I.

This morning, I woke up with an overwhelming urge to write on RUOT. It has been quite a while since I sat down to write– anything, really. One reason is that I have lost my words for a while.

The escalating genocide in Palestine that began last month and the subsequent reactions, or rather the lack thereof, particularly from the global north, has left me in a state of paralysis. A profound disappointment with humanity is always difficult to process. As I often say, I read and write to make meaning of life, to understand the human condition. And the consistent disregard for the protection of Gazans and the rejection of a ceasefire has made me, like many others, question the very essence of being human.

I don’t even have the emotional capacity to delve into the tragic irony of the situation: a so-called government established for those who survived one of the most horrific systematic killings in history, currently inflicting another systematic killing on the natives of a stolen land. I don’t even have the emotional capacity to delve into the tragic irony of the situation because I no longer want to educate those who have never made an effort to understand the simplicity of the Israeli war against Palestine. I no longer want my Palestinian friends, friends from the Middle East to educate those who have never bothered to compherend the history. Things are clear. Things have never been clear. The little energy that remains should be preserved for ourselves.

So, I do what I can do. To sustain myself. To play my part.

So, I keep on teaching, writing, and reading.

II.

I started a new position at another university in September after my return from France. This was around the same time when I was working on my book proposal, as well as the reviews I received for my manuscript–and this is yet another reason, or rather a pretext, that kept me from writing in this space. Truly, it had all happened so quickly and unexpectedly that I didn’t even have any time to prepare my lectures before the semester began. Since I’m teaching brand new literature classes, I often have only a week to prepare the following lecture. Paradoxically, I love it. The current semester has me navigating the realms of major literary works, teaching two courses that cover the world classics by writers like Voltaire, Tolstoy, Marquez, and Austen. And revisiting these texts as a thirty-four-year-old, with my students, has proven to be an interesting experience, one that I didn’t know I needed.

Ever since I’ve known myself, I have read, and I have written.

Growing up, I consumed any book I could find. It didn’t matter what genre it was– fiction, poetry, drama, Turkish literature, world literatures, magazines, and more. Once I got to high school, my close friends and I started this reading odyssey, where we would scavenge our parents’ and grandparents’ dusty bookshelves and read the classics. The concept of “the classics” eluded us at that point; we were simply drawn to these different worlds. In late ’90s and early 2000s Turkey, it was common for newspapers to orchestrate coupon programs disseminating various series of canonical works of literature. Even households less predisposed to reading had a collection of the classics—Tolstoy, Balzac, Maxim Gorky, Rumi, Dostoyevski, The Bronte Sisters, and more. So, my friends and I read it all. We derived immense pleasure from our collective immersion into the worlds of Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, and Heathcliff–with whom we also fell deeply in love.

III.

In fact, just the other day, after I taught my early modern literature class, I was sipping a cup of lukewarm coffee from the campus cafeteria (and secretly congratulating myself on abstaining from succumbing to the allure of a PSL from Starbucks). Still riding the intellectual high from the discussion with my students on Elizabethan poetry and politics and its intersection with contemporary global discourse on refugees, I was browsing the pages of Words Without Borders, a favorite of mine. It was then I came across an essay by an Iranian writer of whom I previously hadn’t heard: Habibe Jafarian. It was translated by another Iranian writer Salar Abdoh, and the title read: “For the Love of the Books.”

I was immediately drawn in.

In her short personal essay, Habibe Jafarian tells us how books have become an indispensable part of her life. Habibe grows up in a working-class household in northeast Iran yet is able to transgress the confines of her town–and her country. The first part of her narrative finds the 12-year-old Habibe in her religious studies class, asking her teacher about the meaning of “existentialism.” When her teacher discovers that Habibe has read one of the banned books, she retorts:

Who told you to read such a book? Where did you even get it? Do you know that its writer, Sadegh Hedayat, killed himself? Do you realize suicide is a great sacrilege? What else do you read? You shouldn’t be reading this sort of thing.

But, as Jafarian shows in the rest of her narrative, young Habibe reads anything and everything.

Her brother’s “secret chest” of banned books at home and the University of Tehran’s library later when she starts college introduce her to modernist Persian literature and translated works of The Bronte Sisters, Ernest Hemingway,  Jean-Paul Sartre, Tolstoy, and more. She writes in a beautiful passage that resonates with me:

There is the world before a person discovers books and there is the world after. It is a kind of matrimony. Dangerous, but necessary—especially for those of us for whom a life of not reading might seem simpler, but also drab and ultimately colorless. I was determined: one day I’d marry a book.

For Habibe, books are an affliction, like forbidden love.

Reading, after all, is a dangerous act that encourages you to think critically, exposing the vast possibilities that the world can proffer. This holds particularly true in oppressive regimes, where reading becomes an act of resistance, transporting you beyond the confines of a nation whose sole arsenal lies in keeping you in. Habibe recounts a specific instance when she returns a copy of Anna Karenina to the university library, and the disapproving librarian castigates: “Some women are monsters!” Jafarian writes:

Not knowing how to react, I offer an inane smile. To my understanding, the tragic woman in the novel is nothing like how the librarian describes her. She’s sincere and intelligent. I care about her. And this mindless smile that I offer as an answer is one that, in retrospect, I will go on to offer the world every time I’m faced with declarations and judgments from people who know nothing of the world of shadows, people for whom there is only certainty and no relative answers to difficult questions, people who are forever sure of what’s black and what’s white and who’s guilty and who is not. Books, the very act of reading, have stripped me of absolutes. I do not dislike Anna Karenina, and this is dangerous to our librarian.

Much like Habibe, I don’t know who I would’ve been at the age of twelve, twenty-five, thirty–

and who I would be now, if I wasn’t afflicted with bibliophilia. What I know is, reading has been a key force in my life, enabling me to pose the right questions and, in turn, discover facets of my own evolving identity in an evolving world. Amongst the myriad benefits inherent in reading, one that takes center stage in my classes is that reading holds the power to highlight the truth about truth as a mutable entity, as a construct.

Whether reading texts established as classics or ones yet to be classified as such, reading stands as a subversive act in a world governed by absolutes. Reading is an act of resistance, a pathway to critical thinking, and we know the significance of individuals learning to think for themselves.

Certainly, active engagement in protests and donations during times of crisis is indispensable. Yet, contributing to and taking part within the realm of words and ideas is equally critical. The world needs individuals who are unafraid to question, challenge, and think independently—a seemingly silent yet potent form of activism.

Keep protesting and donating, but also please–

keep reading.

P.S.: You can read “For the Love of the Books” here; enjoy!