Azar Nafisi

said, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you anyway.”

He claims, “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. . . . The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”

He found the protest novel the opposite of revolutionary because it neatly categorizes everything and everyone, relieving us of ambiguities, contradictions, and complications, letting us bask in the knowledge that no matter what happens, the lines are drawn, and we are all safe as long as we don’t cross them. Baldwin kept crossing the lines.

As Baldwin puts it, “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone that they will be forced to deal with pain.”

Coates describes it well: “Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe.”

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.