 July/August 2003
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
Words of War Azar Nafisi is a fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. This article appeared in the New York Times, 3/27/03. These days I am often asked what I did in Tehran as bombs fell during
the Iran-Iraq war. I think back to the eight-year war with Iraq, a time when days and nights seemed indistinguishable, and were reduced to the sound of the siren, warning us of the next air attack. I often reminded my students at Allameh Tabatabai University that while guns roared and the Winter Palace was stormed, Nabokov sat at his desk writing poetry. My Tehran classroom at times overflowed with students who ignored the warnings about Iraq’s chemical bombs so they could reckon with Tolstoy’s ability to defamiliarize (a term coined by the Russian Formalist critics) everyday reality and offer it to us through new eyes. The excitement that came from discovering a hidden truth about Anna Karenina told me that Iraqi missiles had not succeeded in their mission. Indeed, the more Saddam Hussein wanted us to be defined by terror, the more we craved beauty. If I felt compelled to keep rereading the classics, it was in order to see the light in the eyes of my students. I remember two young women, clad from head to toe in black chadors, looking as if nothing in the world mattered more than the idea that Pride and Prejudice was subversive because it taught us about our right to make our own choices. Among my scribbled notes from those days, I found a quote from Saul Bellow about writers in the Soviet work camps. To my friends in the United States who are skeptical about the importance of imagination in times of war, let me share his words: “Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach to the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place—the foreground.” And so a new war has begun, though this time it is my adopted country and not the country of my birth that is fighting Iraq. Nothing will replace the lives lost. Still, I will take some comfort now as I did then by opening a book. 
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My
interlocutors are invariably surprised, if not shocked, when I tell
them that I read James, Eliot, Plath, and great Persian poets like Rumi
and Hafez. Yet it is precisely during such times, when our lives are
transformed by violence, that we need works of imagination to confirm
our faith in humanity, to find hope amid the rubble of a hopeless world.
Memoirs from concentration camps and the gulag attest to this. I keep
returning to the words of Leon Staff, a Polish poet who lived in the
Warsaw ghetto: “Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a
time when it seems that it is not needed at all.”|
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