4.75 ( )

A beautiful collection of letters that makes me want to revisit The Handmaids Tale and many works of Baldwin, a worthwhile read if you love and believe in books. ( )

Reason read: book I meant to read earlier, Iranian author challenge (Asian). My third book by Azar Nafisi and my least favorite. This book explored politics more than it did books though the premise of the book is that we should read all books to be informed even those that don't fit with our ideologies. I did not get the impression that she was doing this herself. She read those that were supporting her own. It was more evident in this book what her ideology, communism. I enjoyed her exposition on Grossman's To the End of the Land which I had recently read. The book is written as letters to her father where in she addresses her concerns about Iran and the US. She is a strong hater of the president during 2016 and 2020 and she voiced her opinions in these letters, believing that the US was losing it's freedom under the current president. The book ends with a letter that her father had written to Lyndon B. Johnson when he was president. I bought this book and I am sorry that I did. I would have rather owned Republic of Imagination which is a much better book. ( )

Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times
Author: Azar Nafisi
Publisher: Dey St. - William Morrow
Publishing Date: 2022
Pgs: 223
Dewey: 809-n146r
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
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REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
What is the role of literature in an era when one political party wages continual war on writers and the press? What is the connection between political strife in our daily lives, and the way we meet our enemies on the page in fiction? How can literature, through its free exchange, affect politics?
In this galvanizing guide to literature as resistance, Nafisi seeks to answer these questions. Drawing on her experiences as a woman and voracious reader living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, her life as an immigrant in the United States, and her role as literature professor in both countries, she crafts an argument for why, in a genuine democracy, we must engage with the enemy, and how literature can be a vehicle for doing so.
Structured as a series of letters to her father, who taught her as a child about how literature can rescue us in times of trauma, Nafisi explores the most probing questions of our time through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, and more.
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Genre:
Politics
Political Literature
Criticism
Society
Culture
History
Iran
America
The World
Censorship
Thought
Political Thought
Liberal Political Thought
Forgiveness
War

Why this book:
In the current straits, thought keeps you off the rocks and shoals. Read…because they don’t want you to.
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The Page 100 Test:
√ ◄ - good to go.
🧠◄ - makes you think
$ ◄ - this is money.

The Feel:
This touches on the works of other authors and brings their most “dangerous” qualities to life in these pages. I’m invested in Nafisi’s story, but I’m curious about some of these others that are brought up as well.

Favorite Character:
James Baldwin when his work is discussed here rapidly became a favorite.

Least Favorite Character:
College friend from Oklahoma University, Dan, whose favorite author is Ayn Rand. I already don’t like this guy. Wonder if he’s in Congress today? :/

Favorite Quote:
This era is overwhelmed by violence both in rhetoric and reality communicating not through inclusion but elimination. Adversaries and opponents are now reduced to and defined as enemies.

We enter dangerous territory when we blur the lines between fiction and reality, or weaponize fiction to further an agenda–be it political, religious, or personal. The totalitarian mindset breaks the borders between fiction and reality, and, in the same manner, it imposes its own fictions and mythologies on the realities of its people, speaking and acting on their behalf. You see this mindset not only in authoritarian countries but also in democracies–the most obvious in America being Trump’s replacing reality with his lies and illusions.

[There is] “a heavy price to pay for mischief.”

“Rather sad that the world knows so much about America, while America knows so little about the world.”

“Race is the child of racism, not the father” - James Baldwin

“[they both believed] the writer should be free to demolish the barrier of color, to cross the forbidden line and write from the point of view of someone with a different skin.” - William Styron in remembrance of James Baldwin from the New York Times. The mutual respect of the two men aborning in Baldwin’s coming to Styron’s defense after the latter wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner. Baldwin said of Styron that “[he] had a right to a confrontation with his history. No one has a right to tell a writer what to write.” I would just add that if you don't like it, don't read it. The writer is the one bleeding on the page. It’s their blood, their soul. Sit in judgment if you must, but karma is a bitch. This is the essence of freedom of speech to me. Yes, you have the freedom to speak it, but I have the freedom not to listen or to turn the volume down and let you scream into the abyss.

Baldwin believed “we are all adnrogynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other–male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are a part of each other.” Powerful stuff.

Favorite Concept:
Dignity, self-revelation, and the virtue of being mulish.

The exploration of race, race relations, and the juxtaposition of Iran and America embodied here is fascinating.

