Read Online The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi - Free Book Online

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.
4
    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