How reading helps us build empathy and resist tyranny

‘Read Dangerously’ reveals similarities between Iran, U.S.

Azar Nafisi’s “Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times” takes the form of five letters to the author’s late father. They were composed during the Trump presidency, as the pandemic and George Floyd’s killing unsettled both the body politic and individual psyches in the United States. The letters are ruminations on the role of humanistic books in places torn by conflict and polarization; but they also, through flashbacks to Nafisi’s home country of Iran, draw unnerving connections between that totalitarian state of her birth and the contemporary America she has adopted as a naturalized U.S. citizen.

By taking this approach, Nafisi pays homage to two writers she offers as models in the book, her sixth. James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates both tackled the unremitting trauma of racism in America through the literary device of letters — Baldwin to his nephew, Coates to his son. Their warnings and their hope were couched as offerings to the next generation. Nafisi, perhaps best known as the author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” might have followed their lead and written to, for example, the two grandchildren whom she was expecting, and who were born, as she wrote “Read Dangerously.” Why, instead, does she address her words to her father, almost two decades dead?

Her father was jailed by the shah’s government in 1963, when he was mayor of Tehran. His crime was to disobey orders to shut shops early and close hospitals to protesters during demonstrations against the arrest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then an outsider to political power. Khomeini had denounced the ruling elite’s progressive reforms, including those enfranchising women. Nafisi’s father went to prison for four years because he insisted on fair and humane treatment for people he disagreed with. From father to daughter, there is a clear line in the moral and intellectual commitment to seeing the enemy’s humanity. “Read Dangerously” — criticism, memoir and argument as well as correspondence to a lost loved one — confirms that lineage.

To build her thesis (an old one) that reading literature increases our capacity for empathy, even and perhaps especially for our enemies, Nafisi begins by setting up a classic confrontation: between oppressive power and those who speak truth to it through the exercise of the imagination.

Frequently and deftly shifting lanes between autobiography and literary analysis, she uses her experience and reading of three books to question the nature of this immemorial conflict between the poet and the tyrant. She remembers how, as a university student in Oklahoma, she debated Plato’s “Republic,” in which philosopher-kings exiled poets from their ideal society, with a conservative American fellow student, a fan of the banishment. They disagreed, but respectfully and over many congenial coffees. She also remembers witnessing on the ground, as a citizen of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980s, Khomeini’s infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie for the perceived sins of his novel “The Satanic Verses.” The “poet” had written a rambunctious, high-velocity book about migration and the changes in national and personal identity that it catalyzes. The tyrant cleric had seen in it only blasphemous portrayals of the prophet Muhammad. Then Nafisi tackles another state that bans books and promotes burning them — the fictional, futuristic America that Ray Bradbury created in “Fahrenheit 451’ — and she does this in a way that complicates our understanding of who the tyrant is.