The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (6 page)

We shared a family and a history and lived parallel lives, but perhaps equally important we shared a passion for American literature. Farah was the first and most exalted citizen of my Republic of Imagination. While I pined and opined, she drafted our constitution, wrote its bylaws and documented its history. I knew I would be its scribe, but she goaded and prodded me to write and challenged me when I grew lazy or complacent. I knew I wanted to write about Huck, to capture what he could teach us, at a time of reality TV and phony bombastic patriotism, about a more authentic American ideal. Farah reminded me that what Huck stood for, what he embodied, was a set of values grounded in history. We still read Huck today—American students will come across him again and again—but are we really listening to what he has to say? When I asked my students in Washington to read him, some would look at me quizzically, as if to say, “Why Huck? What can he possibly have to teach us?”

Who says fantasy is not potent? All through the seventies, during our student years, Farah and I had lived mainly in an imaginary America—more Tom Sawyer than Huck, we imposed our own fantasies on Iran as well as America. Like many of my age, I participated in various political groups in a decade that saw the blossoming of the civil rights and women’s movements and that ended abruptly for me in 1979 with the Islamic revolution in Iran. Passionate times tend to produce a dangerous smugness as the dizzying satisfaction of helping to put the world aright takes over the urge that motivated the protest in the first place.

In those days, I felt I was living in two different
Americas: the America of the Vietnam War and the civil rights and women’s rights movements, of Nixon and Watergate, and the neighboring country I had discovered through its fiction, poetry, film, art and music: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Judy Collins, Edward Hopper, the Harlem Renaissance, the Marx Brothers, Howard Hawks, Woody Allen, Herman Melville, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, E. E. Cummings. These were my heroes, the founding parents of the America I felt I knew and belonged to. Reality was confusing and polarized, while fiction was complex, paradoxical and illuminating: that whole vast continent of art and the imagination gave weight and substance to the urgent, emotional, simplified world of protests and demonstrations.

We were too young to have participated in the civil rights movement that had defined the sixties, that of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin. Ours was a different era, of the Black Panthers, Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael: more impatient, more violent,
more ideological and more fantasy-oriented. I participated in the protests—we all did—but
my heart was in that other America, the one I discovered through its fiction and poetry.

I had not seen Farah for more than a decade when suddenly we were at the same convention in Chicago in 1976, having coffee and discussing the speech I was going to give. We belonged to opposing factions in the Confederation of Iranian Students, and since her group held the leadership posts, she was responsible for checking my speech, making sure I covered all the “right positions” and did not stray too far from the party line. Our meeting that day was cordial, even affectionate, although we did not talk about personal matters, about what had happened to us since we had last said goodbye in Tehran so many years ago. For Farah the Iranian student movement was her whole life; it became a home, a shelter, in a way it never was for me.

What had happened between Farah’s departure for the United States, at the age of ten, and our meeting in Chicago to create this distance between us? In an account of her life based on many hours of taped interviews—which
her
sister, Mahnaz, published in her book
Women in Exile
in 1994—Farah mentions how lonely she was in high school in the States. “I was never quite thin enough, my hair never straight enough, my outlook never close enough to the prevailing standards, and the standards, even when they stressed nonconformity, were strictly observed.” So, she says, “I played the piano, listened to classical music, read Victorian novels, and felt out of place.”

Only once in all this time did she return to Iran, for a summer, and then she felt a fateful sense of belonging. “I was somehow made whole by the realization that this was home,” she told Mahnaz, “and what happened here mattered to me.” She would make the most important decisions in her life based on that desire for belonging. She wanted what Huck Finn appeared to be escaping from—a comfortable and predictable home.

When she returned to California after that summer, she was drawn to the Iranian student movement mainly by a desire to recapture this sense of belonging. Despite the fact that she had left Iran as a child, the Iranian activists accepted her as their own. Their gatherings felt like a “club”; for the first time, she had a network of friends around whom her life was structured. “What drew me to the Association at the beginning was more the camaraderie than the political cause,” she told Mahnaz. “The passion for the cause came much later.”

Farah never did anything halfway. Once she committed herself to the movement, she cast all doubts aside. She held rallies, went on long marches, and joined a forty-eight-hour vigil in front of the Iranian consulate in Chicago in the dead of winter. She even tied herself up to the Statue of Liberty once with a group of friends to protest the shah. All of these activities became more glorious, and somehow more justified, when she fell in love with Faramarz, a popular student leader, handsome and charismatic, who was a few years older than her. Those were the days when men tried to seduce you, if not with grass and mescaline, then through a discussion of Engels’s
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
. Farah and I both joined the student movement not just out of a sense of justice, but because we found in it a connection to our old home. And yet Farah felt a sense of identification with the group that I never did with any political or ideological organization. Twain, James and Howells belonged to a private world; I read them late at night, in silent places.

That was a decade when all sorts of “vice” and all forms of rebellion flourished simultaneously side by side, the Maoists and Marxist–Leninists, the Trotskyites, the hippies, the feminists, the civil rights activists, the Vietnam veterans, even the Hare Krishna. We would sing songs about Joe Hill and chant Neil Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” occupying administration buildings alongside the “flower children” as well as members of the Black Panthers or the Revolutionary Communist Party—one movement for peace and one for war. While some protested and marched militantly, others would streak across the lawns and occupy movie houses in small towns like Norman, Oklahoma, where I happened to be studying
Huckleberry Finn
.

