Azar Nafisi

Razieh’s story reminds me of Tzvetan Todorov’s great book Facing the Extreme. He introduces us to Kostylev, a young Communist soldier, who, while browsing in a library, accidentally came across Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe. Reading them preoccupied him to such a degree that he neglected his duties and was arrested. But he expressed no regrets, saying, “If I have ever known, even for a short time, what freedom is, it was when I was reading those old French books.”

So you see, Baba jan, Baldwin teaches us the proximity of hope and pain, so that when I am faced with those checkpoint guys with their guns or the white nationalists with their semiautomatic rifles, I do not wish their guns were mine. Still, I win the fight.