Chapter 4
Knowing the Enemy: Grossman, Ackerman, and Khoury's Shared Humanity
Israeli novelist David Grossman's To the End of the Land follows Ora, a woman whose son Ofer has gone to war. She believes that by being absent when news of his death might arrive, she can somehow magically prevent it from happening. While writing this novel, Grossman's own son Uri, a tank commander, was killed by a missile just two days before a cease-fire ended the Second Lebanon War.
Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, Ora uses stories to survive. The novel comprises tales she tells Avram, her friend, former lover, and Ofer's biological father, during their walk across Galilee. Avram had been captured and tortured during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, causing him to withdraw from life.
Grossman's work explores what he calls living in "the disaster zone," constantly "clenched both physically and emotionally." Having lived in the Islamic Republic, I know what it means to live in such a zone. My memories of the Iran-Iraq War are saturated with fear and anticipation of disaster. Even during peaceful moments, I was always waiting for bombs to drop. This constant anxiety shapes even the smallest acts - taking ice cream from the freezer, combing my daughter's hair, reading in bed.
What makes Grossman's work remarkable is his refusal to shield himself from "the legitimacy and suffering of my enemy... Nor do I shelter myself from the surprising similarities I discover between him and me." He writes to escape the "false, suffocating dichotomy" between "victim" and "aggressor," seeking a "third, more human option."
American writer Elliot Ackerman, a former marine who served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, shares this approach. His memoir Places and Names describes meeting Abu Hassar, a former al-Qaeda fighter now living in a Turkish refugee camp. Their encounter - an American marine and former terrorist - seems straight from a Grossman novel.
There's a powerful scene where Ackerman and Abu Hassar, unable to speak each other's language, communicate by drawing a map together, marking places where they fought. "Our hands now chase each other's around the map, mimicking the way we'd once chased each other around this country," Ackerman writes. They discover many overlapping locations but no overlapping dates - perhaps a relief that they never directly confronted each other.
Palestinian novelist Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun offers a similar perspective from the Palestinian side. Like Grossman's Ora, the narrator Dr. Khalil Ayyoub tells stories to his comatose mentor Yunes al-Asadi, hoping to keep him alive. His tales cover Palestinians' lives and deaths since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Khoury sees writing as using your wounds to heal your wounds - the Arabic linguistic origin of "word" is "wound." He individualizes each character through crucial life moments, sometimes telling the same story from different perspectives: "I'm scared of history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one only leads to death."
For both Khoury and Grossman, storytelling is an act of love and hope. Dr. Ayyoub believes the "secret of war" is that your enemy is your mirror. When polarization eliminates discourse, you can become the other side of the coin to your enemy - disagreeing on issues but adopting the same attitudes. "The real war begins when your enemy becomes your mirror so that you kill him in order to kill yourself."
With remarkable generosity, Khoury reminds us of his enemy's tragedy: "You and I and every human being on the face of the planet should have known and not stood by in silence, should have prevented that beast from destroying its victims in that barbarian, unprecedented manner. Not because the victims were Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us."
Having been a victim never justifies making victims of others. As Nahila tells her military interrogator: "You were tormented, but your torment doesn't give you the right to torment us."
Chapter 5
The Republic of Gilead: Atwood's Warning of Creeping Totalitarianism
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale juxtaposes two kinds of silence - the peaceful silence of nature and the eerie silence of oppression. The mandatory veil in Iran isn't about faith but state control through uniformity. In both Iran and Gilead, religion becomes ideology and an instrument of power.
Both republics deny women's autonomy and individuality. Totalitarian societies begin by confiscating and rewriting history. Before the revolution, Iranian women had many rights that seemed natural to us, not hard-won through generations of struggle.
What's fascinating isn't just the resemblance to Iran but how universal these patterns are. Atwood deliberately placed Gilead in America, implying totalitarianism can happen anywhere. Totalitarian systems appear gradually - many ignore warning signs, especially when rulers initially target those we disapprove of.
The first step in resisting totalitarianism is refusing to let extreme brutalities become ordinary. In totalitarian societies, what was once routine becomes extraordinary. As Offred says: "I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison, but a privilege."
Though women are victims in totalitarian regimes, they also hold power. Iranian women sensed this from the start, refusing to comply with mandatory veiling despite floggings and jail. Masih Alinejad's "Iranian Women's Stealthy Freedoms" movement shows women using cameras as weapons against a regime with guns.
Under totalitarianism, banal rituals become extraordinary. The dehumanization of others begins by creating an "it" where a person was before. Yet complications arise - Offred's Commander wants to play Scrabble and be kissed "as if she meant it." Their relationship evolves: "He was no longer a thing to me... It complicates."
In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia reveals her complexity - outwardly serving Gilead while secretly plotting its destruction. Atwood refuses simple characterizations; victims can be fallible, and villains human. When my father was in jail, even the head of the secret police showed vulnerability by crying during their conversation.
A totalitarian mindset is the enemy of complication and ambiguity. Yet Atwood reveals the inconsistencies even fanatics cannot evade - Guardians peeking at forbidden faces, Commanders playing forbidden games. This doesn't exonerate them but creates hope that these contradictions will eventually cause the system to crumble.
Atwood calls Offred's narrative "witness literature" - recording her story and hiding it, trusting it will be discovered later by someone free to understand it. This act of hope implies a future reader. Offred says, "You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else." By telling her story, she creates her reader: "I tell, therefore you are."
Chapter 6
Baldwin's Fire: Confronting America's Racial Wounds
James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time combines memoir and social critique to confront America's racial wounds. Baldwin warns that without addressing the country's racial history, "the fire next time" would consume America. His prophecy has proven eerily accurate as we witness continued racial violence and unrest.