Book makes me consider the protests in America. The outraged soul takes to the streets demanding justice. The outrage fades. It’s still there, but everyday life is beating us. The media fans the flame until they have something to move on to. The exhausted soul just tries to get through the next day. “Normality” returns. The next outrage occurs, but nothing was done to truly address the previous outrage. Maybe if we had votes of no confidence in this country that gave more power to the people. Imagine Presidents trying to form new governments less they fall out of power in the offseason. The stagnant system robs people of their power. A power that can only be expressed during election season. This is why The Powers That Be fear making it easier to vote.

Talking about Baldwin and Coates belief that there is no biological basis to race, and that white and Black are political constructs, a ploy created to ensure the subjugation of one group of people by another. …I take that along into the same headspace with Lyndon Johnson’s quote - “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” Those ideas living together in my psyche make me thoughtful about all those aspects. And horrified as I look out my window at the America we have now.

When Baldwin refers to white people as “our striken kinfolk”, I feel that. His commentary when he said that racism harms both the victim and the perpetrator.

Hmm Moments:
“Don't you think that there is a moment in most political upheavals when people lose their individual voices and become one when a sort of blindness takes over their faculties, and that is the decisive moment that can allow a tyrannical mindset to take over.” … …well that’s horrifying.

As she talks about Ora from “To The End Of The Land” and her obsession with not being home when the military notifiers come to tell her that her son has perished in war because if she's not then he can't be dead. This percolates thru my brain as a Schrodinger.

Calling the Ball:
Finding it difficult to read A Handmaid's Take seems a universal experience. Not because it’s bad. More because of the fear…or sobering reality that it’s not as far fetched as we’d all like to believe.

Wisdom:
“Each is responsible for the atrocities but is not equated with them.” We forget this. We blame. We vilify. We stereotype.

Juxtaposition:
The author on living in Iran - “...religion was a kind of victim, used and manipulated as a political ideology to maintain the power of the state.” While in the current American political climate, religion is being used as a weapon against everyone who isn’t white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and in lockstep with their agenda.

“You and I were stunned that so many chose to ignore the ominous signs: the murder and executions, the mistreatment of women and minorities, the replacement of progressive laws with regressive and brutal ones. When the new regime executed the old government officials–or innocent people accused falsely of collaborating with that government–many remained silent, and the majority of political organizations and groups, both inside and outside Iran, including some on the Left, supported the Islamic regime’s actions.” Sounds like Paul Gosar’s America.

Plato’s Noble Lie and The Cave are metaphors for modern America.

Saul Bellow asked “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, The Proust of the Papuans?” Ralph Wiley’s response, “Tolstoy was the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Unless you find profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” Wiley reminds us of hte universality of ideas and imagination. Like scientific advances, they might originate at a specific place and tim, but once theta trout there in the world, they belong to the world–or, rather, belong to whoever cares about them, nurtures them, uses them. We need that imagination in order to survive as human beings. Where els but through imagination and ideas do we connect even with those we have never met in our lives?

Erstwhile:
The reminder that One Thousand and One Arabian Nights are told to save Scheherazade’s life from the virgin killer king who marries a new wife every night and kills them at dawn to keep her from ever betraying him. And after telling him 2 ¾ years worth of stories, he chose to let her live and be his queen. ⸮…what a prize⸮ The lead is buried whenever one of us gets nostalgic about any of this story. Course same could be said about many of our fairy tales when we look too closely at them and passed their Disneyfication.

The Unexpected:
Through this Iranian woman’s literature criticism, review, and love affair, I confronted myself, my past, our shared past, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and America. Good stuff.

The Poker Game/DND Table:
Imagining a poker game with Baldwin, Plato, and her father. The discussion around the table would lead to forgotten cards and introspection.

She could sit at my poker or DND table. It’d be fun.

Movies and Television:
I’ve gotta track down that mentioned biography of James Baldwin.
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Pacing:
For Non -Fiction, there was real flow to this. Page to page, sometimes in a blur, having to stop to think and consider the nuggets throughout.

Last Page Sound:
Thought-provoking. When I said that about the book, I failed to realize how thought-provoking it would actually be. Totally caught off guard by this book. I expected political criticism and talk, but the chapters on Baldwin and Coates are so enlightening.

Conclusions I’ve Drawn:
Based on Nafisi, I believe I would enjoy being challenged by…I mean reading James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Their work is going on my TBR list.

Reread Pile:
Doubt I’d re-read this. But I may get a copy to keep on my bookshelf to reference from time to time. It was damned good. And who knows, another political season is coming.
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