Azar Nafisi

I am reminded of the incident when you were in jail, and the head of the dreaded secret police paid you a visit. During your conversation, he was so touched that he started crying. Here you were with one of the most powerful men in the country crying in front of you. That incident did not make him stop harassing you, nor did it make you justify his actions, but it showed you a different side of him. It humanized him.

In her novels, Atwood gives us a subversive view of this black-and-white world, where any form of opposition is met with elimination and death, and she reveals the complications, inconsistencies, and paradoxes that even the fanatics in the absolutist states cannot wholly evade: the Guardians who want a peek at the Handmaid’s face; the Commander who uses his power and risks his position to play Scrabble with the Handmaid; the almost all-powerful Aunt who is secretly planning the destruction of Gilead. Suddenly, behind the seemingly immovable façade, there are all sorts of movements. Uncontrollable. Inevitable.

The more they dehumanize us, the more we should humanize them.

the black-and-white world of Gilead, Atwood introduces gradations of color. As readers, we hate this system that has created so much suffering, and we know that it must be destroyed. Yet when confronted with individuals within that same system, we discover that they are human like us, or that we are human like them.

One of the things that made the Islamic regime so intolerable was what it did to its citizens morally and spiritually, draining us of our sense of right or wrong, making us complicit even in the crimes committed against us.

“It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer),” he wrote, in “Nothing Personal,” “to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant.”

tried to tell her about how angry I had been and how worried I was that anger would be the only feeling I would have; that I would be unable to turn my hatred into something constructive. She said that I was overintellectualizing and that I should say what I’d just told her to the families of the 1,500 people killed by the regime in the November 2019 protests. “People are angry,” she said. “That is all they have. Let us not try to take that away from them.”

The search for justice and freedom in any part of the world enriches and encourages the search for justice and freedom the world over. In the same manner, those on the side of oppression are strengthened by oppression in other parts of the world.

was telling me the other day that Trump, like the virus, is contagious: deadly not only for America but also for the rest of the world.

“But race is the child of racism, not the father,” he says.