Thus The Regime Has Deprived Iranian Women

Art Is As Useful As Bread.

Those In The West Who Dismiss The Repressiveness Of Laws Against Women In Countries Like Iran, No Matter How Benign Their Intentions, Present A Condescending View Not Just Of The Religion But Also Of Women Living In Muslim Majority Countries, As If The Desire For Choice And Happiness Is The Monopoly Of Women In The West.

We Speak Of Facts, Yet Facts Exist Only Partially To Us If They Are Not Repeated And Re-created Through Emotions, Thoughts And Feelings. To Me It Seemed As If We Had Not Really Existed, Or Only Half Existed, Because We Could Not Imaginatively Realize Ourselves And Communicate To The World, Because We Had Used Works Of Imagination To Serve As Handmaidens To Some Political Ploy.

We Do Not Read In Order To Turn Great Works Of Fiction Into Simplistic Replicas Of Our Own Realities, We Read For The Pure, Sensual, And Unadulterated Pleasure Of Reading. And If We Do So, Our Reward Is The Discovery Of The Many Hidden Layers Within These Works That Do Not Merely Reflect Reality But Reveal A Spectrum Of Truths, Thus Intrinsically Going Against The Grain Of Totalitarian Mindsets.

The Dearer A Book Was To My Heart, The More Battered And Bruised It Became.