Free The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi

American ancestor was “an early Indian.” “Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. Not one drop of my blood flows in that Indian’s veins today. I stand here, lone and forlorn, without an ancestor.” Next he calls himself a Quaker. “Your tribe,” he says, “chased them out of the country for their religion’s sake. . . . [They] broke forever the chains of political slavery, and gave the vote to every man in this wide land, excluding none!—none except those who did not belong to the orthodox church.” Then he invokes the Salem witches and, finally, the most persecuted and marginalized of all, the black slave: “The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine—for I am of a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I am not one of your sham meerschaums that you can color in a week.”
    It was his recognition of this mongrel quality in the American identity—earlier expressed by Whitman in
Leaves of Grass
when he says, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)”—that enabled Twain to create an epic of the first American rogue. Many great writers of literature challenge and tackle conformity, but he made it a national characteristic to be always new, to start as if there had been no precedent. He found a verbal equivalent to the language of jazz, that other very American, exquisitely mongrel form of imaginative expression.
    After Twain, it becomes difficult to talk about America without acknowledging those absent ancestors, conveniently airbrushed out of the preferred mythology of America’s glorious origins. Twain’s heresy in
Huckleberry Finn
was no longer against the original fatherland, Britain—or, in a larger context, Europe—but against this new and in a sense more menacing “father,” the “
Mayflower
tribe.” He became the epic narrator of this challenge, a theme that from then on was picked up and articulated in many different forms in the great works of American fiction.
    “Hear your true friend—your only true friend—listen to his voice.”Tongue in cheek but also dead serious, he tells the
Mayflower
grandees in Philadelphia: “Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay—perpetuators of ancestral superstition. . . . I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late. Disband these New England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors, the super-high-moral old ironclads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of Plymouth Rock—go home, and try to learn to behave!”
    Twain’s most effective act of heresy was a literary declaration of independence from all previous forms of fiction, even those he revered. In most of his work, but most perfectly in
Huckleberry Finn,
he set out to give shape and voice to this mongrel, who was not just on the margins of society but without a space within its literary orbit. This is what fates Huck to be seemingly unable to fully articulate his own story, and why others, in fact far less articulate, constantly try to impose their own stories on him, reforming Huck and enslaving Jim. Unlike our modern-day “rogues” who are such masters of self-promotion, Huck and Jim are representative of their nation exactly because they are the least represented.
7
    I was impatiently waiting for Farah at the coffee shop of the Phillips Collection, one of my hidden lairs, where I worked and rewarded myself by wandering around the museum at intervals and gazing at my favorite paintings. I had underlined a quote from Twain’s journal, knowing that this was to be the focus not just of my chapter on Twain but of the whole book. I was living in the deceptively liberating period after finishing a book and