The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi Page A
Authors: Azar Nafisi
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and voluntary blindness of decent, ordinary people, those who go to church and volunteer for good works and yet can easily turn, as they do in
Huck Finn,
into a murderous mob? It might have been this question that gave
Huck
such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran.
Twain remembered his own mother, who, like the Widow Douglas or Aunt Sally, was “kind-hearted and compassionate” but “was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation.” When acting on her instincts, she impulsively took the victim’s side, seemingly unaware of the contradictory nature of her actions and feelings. In his
Autobiography,
Twain mentions a small slave boy, Sandy, who came from Maryland and had no friends or family. As a young boy, he was bothered by Sandy’s incessant singing and complained about it to his mother. “Poor thing,” she told him, “when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it.” Twain remarks, “It was a simple speech . . . but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more.”
As a child, Twain recalls, “all the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. . . . We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible.” From one of the slaves on the farm where he grew up, he learned the language and the mesmerizing power of stories. The best on that farm was “Uncle Dan’l,” “whose sympathies were wide and warm and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.” He explains, “He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as ‘Jim,’ and carted him all around—to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon—and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities.”
In real life, Samuel Clemens befriended Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and paid for the tuition of Warner McGuinn, who was among the first black students to study law at Yale. “The shame is ours, not theirs,” he wrote in his letter to the dean of the Yale Law School in 1885, “& we should pay for it.”
11
There were many ways of fighting slavery, from attempting to change the laws to preaching to shaming the slave owners to taking up arms. One way was to write from a silenced and traumatized perspective, which in itself was an act of insubordination and great daring. Memoirs by former slaves, both biographies and fictional accounts, are heartbreaking, reclaiming as they do mutilated and confiscated lives. But the monstrous reality weighed too heavily on their fictional narratives. Their language, often sentimental and formal, cannot adequately give voice to characters, or express their individual burdens. Decades would pass before slave narratives developed the language and the form necessary to escape from the strictures of an authority that not only dominated their reality but also interfered with their imagination. (Notwithstanding the occasional hidden gem, like an astonishing book discovered by Henry Louis Gates Jr., called
Our Nig,
by Harriet E. Wilson, that in some ways could be considered a companion to
Huck Finn
.)
And then, of course, there was
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
published in 1852. Despite its defects as a novel,
Uncle Tom
touched the hearts of millions of readers. Henry
Huck Finn,
into a murderous mob? It might have been this question that gave
Huck
such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran.
Twain remembered his own mother, who, like the Widow Douglas or Aunt Sally, was “kind-hearted and compassionate” but “was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation.” When acting on her instincts, she impulsively took the victim’s side, seemingly unaware of the contradictory nature of her actions and feelings. In his
Autobiography,
Twain mentions a small slave boy, Sandy, who came from Maryland and had no friends or family. As a young boy, he was bothered by Sandy’s incessant singing and complained about it to his mother. “Poor thing,” she told him, “when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it.” Twain remarks, “It was a simple speech . . . but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more.”
As a child, Twain recalls, “all the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. . . . We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible.” From one of the slaves on the farm where he grew up, he learned the language and the mesmerizing power of stories. The best on that farm was “Uncle Dan’l,” “whose sympathies were wide and warm and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.” He explains, “He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as ‘Jim,’ and carted him all around—to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon—and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities.”
In real life, Samuel Clemens befriended Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and paid for the tuition of Warner McGuinn, who was among the first black students to study law at Yale. “The shame is ours, not theirs,” he wrote in his letter to the dean of the Yale Law School in 1885, “& we should pay for it.”
11
There were many ways of fighting slavery, from attempting to change the laws to preaching to shaming the slave owners to taking up arms. One way was to write from a silenced and traumatized perspective, which in itself was an act of insubordination and great daring. Memoirs by former slaves, both biographies and fictional accounts, are heartbreaking, reclaiming as they do mutilated and confiscated lives. But the monstrous reality weighed too heavily on their fictional narratives. Their language, often sentimental and formal, cannot adequately give voice to characters, or express their individual burdens. Decades would pass before slave narratives developed the language and the form necessary to escape from the strictures of an authority that not only dominated their reality but also interfered with their imagination. (Notwithstanding the occasional hidden gem, like an astonishing book discovered by Henry Louis Gates Jr., called
Our Nig,
by Harriet E. Wilson, that in some ways could be considered a companion to
Huck Finn
.)
And then, of course, there was
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
published in 1852. Despite its defects as a novel,
Uncle Tom
touched the hearts of millions of readers. Henry
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