Baldwin's genius lies in his ability to articulate rage while maintaining compassion. He refuses to demonize white Americans, insisting they are trapped in a history they don't understand. Their ignorance makes them dangerous, but also pitiable. He writes, "I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be 'accepted' by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet."
Baldwin rejects both the Nation of Islam's separatism and white liberals' condescension. He envisions a society where people are judged by character rather than color, but understands this requires honest confrontation with history. He writes, "To accept one's past-one's history-is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it."
Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me continues Baldwin's tradition, structured as a letter to his teenage son. Like Baldwin, Coates refuses easy optimism but maintains humanity. He writes, "I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world." Both writers emphasize the physical vulnerability of Black bodies in America and the psychological toll of constant vigilance.
Baldwin and Coates differ in their religious perspectives - Baldwin was raised in the church and maintained spiritual language despite rejecting organized religion, while Coates embraces secular humanism. Yet both find salvation in art and literature. Baldwin writes that art "is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion." For Coates, books become "the spine of our struggle" against oppression.
Baldwin's approach to resistance involves refusing to internalize hatred while maintaining clear-eyed assessment of injustice. He writes, "I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores." This claim to full American identity while acknowledging its failures represents the paradox of his vision - loving a country enough to demand it live up to its ideals.
The power of Baldwin's work lies in his refusal to offer simple solutions. He recognizes that America's racial problems are deeply entangled with class, sexuality, and religion. His vision demands we confront these complexities rather than retreat to comfortable simplicities. As he writes, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
Chapter 7
Universal Stories: How Literature Transcends Boundaries
"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" asked Saul Bellow. Ralph Wiley brilliantly responded: "Tolstoy was the Tolstoy of the Zulus," adding, "Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership." This reminds us that ideas and imagination, like scientific advances, belong to whoever nurtures them. We need imagination to connect with those we've never met.
I experienced the extraordinary role stories play under extreme conditions. My student Razieh, a religious girl from a poor family in Iran, had an insatiable passion for beauty - borrowing and sometimes stealing books from houses her mother cleaned. She loved Tolstoy, Austen, and Hemingway, but her true passion was Henry James and his "fiercely independent women."
Years later, I learned Razieh had been arrested during student demonstrations and executed. Before her death, she had shared memories of our classes on Henry James with her cellmate. All I can do to keep her alive is repeat her story and remember her love affair with literature.
It strikes me that Razieh and Baldwin shared Henry James in common - both connecting to him from vastly different worlds. True equality comes from celebrating differences while recognizing our common humanity. Like the Dutch writer Etty Hillesum, who said "A camp needs a poet," victims in death camps told stories to reclaim their confiscated lives.
You might say Henry James didn't save Razieh from execution. But when stripped of everything we call life, when at death's door, we instinctively turn to those achievements of humanity that appreciate dignity, freedom, and beauty. As Elias Khoury told me during a panel discussion, "Henry James did not save Razieh. But Razieh saved Henry James." The root of "word" in Arabic comes from "wound" - readers from different backgrounds keep books alive by reinterpreting them through unique eyes.
The novelist Moniro Ravanipour, constantly on the run after her brother's execution and family persecution, found salvation in writing: "I write so they can't kill me; I write to stay alive." Similarly, Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur, jailed for four years on unspecified charges, refused to join noon prayers with fellow prisoners, believing that praying out of fear would destroy her creativity as a writer. "A writer might be a coward or an egotist," she wrote, "but if she is mired in dishonesty, the brilliance of her pen and the brightness of her mind will grow dark."
Literature creates a portable home that can never be confiscated. It offers a space where we can be fully human despite external constraints. Through reading and writing, we maintain our dignity and humanity even in the most dehumanizing circumstances.
Chapter 8
The Reader's Revolution: Our Collective Responsibility
When it comes to freedom, writers and readers are joined at the hip - the freedom of one guarantees the other's. Great writers become witnesses to truth; they cannot remain silent. And once readers encounter their work, they too cannot remain silent.
As a parent and grandparent, I wonder what kind of world we're leaving for our children. I want them to know about their migrant legacy - that our family came to America seeking freedom, and became involved in defending that freedom from enemies within and without. I want to provide them with a portable home like my father gave me: a place where they'll feel completely free that no one can take away.
Books might not save us from death, but they help us live with hope. As Baldwin said, "The war of an artist with his society is a lover's war... to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real." Baldwin teaches us the proximity of hope and pain, so when faced with checkpoint guards or white nationalists, I don't wish their guns were mine. Still, I win the fight.
Readers have no formal organization to promote truth or bring change, but they number in billions, spanning all professions, backgrounds, genders, races, ethnicities, and religions. Their collective power would be immense. Every censored writer, every closed bookstore or library, every banned book should remind us of our responsibility.
In a world made opaque by wars and conflicts, where enemies dominate our minds more than friends, where lies masquerade as truth, we need imagination's clear eyes to see beyond the show. As Tzvetan Todorov reminds us, "only total oblivion calls for total despair." Memory becomes a potent weapon against totalitarian regimes. Telling and reading stories might not change reality, but gives meaning to our lives: "Remember everything, and tell it, not just to fight against the camps but so that, having left something behind, our lives will have had some meaning."
The hope inherent in storytelling transforms readers into keepers of memory, keepers of truth. In our polarized world, reading dangerously - engaging with ideas that challenge our assumptions - becomes an act of resistance against the tyranny of certainty. It reminds us that the world is more complex, more beautiful, and more human than ideologues would have us believe.
Which is why I'll end with one slogan: Readers of the World, Unite!
