LitMinds Blog and Interviews

We're excited to present this interview with Persis Karim, a mentor and an early supporter of LitMinds effort.  Persis is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.  She has edited and published two anthologies - Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been and A World Between. 

It was at an author event at Modern Times bookstore in the Mission here in San Francisco last fall that we met Persis and three of her co-authors and collaborators.  Persis' energy was infectious when she started talking about the potential for a vibrant literary community that invokes the spirit of the 18th century Parisian salons and New York beat clubs.    She has been a big influence on our thinking behind LitMinds.

We asked Persis to tell us about her love of literature, her experience in the classroom, and her involvement in the LitMinds community. 

1) Your graduate studies include completing a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies and ultimately earning a PhD in Comparative Literature.  With your strong interest in learning about your Iranian heritage, what drew you to focus your studies within the field of literature and language?
I’ve always been interested in language, literature, writing--even as a child I religiously kept a journal and attempted to write to my grandmother in French as early as age 10 or 11. I think having foreign-born parents always made me acutely aware of the need to learn, speak, and read in other languages. I remember how much I loved seeing the envelopes scrolled in Persian (to my father) and the envelopes addressed to my mother with Madame in front of her name. I was aware of a universe of language through these sorts of subtle things. It made me curious, made me want to know more. When I arrived at UT to do Middle Eastern Studies, I decided I wanted to be able to read Persian, to read some of the classical poets that my father had regularly quoted, read from, read to me in Persian. They included Omar Khayyam (his favorite), Rumi, Hafez, and Sa’di. Eventually, I decided that I couldn’t contain myself to just Persian—I have always been a comparatist at heart. That’s what happens when you’re bi or tri-cultural, you want it all!

2) Since 1999, you have been a professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.  What written works most often make it on your syllabus and why?  Which authors, books, or writings have inspired lively discussions in your classes?
The field of study and teaching I’m most drawn to is world literature and comparative literature. I believe that American readers are woefully underexposed to the vast body of literature that is produced around the globe, so I like to bring it to my classes. The works I’ve been most moved by as a reader and as a teacher are: Promaedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind (about the history of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia), Tsitsi Dangaremba’s Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe), Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (Sudan), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude and Eduardo Galeano’s Century of the Wind (a sort of nonfictional although beautifully embellished chronicle of the history of the 20th century in Latin America). I believe Toni Morrison’s Beloved is the most important work in American literature, and if I could, I’d require at least every U.S.-based college student to read and discuss this novel.

3) One of your courses is called “Banned Books and Novel Ideas.”  What themes do you discuss in the course and what books are on the class reading list?
This class is conceived of as a course that explores the potentially “dangerous” aspects of reading—the ways that books, ideas can dislodge, undermine, challenge prevailing modes of thinking and processes of power. I am also interested in getting students to think about the fact that reading (even now) can be an act that invokes and embodies notions of democracy. So I have students read either controversial or banned texts or controversial or banned authors. I often begin the course with the writings of Galileo Galilei to show them how one man’s thinking disrupted a system of ideas and religious authority. I also have them read books and plays that were banned because of their sexual relifious or political content: Nabokov’s Lolita, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman. I also include books that have been banned in U.S. schools often by religious or parental groups who are afraid of what their kids might get from reading.  In reading these I am interested in the content of the works as well as the issues around censorship, book-banning, and the struggles of writers and thinkers to challenge the status quo or those of in power. More recently, I also included the issue of the USA Patriot Act and the ways that it has committed a form of de facto censorship by shutting down the exchange of ideas from nations, cultures, and people who are denied access to the US. I consider this a chilling time for intellectual discourse.

