She wrote 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' (23 years ago but still popular in English) which was made into a movie there.
'These people [in the Iranian government] cannot accept any form of democracy because they believe that they are the emissaries of God against .. the West, which is why the people of Iran turned to it, and wanted them to protect them and support them.'
'The real Iran, not the fabricated one. Imagination and ideals come to the rescue.'
When a totalitarian regime comes to power, she said, the first thing they do is confiscate your history, they rewrite it, your cultural and social life, your personal identity.
Her struggle with the regime 'started with the veil. Not just the veil but mandatory veil.' Attitudes toward the veil is a political one. The regime uses it as a sign of triumph over democratic culture. 'That is why the veil becomes so important. It becomes a symbol.'
'When I would not wear my veil properly, or put a little bit of makeup on, it was to tell this regime that 'You do not own me. That I can be independent even when you threaten to put me in jail and to kill me or whatever.' That is the message of the Iranian people. And the fear that makes the Islamic Republic so savage against the people without weapons, against the best minds in literature and ideals, is because it is scared of them, becuase it is scared of truth. And truth once you know it, you cannot be silent. They have tried everything they could, but they could not silence the Iranian people.'
One of the first things the regime did was bring down the statues of the king and his family. And then they went to take the names of some Shah-named streets. Then they talked about taking down the statue of a poet and change the name of another poet, and there the Iranian people stood up, 'No you don't. You will not take down this statue of this man.' 'They can bring down a king, but you can't touch a poet. ... This is an Asian country. It has been invaded many times, but what gives this nation its identity, its continuity, is its poetry.'
When she gave her students a banned book, she had to xerox her copy and she told them to give the xeroxs back when they were done because it was considered 'obscene and we can't teach it here.' And she knew most of them would go make a xerox before giving it back, 'because whatever the regime would be against, people would automatically be for. So that is how I got them to understand [the writer she was teaching].'
Literature, she said, is about empathy and connecting to others, citing 1001 nights where a king whose wife cheated with a slave, loses control of himself and executes a virgin every morning until one volunteers and tells him stories until he feels better or just can't bear to kill her.
'Everything we say about difference will end up in what we have in common. How we connect to the world. When the Iranian people were disconnected from the world, they connected to it through their golden ambassadors, through the filmes, the music, the fiction, and maybe people in the deomcracies should do the same in relation to Iran, Afrghanistan, or Ukraine.'
'Freedom is an ordeal. It needs to be nurtured. We need to pay the price. We need to protect it. We in the West forgot and people in Iran are here to remind.'