“How did it start, this relationship with America?” Azar Nefisi asks herself in an essay in The New Yorker. “When I was a young girl, in Tehran, my English tutor told me the story of the Wizard of Oz. It was the first time I had heard of America, of Kansas, and of cyclones.”
Nefisi doesn’t say whether she read The Wizard of Oz later on her own, or if she at some point saw the MGM movie. But, of course, The Wizard of Oz is only one of the American books that moved her — and we’re talking rather literally here. Nefisi left Iran for the United States.
“America somehow encourages [the] vagabond self,” the author reflects, “and that is why so many people who migrate feel at home here: they can be outsiders yet still belong. Years before I became an American, I had already made my home in the imaginary America. …”
Unlike Dorothy in Wizard Nefisi’s journey was intentionally chosen. Dorothy came around on that front, though. In The Road to Oz, for instance, Dorothy finds herself standing at a crossroads, paths branching off in several directions. She thought she knew the way, but now finds herself confronting choices she hadn’t imagined. But she doesn't panic. This isn’t her first time wandering lost through a strange and magical countryside. Dorothy accepts that she has a ways to go before she finds home again; she chooses a path and moves on.
Nefisi says she has given other answers when people have asked her why she decided to become a citizen. But this one could be true, too.“Could I have said I became a citizen,” Nefisi wonders, “because of Dorothy and Oz?”
Azar Nefisi is best known for Reading Lolita in Tehran.
source: “Vagabond Nation” by Azar Nafisi
The New Yorker, April 18, 2011, v. LXXXVII n.9
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