My first inkling of Huck’s subversive character was more the result of a literary discovery than a political one. From the great Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s syrupy
Little Lord Fauntleroy,
orphans were a fixture in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature. It was and perhaps still is seductive to follow the misadventures of a lonely and poverty-stricken orphan in a cruel and ungenerous world, only to be rewarded in the end, alongside our protagonist, with a wealthy relative and a warm home. We emerge comfortable in the knowledge that, despite all the terrible things happening in this terrible world, all’s well that ends well.

But here was one little orphan who not only did not find a home but was repulsed by its very idea, taking off whenever he was offered one. That, to my mind, told us a great deal about Mr. Huckleberry Finn. Yes, it is true, he wasn’t an orphan, strictly speaking—his father is alive for part of the book—but the same could be said of little Cedric Errol, the velvet-clad Little Lord Fauntleroy,
whose mother meekly follows him to England
.
And yet both were most decidedly creatures of the orphan novel.

When I first mentioned this concept to Professor Elconin, he seemed intrigued by it and encouraged me to write a paper on the subject, but, like so many other projects, that paper and my enthusiasm were soon forgotten in favor of seemingly more urgent matters. Yet I never quite forgot the orphan Huck and the knowledge that both the reward and the punishment for his straying from the fold was a permanent state of homelessness.

Perhaps there was a connection between my activism and love of literature. I
was
drawn to the songs and to the emotional high of participating in an illicit movement. Farah, however, was dead serious—at heart she was far less quirky than me, far more pragmatic. She fulfilled her revolutionary goals with the discipline of a hardworking student, bringing to the task the same meticulous practicality that she would later put into finding a job to support herself and her two young children. She asked fewer questions than I did and was loyal to her group and to her beloved, Faramarz.

She would describe her relationship with Faramarz as one of “comradeship, love and respect.” But in our stolen moments, what she talked about was passion—he had taught her how to love; with him she had seen herself anew, and, perhaps for the first time, she approved of what she saw. Even when the time came to question and doubt and finally to distance herself from the movement, she was one of those rare individuals who broke her ideological ties and remained personally loyal, refusing to betray those who had first given her a sense of belonging.

This loyalty had its costs, and sometimes manifested itself in absurd situations. Mahnaz described with laughter how once she had gone to New York to participate in a meeting at the UN and left Farah, who had come to visit, in her car during the meeting. On her return, Mahnaz found Farah trying to convert her limo driver to the revolutionary cause. “I kept telling her, when we were working on her CV,” Mahnaz told me much later, “that tying yourself to the Statue of Liberty is not the best recommendation for a job.”

Two decades later, all three of us were refugees in Washington, D.C., laughing at our own follies. We used to reflect on how ironic it was that I, the restless one, the loner, the crazy “literature person,” had a more stable life than Farah, the pragmatic if occasionally impulsive problem solver, ever had. Every time she managed to create a space that she might call home, fate, politics or her own hidden impulses would take that safe haven away from her.

Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams. It turned out that Farah’s illusions and fantasies about America were nothing compared with the ones she harbored about Iran, and no place would be more dangerous for her than the one she had originally called home.

Farah called me late at night. I was watching
Masterpiece Mystery!
Inspector Morse.
“Hello, Azi-joon,” she said. “Had it not been you, I would not have answered the phone,” I said. “I’m watching something important.”

Ignoring me, she went on. “I’ve found a great quote for you. . . .”

She proceeded to read a long passage by Arthur Miller about Twain. She had found it in
The Illustrated Mark Twain,
which for some reason she was reading: “‘He wrote as though there had been no literature before him . . . as though he had discovered the art of telling a story about these folks that inhabit this continent. . . . And that there was no other continent—it’s like something that rose up out of the sea and had no history. And he was just telling what he ran into.’”

I had to admit it was a great quote.

“See you tomorrow,” she said mischievously. “I don’t want to keep you from something important.” And with that she hung up.

I wanted to continue watching Inspector Morse, but I couldn’t focus anymore, so instead I picked up Joseph Ellis’s biography of Washington from the shelf and started looking through the parts I had underlined.

When I called Farah the next afternoon, I caught her trying to take a nap.

“I’ve been busy,” I told her. “I want to read you a line from George Washington’s final speech as commander in chief—I found it in your book by Joseph Ellis.”

She mumbled a bit about needing to sleep, but then she said, “Okay, fine, what is it?”

I cleared my throat and did my best George Washington impersonation: “‘At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.’”

Washington believed it was essential that America, having won her freedom, should not squander it on petty squabbles. He wrote his open letter to the governors of the newly independent states in large measure to warn them to resist factional disputes that might pit one state against another. “The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Suspicion,” he wrote, “but an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.” He understood that a certain habit of mind and disposition of character was and would remain the key to America’s greatness.

Farah said, “I told you—you had to use U.S. history. See you tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

Two decades before Hemingway’s proclamation that Huck Finn was “the best book we’ve had,” Twain’s friend William Dean Howells wrote, “Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists, they were like one another and like any other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”

When I told Farah about that quote, one of my favorites, she shrugged as if to say, “So what?” Then she turned away and said in a matter-of-fact way, “You might as well say the Jefferson of our literature.”