Let's Get Subversive

Last night I attended a panel discussion that was part of the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre. The theme was "Imagination as Subversion in Nonfiction and Memoir." One of the panelists was Azar Nafisi, who wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books, which chronicled the seminar in Western literature that she hosted for female students from the University of Tehran just after the Ayatollah Khomeini came into power. I had read it a few years ago, and I was excited to hear her speak.

Along with writers Daniel Mendelsohn and Samantha Power, she discussed how imagination could be used as a tool of resistance. Mendelsohn had to imagine the experiences of Holocaust victims as he reconstructed what happened to them, and Power had uncannily similar experiences in her own writing about oppression and war in Iraq and Darfur. Far from being a light conversation, the panel almost immediately focused on foreign policy and international or cultural conflict.

Nafisi, now director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, said that one reason that genocide is allowed to happen is that people in other countries fail to imagine that the victims are anything like them; they think only that those people are so totally different, and that somehow makes the news easier to swallow. Mendelsohn pointed out that imagination is not always benign; the Nazis imagined all sorts of new (and "unimaginable") ways to torture and kill the Jews. He prefers the term "inventive" as distinguished from "imaginative," which has customarily had a more positive connotation.

During the post-discussion reception, I met Ms. Nafisi and asked her about her former students and whether they appreciated the subversiveness of meeting to talk about such American classics as Lolita, The Great Gatsby, and Washington Square. She was unabashedly warm and friendly in her response, and it was exciting having this brief but personal encounter.

As I walked out with my friend Mike and two of his friends, he said that whenever he came out of the Folger, looked west down East Capitol Street, and saw the Capitol dome lit up against the black sky, it was a surreal moment because it looked like a postcard. We agreed that it was an amazing sight.

I walked the two blocks to the Capitol. I've always considered it one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen, and I felt grateful to Mike for reminding me of its awesome presence. I turned left onto First Street, the Capitol on my right, the Library of Congress on my left. My favorite fountain in D.C., that of Neptune and his mermaids and wildly flailing horses, was dry and statuesque in the brisk night air. (This is what it looks like in the afternoon, with the fountain on full.)

I had the sidewalk almost all to myself, though it wasn't that late, and as I walked past the Cannon House Office Building - the halls of which I had walked as a Senate intern 25 years ago - I was so appreciative of the opportunity to be with such accomplished writers in such a beautiful venue as the Folger Theatre in such an exciting city as Washington. Literature and writing may not be the first things you associate with D.C., but this is a stimulating place for both readers and writers.

Photo credits: top: PEN/Faulkner, bottom: Mark Abe