Surveillance States

Azar Nafisi

For a while, every time I borrowed a book from my local library in Washington, D.C., I was
greeted by an Orwellian poster: “Big Brother Is Watching You!” I often wondered if others
paused to reflect on the implication of these words, if they understood how profoundly living
under surveillance distorts a society. It transforms your perspective, your manners, your
relationships with friends, colleagues, students, with every waiter and cabdriver you meet. It
changes your relationship with yourself.

When I lived in Tehran in the 1980s, I kept a diary in an idiotic secret language I can no longer
decipher. To write about my relatives and friends who were imprisoned or on the run, I’d
fictionalize them and make myself a character: a westernized woman who, alienated from her
traditions, sees everything in black and white. My mother developed elaborate codes to evade
the censors while talking on the phone. Her conversations were almost nonsensical. She would
say, in Persian, “Agha marizeh” (“The gentleman is ill”) to signal that things were going badly
for the regime, and then whisper anxiously, “Do you understand? Do you understand?”

Censorship entered our minds and hearts early. Veils were added to the illustrations of
children’s books like “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” “Daddy Long Legs” and “Beauty
and the Beast.” A friend’s 8-year-old daughter became afraid to go to the bathroom alone
because her religious teacher had told her that if blasphemous thoughts entered her mind there,
each strand of her hair would transform into a snake.

In university literature classes, love scenes were regularly stricken from novels. The word
“wine” was excised from Hemingway’s stories. Censors frowned on villains in fiction or film
having beards or having religious names. A theater director I know used to complain that every
scene with a husband and wife in a bedroom required a quarrel. Tenderness was too risky.

When I was writing in Iran, it became clear to me that certain words or tones would immediately
agitate the authorities. To write about the books I loved, I had to adopt an academic approach
to themes that clamored for feisty and colorful language. (Once again I was writing in code.) I
wanted to write about Nabokov, for example, some of whose novels had crept past the
authorities, and about the intersections between fiction and reality. But I soon realized this was
an impossible task, not only for political reasons but also because I couldn’t speak honestly
about my own life: I couldn’t mention my boyfriend’s affectionate inscription on the flyleaf of
“Ada, or Ardor,” or what that novel had meant to me as a young woman.

Instead I learned to produce pure literary criticism — and to limit myself to writing about the
literature of the past. I was freer there; I could talk more openly and critically about society.
The more I consigned myself to older books, the more I learned how central and subversive
literature has been in Iranian history. I hadn’t realized the extent to which our sense of identity
was rooted in poetry — no wonder even the illiterate can reel off lines from classical Persian
poems. I learned how the radical changes in culture were as central to the creation of modern
Iran as the political revolution. I began to read writers from the 10th century, starting with the
epic poet Ferdowsi to more contemporary feminist poets like Forugh Farrokhzad and Simin
Behbahani.

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The real reason for government surveillance is fear, in this case the state’s fear of its citizens.
Governments that spy on their people want to gain information and thus control not only over
their enemies but over everyone, keeping them perpetually suspicious. What begins as a
political action quickly permeates every aspect of life, including our most private spaces. What
originates in fear of an enemy, sometimes founded in reality, quickly attaches to the familiar
and mundane. The enemy becomes our eccentric colleague, the new neighbors speaking in a
foreign tongue, those three people talking quietly to one another on the metro. Soon, every bag
carries a bomb, every question contains a trap and all the places where we felt comfortable are
no longer safe.

It stays with you, that fear. It burrows under the skin. Even after you escape and are thousands
of miles or many years away, you will still sometimes feel you are being watched. Something
within you has been permanently damaged by the terrible knowledge of the human capability
for cruelty and your own weaknesses in the face of it.

When I came to America in 1997, for a long time I was in a state of euphoria, basking in the
freedom to say anything to anybody. But euphoria doesn’t last long, in the real world or the
fictional one. The fear I thought I had left behind when I immigrated caught up with me. In Iran
surveillance and violence against citizens are naked and obvious. Here it is insidious. Here we
are threatened by indifference. I fear the reign of ignorance, of citizens uneducated in their own
and others’ histories and cultures. How can we find answers to the predicaments we face,
without knowing what the questions are?

Saul Bellow expressed anxiety over how those who survived the ordeal of the Holocaust would
survive the ordeal of freedom. I don’t fear the ordeal of freedom. I fear the moment when we
stop thinking of freedom as an ordeal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/surveillance-states.html?_r=0