The author of the controversial Reading Lolita in Tehran tells us about the books she read when she was growing up in Iran that taught her important lessons about defending human rights
Throughout my childhood and teen years, even much later when I had children of my own, my mother worried that I had my head in the clouds, reading too many stories, neglecting real life and its problems. My take on having one’s “head in the clouds” was different from my mother’s, for me it meant having a place of one’s own, somewhere like Alice’s Wonderland, or what I later named The Republic of Imagination. A place on earth, in our own backyard that might help us get to the clouds and all sorts of other wonderlands, existing all around us and yet invisible to the naked eye. I wanted to go there in order to return to my own home refreshed, armed with a new perspective, prepared to confront “life and its problems.” For what is a wonderland but a new and magical version of our everyday reality, rescuing that reality from the dust of habit and complacency, what is the Republic of Imagination except the version of reality as it should or could have been?
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