E-mail a friendGina Nahai
airdate November 27, 2007
A professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California, Gina Nahai is also a best-selling author, whose novels have been translated into 16 languages and are taught at universities and high schools nationwide. Her writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including the Chicago Tribune and The Jewish Journal. Nahai has lived in Iran and Switzerland and studied the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the U.S. Defense Department. Caspian Rain is her fourth novel.
Author discusses the differences in how Americans and Iranians deal with loss. (1:12)
Gina Nahai
Tavis: Gina Nahai is an acclaimed author whose previous books include "Sunday Silence" and "Cry of the Peacock." Born in Iran, she immigrated to California shortly before the revolution. That forever changed her homeland, and she is now professor of creative writing at USC and author of the new book "Caspian Rain." Professor Nahai, nice to have you on the program.
Professor Gina Nahai: Thank you, it's great to be here.
Tavis: I want to go back to your being a child. I recognize that Iran is not at the table for these talks that everybody is talking about. We'll come back to what you think about that in just a second. But you were in Iran until you were about 13?
Nahai: Yeah.
Tavis: The Shah was running things around that time?
Nahai: Yeah. When we left, my family left in the heyday of the Shah's rule, at a time nobody believed what was about to happen would happen. And about a year later, the first stirrings of the revolution occurred and then the revolution. The Shaw left Iran February, 1979.
Tavis: As a child - again, you're gone at 13 - what do you recall about growing up in Iran, as an Iranian Jew, no less?
Nahai: As an Iranian Jew, yeah. After a while, you're left with only certain impressions. It's been 30 years since I left Iran, and the impression that I'm left with is a contradiction. One is that it was a place of great intolerance and the other was that it was a place of the greatest kind of hospitality, friendship, and in some ways, the greatest kind of tolerance you could find in that entire region, and in many parts of the world. So it's one of those things, the Iranian culture is full of these kinds of contradictions.
Tavis: Contrast for me, then, or juxtapose for me your memories, to your word, the impressions that you have of 30 years ago with what we are seeing and reading and told to believe about Iran today.
Nahai: Well, what we see and read, if you read the - and if you don't listen to the Bush administration too much - what we see and read is true. But it's only one part of what happens in Iran, one part of the - every country is many countries; every people is many people. And unfortunately, what happens in the United States is that either we completely ignore some part of the world or if our attention is drawn to it, that we focus only on one facet of the culture of the place.
So no, Iran is a very varied country. The Iranian revolution was the first of its kind in the world, the Islamic revolution, right? But Iran at the same time is a place where the first declaration of human rights was issued 2,500 years ago. It's the place where the first democratic revolution in the Middle East took place in 1906 and again in 1951. And these are things that we don't hear about, that we know enough about.
Tavis: So you made the comment earlier about the Bush administration, and I heard your comment, "If we don't listen to the Bush administration too much." For better or worse, like it or loathe it, agree or disagree, he is the president and we have to listen to this administration. And what this administration is telling us is that this country is part of an axis of evil. What this administration is telling us is that Iran is a nuclear threat. Should we believe that?
Nahai: Well, the axis of evil thing - I always thought axis of evil was Bush, Cheney, and Rove. (Laughter) But the axis of evil thing is just oversimplification, obviously. There aren't three countries in this world that are threats to international peace and so on. Is Iran a nuclear threat? Well, I would say under Ahmadinejad to some extent, yes, because he's a zealot.
He's an idealist, and so there really is no end to how far he will go in order to enforce his own beliefs upon the world. But the counterbalance to that is that the real seat of power in Iran is not the president, is not Ahmadinejad, but it's the Guardian Council, the mullahs, headed by Ali Khamenei, and they are the people, he and the other members of the council are the people who actually approve the president, who appoint the heads of the various parts of the military, who appoint the Friday prayer leaders who are very, very important in Iran, because each one of them controls his own neighborhood, so to speak, right.
And so those people are a lot more pragmatic. They have much vested economic interest, they've become very wealthy in Iran over the last 30 years, and they have a vested interest in keeping the balance over there and not alienating the rest of the world too much.
