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

what to do. I started to complain that when I once mentioned Tocqueville in a graduate seminar,one of my students had raised her hand and asked, “Who is Tocqueville?”
    “Can you believe it?” I said, with mounting indignation. “At a school for international studies, for heaven’s sake!” I would soon discover that most of the class did not know about the Frenchman who had written
Democracy in America
. “I bet quite a few of my students in Iran would at least have heard of him.”
    “All the more reason,” Farah said, seemingly unperturbed, “why you should read Joseph J. Ellis’s
Founding Brothers
.”
    Two years later, I would accompany Mahnaz to Farah’s bedroom to choose a keepsake from a pile of books randomly stacked against the wall, like a group of orphaned children waiting for a new parent. I did not hesitate in picking
Founding Brothers
. I could not think of any book that reminded me more of the intimately joyous times Farah and I spent together—any book, that is, other than
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.
    It so happened that Farah’s prediction came true; she didn’t get a chance to read my book. Five years after that conversation, I had not yet finished writing it. The main hurdle was the chapter we talked so much about, the one on Huck Finn. It took me more than two years to write it, and then I set it aside for another year because it didn’t feel right—too much analysis, too little heart. Looking over my notes in frustration, I kept coming across my conversations with Farah. Then it hit me that she had left me the key to the chapter in our exchanges, when Huck became so central to our musings about becoming American, about the meaning of exile and home. Farah had made peace with what it meant to live with a divided heart.
    I had not thought seriously of writing about those conversations until I received an e-mail from Farah’s daughter in response to my inquiry about how a dog Farah had adopted in the last months of her life had come to be called Huck. “There was something about Huck Finn in the air in our house that last year,” Neda wrote back. “Mom started talking about your project and was entranced. Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived. Sometime in the months before she died, she asked me to get a book on tape for her and download it to her iPod. I borrowed
Huck Finn
from the library and put it on her iPod and while she was listening to it with earbuds, I was listening to it at work during the long, long hours of watching Congress grind to a halt. And I still haven’t been able to return the original. Yes, I am effectively a thief.”
    Huck came to mean more to Farah as she sorted through her memories and sought to tell herself and her daughter the story of her own journey—her “adventure,” if that is the right word for all manner of bad luck. In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so provident or benign.
    When Farah and I met in those last eighteen months of her life, we seldom talked about anything other than
Huck Finn
—like two teenage best friends in love with the same elusive boy. Our conversations took place in different parts of Washington, usually somewhere between Foggy Bottom (my home) and Georgetown (hers), at her house or in various coffee shops and restaurants, and sometimes, when she felt well, on walks around the waterfront or along the canal. In every one of these places, our conversations would take us to familiar landscapes as sudden windows opened up, framing vistas of our past lives. So many things were happening then—two wars halfheartedly and desultorily waged, the economy going from bad to worse, heated election campaigns, and new hopes forming the seeds of new disillusionment both in Iran and in the United States. Farah was elated at the prospect