied to become an American citizen. Farah took this as a cue to proselytize for her latest obsession, a passionate enchantment with U.S. history.
    Before she became too ill to drive, the three of us would meet regularly in bookstores dotted around Georgetown and Dupont Circle, or at the Cheesecake Factory in Chevy Chase, or Leopold’s in Cady’s Alley, to talk and talk. We would be giddy with excitement, too impatient to let one another finish our sentences, childishly interrupting with a chaos of allusions and shortcuts understandable only to ourselves. Even at the hairdresser (because we three would meet there, too, when one of us needed a haircut or a blow-dry), we would be so raucous that soon the polite and considerate owner relegated us to a back room, serving us cappuccinos while we tried in vain to keep our voices down.
    Farah and Mahnaz had both majored in English literature—rare for Iranians even now, and more so then—and our discussions were always peppered with exchanges about books. We were related, but blood alone was not responsible for this intimacy. Long before I was called into a drab office at Immigration Services to answer a few questions and take an oath as a newly minted American citizen, we shared the complicity of being citizens of two countries, straddling two such different worlds. We belonged to two languages, simultaneously reminding us of the country we had left behind and the one we had chosen to make our new home. More than anything else, it was that ready access to two languages, to their poetry and fiction, to their cultures, vague as that term might seem, that provided us with a temporary feeling of stability.
    I have always believed it was that initial sense of kinship, the sharing of the same dreams and our love of literature, that sustained our friendship—that led us to take that car ride and so many others like it, when Farah and I would often get so involved in conversation that we would inevitably lose our way, miss an exit on Rockville Pike and almost always be late for our meetings with Mahnaz, who sat like patience on a monument, trying to find something funny in our schoolgirl excuses and suppressed giggles.
    “You must bring more U.S. history in your new book, the way you did with Iran in
Reading Lolita,
” Farah said, turning toward me instead of keeping her eye on the road. “How else can you write about American fiction?”
    Farah was never shy about telling me