Tavis: What's your stance of how, then, given that you are Iranian, how, then at this point we ought to be engaging that country. We see what the Bush administration is doing and not doing, as it were, but I'm curious as to your take. I have a contractor who's working on my house right now, on a part of my house, whose name is Hosan. Hosan is from Iran, and there a couple of people working with him who are Iranian.
So I'm always fascinated to get into these conversations with everyday people here in the States who are from Iran about what they think we ought to be doing. They are Americans now - what we ought to be doing to engage the country, how we ought to be doing that. And I hear their point of view all the time. What's your point of view about how we ought to be engaging Iran right now in the midst of these peace talks?
Nahai: Well, I think the fact that Iran might feel a little bit isolated, the fact that the Arab countries are going to be present at these talks and Iran is not, I think that may be a little bit of a positive message, a helpful message to Ahmadinejad. But I think the first thing we need to realize is that it's going to be a long-term battle. One of the things that Americans also need to know about that part of the world is that reform works a lot better than revolution. Steps, small steps.
Tavis: That takes time, though, and the American people are very impatient. We want solutions to things now. Yesterday, in fact.
Nahai: Yes, well, they say geography is destiny, and so because of where we are in this country, what part of the world we're in, and the fact that things have been relatively easy for us here, there is this attitude of yes, everything has to happen today or tomorrow. But no, it's going to take a long time, and I think the approach should be two-pronged.
One is that Iranians are not Arabs, and there's been great animosity historically between the Iranians and the Arabs. And so I think the west can exploit that. The fact that there isn't a natural affinity between their countries. They're both Muslim, but they can exploit that. I think that the fact that Iran has had now at least 100 years of a tradition of modernism, perhaps, democracy that's been interrupted, right?
But also under the Shah and under his father, there was about 50 years of relative secularism. Not complete secularism in the government, but relative. I think the west should exploit that, and the Arab countries don't have that. And finally, expanded cultural and artistic ties. Victor Hugo said, “You can stop an invading army but you can't stop the invasion of an idea whose time has come.”
And I think that Iranians historically have been so fascinated by the United States, and there is really this deep love - it's strange to hear this, right? This deep love for so many things American among the Iranian people.
Tavis: I hear that from Hosan and the people at the house that there is a deep love for certain things that are very American. You made a comment a while ago that I totally embrace, which is that to understand any people in the world, you have to read their fiction. Not their nonfiction, because we think that to understand people we have to go into a political conversation or social conversation. But you argue that to understand any people you have to read their fiction, and you are a fiction writer.
Nahai: Yeah, you have to know their stories. That's where the truth is told. See, the difference between fiction and nonfiction is nonfiction records what happened. Fiction explains why that happened, and that's what you need to know, right? And I think so much of fiction is reality anyway. The greatest writers, all the classics come straight out the life and life experiences of the writer himself. And so yes, it's very important to do that.
Tavis: So tell me about ""Caspian Rain."
Nahai: It's the story of a young Iranian Jewish girl in the years before the revolution who is losing her hearing. But really, it's a story about loss. And I've always been, because I've lived in this country for so long, fascinated by the ways in which Americans treat loss or defeat, tragedy, a challenge, and the way we treat it in the more tradition - in the East, so to speak, traditional parts of the world.
Tavis: And the primary difference is?
Nahai: The primary difference is that in this country, no loss is ever f final. The greatest tragedy is only a challenge to overcome. This is the country of the Special Olympics, and the country of making lemonade out of lemons. Over there, loss becomes so much part of a person's identity. Not just that, though, but part of something that you pass on to your children. That generations of the same family will be affected by one loss.
In a way, we have a longer memory and that serves a lot of purposes. But it also holds you back.
Tavis: To your latter point - I only got, like, 45 seconds here - nothing wrong with holding on to memories so long as you don't move into a melancholic state. How do you avoid doing that? Because to your point, you get caught up in melancholy, that can hold you back.
Nahai: Yeah, or fatalism. How do you avoid it? Well, I don't know, we can learn a little bit from Americans, I suppose.
Tavis: Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe we can learn a few things from you, too. I'm sure we can. "Caspian Rain" is the new book by Gina Nahai. Born in Iran, an Iranian Jew, leaves at 13, now a professor at USC and a fine writer, to boot. Nice to have you on the program.
Nahai: Thank you.
Tavis: "Caspian Rain," the new text.
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