Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Babel series began in 2007.

Finally, I’m in Buffalo!

Those four words were definitely not what I expected to escape Azar Nafisi’s lips upon reaching the podium at Kleinhans for 2010’s first installment of Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Babel Series. After Mike Kelleher finished his three pages of introductory notes—including naming three of the four authors to be stopping by this great city next season, listed below—the Iranian-born novelist took the stage and spoke enthusiastically about the children she visited earlier at City Honors.

They gave her great insight and enthralled her enough to stay thirty minutes past her scheduled visit. After the length at which she talked tonight—always passionate and intelligent with her words, that does not surprise me. Definitely someone who understands those children’s new technologies, Nafisi was also unafraid to bash it by saying the youth of America may not be as uninspired to read as we think. Maybe they should stand up and say so … even if it means tweeting that they are not the “Twitter generation.”

This brand of humor shaped the evening and made it one of the most insightful and entertaining lectures I’ve seen from the series. Perhaps it seems that the event keeps getting bigger and better each time, but maybe that’s just how long I’ve been attending. It honestly feels like an eternity since hearing Ha Jin despite it only having been four months ago. Even so, Nafisi is a very unique woman in her work and her beliefs.

The event had us reading her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, a book that tells of the informal literature classes held at her home for a select group of girls. They read international works, removed their scarves, and lived freely—even if just on Thursdays—like the Iranian women did prior to the Islamic Revolution. These women imagined themselves through the characters and stories they read, projecting their own plight onto those fictional roles and vice versa. The book itself serves as a physical representation of her main point of the night: using imagination to help breed empathy.

We cannot begin to understand others until we accept the similarities between us. So often people use differences to label strangers as inferior rather than unique. That those differences must be stopped or suppressed. Being an English literature professor and student of the discipline, Nafisi speaks about Alice in Wonderland‘s caterpillar turning Alice’s question of “Who are you?” back onto her.

We can’t be so self-righteous all the time, pretending that the ones we frown upon with confusion aren’t doing the same to us. Just because we look at present-day Iran and see persecution, veiled women, and “Ahmadinejad smirking as though he broke the neighbor’s window and got away with it” doesn’t mean the nation wasn’t once progressive enough to be at the forefront of women’s rights during the start of the last century.

Nafisi remembers a time when wearing the veil was a religious duty, not a political mandate turning it into a symbol of the state. She remembers women having opinions and speaking them aloud. Unfortunately, that time is gone for the moment, but to pigeonhole the region as being synonymous with the horrors going on now “would be like saying Fascism is the culture of Europe and slavery the culture of America.” She explains that every nation has a moment of time to be ashamed about, but they also have the ability to change. To dismiss the atrocities happening with a “that’s just their culture” in order to wipe our hands clean of it is wrong in her eyes.

Despite her love for Iran and the hope to one day go back and visit the Caspian Sea with her daughter (revolution broke out the last two times she returned, so she isn’t keen on going back quite so soon), Nafisi now calls America home after becoming a citizen two years ago. Knowing the importance of what that means and what her current freedom gives her seems purer than any American-born citizen I know.

She has experienced how a totalitarian force can strip a nation of its identity. How it can recognize women as a driving force for change and seek to crush that spirit by legalizing marriage at nine years old and making veils mandatory for assimilation. So, the preciousness of what’s possible here isn’t taken lightly. Even though this is her life now, though, she will never forget her past.

Nafisi says, “All we are left with really are memories.” She continues, “The most important resistance to tyranny is to not give up what they want to take away from you—to live life.” She doesn’t therefore choose her stories. The books choose her. Being able to speak about her experiences in the US has allowed her to go into her diaries and share all those thoughts and events that were locked away in Iran with the world. Moving here, teaching there, and her mother’s recent passing all shaped her life to write what she has, when she has.

Never shying away from politics or her beliefs, Nafisi got a couple rousing moments of applause with comments against Sarah Palin to show how left-leaning the audience proved. It was the most packed Kleinhans Music Hall has been since Babel moved to that venue, so kudos to Just Buffalo and the author for drawing the crowd. No matter your politics, I don’t see how you can’t find more in common with what’s said than not. Our mutual love for the intrinsic value of literature and art cannot be underestimated. We must find ways to connect and bond on common subjects, so why not let it be stories?

Nafisi would rather us not Kindle-ize our experience, however, and leave our mark on every page of a book while building conversations with our bookstores’ owners or over a cup of coffee. She wants us to unite under one cause: to educate our children (make them more like “those kids at City Honors”) and believe in something.

Labeling it one of the most poignant moments ever written, Nafisi shares the brilliance of Huck Finn seeing Jim as more than a slave he was obligated to turn over to the police. He saw him as the only friend he ever had, ripping the letter that would condemn him to shreds and realizing that, if he was going to Hell by not sending it, so be it. You do have to wonder if our leaders can do the same. Right now I’d say no way since they all seem to take the money while hanging the people out to dry. Hopefully, that will change someday soon. Maybe artists like Nafisi will be the ones to help achieve it.

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Announcements:

Here are the first three speakers for the 2010-2011 season:

• Trinidad and Tobago’s V.S. Naipaul with his novel A House for Mr. Biswas on 10/19/10
• American Maxine Hong Kingston with her novel The Woman Warrior on 12/2/10
• Haitian Edwidge Danticat with her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory on 3/25/11

Subscriptions will be on-sale April 16 at this season’s finale with Salman Rushdie.

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Photo of Azar Nafisi by Bruce Jackson.