4) You have published two anthologies of writings focused on the Iranian diaspora, Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been in 2006 and A World Between in 1999.  How have the stories and voices from the Iranian diaspora changed over the past few decades?  How have these changes reflected the political climate between the U.S. and Iran?
These anthologies represent very different moments in the experiences of the Iranian diaspora. The first anthology I think reflected the urgency of telling stories that were silenced, denied, or maybe even self-censored following the revolution and its immediate after effects. The writing in this first anthology, A World Between, was more immediate, raw, and perhaps punctuated with the loss and suffering of people trying to grapple with the cataclysmic events of the revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the idea of exile and immigration. I see this as a real first in putting any literary experience of Iranians in North America on the map. The second anthology, Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, published last summer, represents for me a more mature, established literary voice. The collection is obviously organized around women’s voices, but has a more complex, sophisticated sensibility. I think women have taken the stage as writers and reflect something about their own processes and challenges as part of this community and as writers. I am really impressed by the writing and I am very excited by the possibility of fiction as the next new area for women’s writing.

5) Your areas of expertise include Middle Eastern and African literature.  What written works do you recommend for people who are interested in reading and learning more about North Africa and the Middle East?
There is so much wonderful literature and not nearly enough translations of the work of Middle Eastern and North African writers. I think this is shameful on the part of the US publishing industry. But there are wonderful books and people can get so much from reading about the societies that I think have been so distorted by the media, by the US government’s drive for control over this region. I wish people would read works like the Koran, poetry by the great Persian poets, as well as the delightful Thousand and One Nights. I cannot recommend enough writers who have engaged the history of the region and the role of colonialism in shaping  the modern Middle East. I would recommend: Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (Sudan); Egyptian Nobel Prize Winner Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley (and almost anything by him); Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun is a fantastic novella about the aftermath of 1948 when Palestinians lost their land and were forced into exile by the creation of the Israeli state; Iranian writer Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon is a wonderful contemporary satire. I also think Assia Djebar, the Algerian writer (who now lives in France) has written poignantly about the impact of French colonialism on north Africa L’Amour, La Fantasiya, (translated as Love, the Fantasy, I think). I can’t recommend enough that people also read anthologies from the region or from specific countries. There is a wonderful new anthology of contemporary Iranian voices called Strange Times My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature that introduces readers to many contemporary Iranian voices. Reading is essential to understanding this region and I wish we had more exposure to these cultures and nations before we embarked on war. We might be more inclined to see their humanity, their own painful histories, and the essential beauty that is so often missed.

6) You have been one of the first members and supporters of the LitMinds community.  How do you think LitMinds can help enhance the art of conversation about books?
I am very excited about the idea of creating a revolution around reading, books, and conversations about books. When I first met Praveen and Christin, I felt that they were working at something I’ve felt was important for a long time—the idea of reading as an act of democratic and civic participation. I think the spaces for celebrating and elevating reading are shrinking and very fast. I am a teacher and it scares me how little Americans read both as an act of pleasure and as an act of civic duty. I think LitMinds is working to understand that we have to marry the business of technology with reading and to provide a 21st century idea of the salon, of the bookstore, of reaching out to young people to create a dialogue around reading. I think that unless you’re in a classroom talking about literature and books, there aren’t that many spaces where this can happen. I applaud you and your colleagues for venturing into this area. I think we have to create a culture and communities around reading. It’s critical to our society and to the idea of preserving and enacting democracy. I know that sounds high-folluten (spelling) but I think we have to look at it as an act of greater impact than simply consuming books. I think we also have to share that love and passion for reading with a younger generation and remind ourselves how much reading connects with other things like educating ourselves, creating dialogue and conversation. I am really happy to be working with the LitMinds folks, because I think they are committed to something much larger than bookstores and technology.

7) How has being a writer influenced you as a teacher and how has being a teacher influenced you as a writer?
I think it is impossible to teach literature and writing without being touched by the lives of my students and the struggles they have to find their place in the world. I think that I’m really proud of the work I do as a teacher because it affords me a way to really introduce language, ideas, literature and stir them, make them ask questions. I’ve also begun to ask questions about myself, about who I am as an American, about my humanity and those around me. Those are things I want to tackle in my writing—whether in my poetry or, gulp, in the novel I am starting to write.

You can check out Persis' LitMinds profile here.