The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (14 page)

I told her I had this strange feeling, difficult to put into words, that although teaching
Huckleberry Finn
in Iran was both rewarding and revealing, and although my students as a whole loved it, they focused mainly on the repressive aspects of the book, wanting to find fault with a society with which they were at war. In my classes in Iran, I had spent a fair amount of time discussing the confinements of life in a “civilized” society and made a point of drawing parallels with Iran, with its rigid structures and conformity, where everything was done
by the book
—and it was always somebody else’s book. In America, my focus had shifted to morality, a topic my students returned to both in class discussions and in their journals.

Some of my Islamist students were uncomfortable with Huck’s view of Sunday school, but, as one of them put it to me one day after class, “Huck is against not religion but established religion, kind of like what we over here call ‘American Islam,’ the kind that was prevalent during the shah’s time.” He handily overlooked the complicating fact that his own kind of religion had now become established. I felt there was little difference between the mentality of slave owners who were in the habit of reminding skeptics that the Bible approved of slavery and of Islamists who claimed that Islam approved of the repression of women and minorities and that the Prophet, after all, was of the view that a woman’s testimony should be worth half that of a man. But he seemed so happy with his find that I didn’t have the heart to disillusion him, at least not then.

If society’s moral edicts are a sham, if they go against the purer lessons of the heart, what should we do? The lessons Huck learns and unlearns go far beyond the immorality of slavery. His trip with Jim is an education, countering the lessons of Sunday school. At every step, Huck is tested.

In one scene in which Jim, having lost Huck, is frantic with anxiety, Huck pretends to have been there all the time. Upon discovering the prank, Jim tells Huck how he felt when he thought he’d lost his friend—“my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los,” he says—and how relieved he was to find him again. Jim goes on to reproach Huck. He says that, while he was thankful to see his friend safe, all Huck was thinking about was “how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is
trash;
en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.” Huck reports, “Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed
his
foot to get him to take it back.” It takes Huck fifteen minutes to “humble” himself to a “nigger,” but he tells us he did it and “I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.”

The real test arrives when Huck contemplates the consequences of helping Jim find freedom. He sees this not as an act of liberation but as a sin, something for which he will be blamed. “I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way,” he says. As Jim believes he is nearing Cairo and freedom—wrongly, it turns out—Huck tells us, “My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever. . . .” He decides to give Jim up, and has a chance to do so when he runs across two men looking for five runaway slaves, but as hard as he tries, he cannot betray Jim. He reports:

“I tried for a second or two to brace up and out with it, but I warn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says:

“‘He’s white.’”

Although he feels bad for doing the “wrong” thing, he figures he would have felt just as bad turning Jim in, and since he cannot understand why it is that the “wages” of doing the right things and the wrong thing are the same, he decides not to think about it and to just do “whichever comes handiest at the time.”

This unresolved dilemma returns to haunt him, as he always seems to impulsively take the side of the “wrong.” When he learns that the duke and the dauphin have betrayed Jim for a paltry $45, Huck begins his longest fight with his conscience. He has another “long think,” sorting out different possibilities, and he tells us, “The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling.” He knows he could have gone to Sunday school and that there they would have “learnt” him that “people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.” He tries to pray, but the words will not come, because his “heart warn’t right.” So finally, deciding to do the “right thing,” he writes a note to Miss Watson, giving Jim up.

Once he writes the note, he feels “good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now.” But his wayward heart would not let him off so easily. For immediately he starts thinking, and as he continues to think he tells us,

I see Jim before me, all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the
only
one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll
go
to hell”—and tore it up.

That is when Huck decides that he is “wicked” and will remain true to his wickedness, and for a start he will try to save Jim. In doing so, he will turn the civilized world on its head and, hopefully, also make his readers do some deep thinking of their own about words such as “right” and “wrong,” “wicked” and “virtuous,” “respectable” and “civilized.”

While Huck Finn is the quintessential individualist, his individualism does not condone greed. With his rejection of the “Sunday-school” mentality, he also rejects the utilitarian view of religion as a system of reward and punishment. His moral choices are deliberate. He takes conscious risks and accepts responsibility. Huck will find a new home and a new source of moral power, where the authority of the outside world is replaced with an inner authority, one that will help him decide what to do with Jim.

This is the kind of individualism that shapes my idea of America, the one I tried to share with my students in Tehran, explaining to them that moral choice comes from a sound heart and from a constant questioning of the world and of oneself, and that it is just as difficult, if not more so, in a society that appears to give you every freedom.
In his study of life in concentration camps, Tzvetan Todorov argues that even under the most adverse conditions, when human beings are at death’s door, they still have a choice. Their ultimate choice lies in their attitude toward life and death. It is in this manner that Huck’s choice of hell and Jim’s decision to risk his freedom in order to remain loyal are essentially choices to be true to that inner self, the rebellious heart that beats to its own rhythm.

If there is a climax to Huck’s adventures, it is this. No other scene so poignantly and so perfectly captures Huck and his mate Jim. But the story doesn’t end here; we have the Phelps farm to deal with. Once Huck discovers that the duke and the dauphin have betrayed Jim for a paltry $45 and that Jim is now locked up at the Phelps farm (which happens to be home to Tom’s aunt Sally and her brood), he decides to go there to free Jim.

“If I were teaching Huck Finn . . .” I began.

“You
are
teaching Huck Finn,” Farah said. “And you have been teaching him ever since your first class in Tehran.”

“I am not happy with that anymore,” I said.

We were in her living room. She had been feeling unwell and was lying on the couch, with one hand covering her brow. She asked me to move closer so she could see me better. The French windows framed her beloved garden. Before we talked about Huck, she had me pick a tiny lemon from a small tree and put it into a huge bowl. She wanted me to smell its fragrance. She told me that among the things she regretted most was not spending more time on the garden.

That was when she first told me about her desire to get a small dog. She said she felt the dog would motivate her to bear the pain better. Her husband was opposed to this and her siblings worried that looking after a dog might be too much of a burden to her. With a faded smile, reminiscent of the smile forewarning you of some form of subtle guile, she told me her plan to convince Habib to let her have the dog, engaging her two children to conspire with her so that Habib would be confronted with the inevitable presence of the dog. She had spent months trying to choose one and thinking of a name for it.

I told Farah that I didn’t want to teach for a while. I felt I needed to take time off, to think things through.

“This is not a marriage you are talking about,” she said. “And you are not twenty years old, with time on your hands. Even if you were, you never know how much longer you will live.”

“I feel we’re all too accustomed to the usual way of teaching these books,” I said. “I want something more. I want to create a new course called Creative Reading. What my students need is not another lecture on
Huck Finn.
I don’t want simply to bring up the questions we all know we have to ask, about slavery, humor, even Americanism. Those questions should not be posed—they should emerge organically from our engagement with the text.” I reminded Farah of Twain’s statement that education “consists mainly in what we have unlearned” and told her that I wanted to do a little more unlearning. After all, Huck himself flees the stifling world of cultured indoctrination. He escapes the Widow Douglas’s civilizing mission and sets off to shape his own education.

“Maybe I should ask my students, before they write on
Huck,
to write about their most sensual encounter with nature, to express how it feels to touch, to listen, to see, to taste and, of course, to feel. To become conscious of the world around them, because that is what I keep missing: the sensuality that at all periods of my life, no matter where I have lived, I could evoke through a poem, a painting, music or a story.”

“Let it be, Azar,” Farah said gently. “You and I enjoyed this beauty without seeing the reality that gave birth to it. That was how we were young, and this is how they are young. Just let them be.”

“When I give speeches,” I said, “the people who come to listen are more frank with me than my students, partly because there is a relationship of trust between readers and writers, some shared intimacy. And of course they are not talking to their teacher but to someone who, despite the curious and immediate feeling of closeness, will leave, after which they will in all likelihood never see them again. The combination of these two elements, of intimacy and distance, conspires to create moments of immense frankness. I feel as open with the audience as they are with me. Teaching is a funny business; you want to share these glimpses of something real and profound, but half the time students want only to know their next assignment and what they will need to study for the test. I wish I could persuade them to be a little less dutiful.”

“You might feel this way for a while,” Farah said, “but you won’t be able to stop teaching for long. It’s in your blood.” And that was that; she wanted to talk about her garden again.

Before we said goodbye, I said, “By the way, I am thinking of a new subtitle. With all this talk of ‘sivilizing’ and all that, how about ‘Unlearning
Huckleberry Finn
in America?’”

“That’s even worse,” Farah said. “Take your own advice: being concrete is good. Stop worrying about the subtitle and write the damn book.” She was becoming more and more like my real editor.

In June 2009, I was officially called on to perform my role as citizen of the United States of America: I was summoned to jury duty. Every morning for more than two weeks, I would take the Metro to Judiciary Square and enter the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, where the main part of my day would be spent with eleven other jurors in a courtroom for the trial of a young African American man named Vincent—known as V—for the murder of another African American man who was just thirty but still older than the accused by ten years. I would avidly write down my questions, my doubts, my “verdict,” which kept changing, in the notebook provided by the court, even though, to my chagrin, we had these taken away from us each time we adjourned. That notebook was all I had to write my impressions in, and I was not used to being unable to perform that task.

As I avidly told Farah later that week, a different Washington from the one we lived in was taking shape in my mind, one that I knew existed, that my husband—who worked in northeast Anacostia—had talked about, but I had never felt its existence the way I did during those two weeks. The experience would forever change my view of the city and make me, in a sense, more committed to it, more its citizen than before. The case was about what had happened on the corner of H and 19th streets, among a group of young, mainly male African Americans drinking Grey Goose vodka and at times breaking into fights. But then it was about so many other things, too. It was about gun ownership and inequality, and it was about jobs and dreams and what happens when you have neither.

A little after I started jury duty, Iran broke into an uprising against the rigged presidential election won by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and for the first time since I had returned to America, attention was being paid to the Iranian people, as well as to the regime. Farah was very excited and got involved, although she was also very sick. For the first time in a long while, our conversations turned to politics and conditions in Iran. Almost every day, she would call her cousin in Tehran to get the news, and we would spend most of our time together listening to the news, reading the news, talking about the news on Iran. I felt that I was participating in two kinds of justice: one in the court of my new country, and the other played out by the people in the streets of my country of birth. In both, the results could not be foreseen, but there was no doubt about the necessity to participate as engaged citizens.