In the New York Times article, "Words of War" Dr. Azar Nafisi uses books as her weapon against violence. Nafisi was a professor teaching at the University of Tehran during the Iraq-Iran war. She seems so real when explaining her experiences during bomb explosions and gunfire going off like a chaotic choir with no instructor. Inside herself, Nafisi feels as scared as everyone one else but knows deep down that she has an instrument that can put the light back in her students eyes. Hope was her main objection, taking bits and pieces of history and taping them together like a science fair project to give a correlation of their own situation."Memoirs from concentration camps and the gulag attest to this: 'Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems it is not needed at all.'" During her time as a professor when bomb sirens and warnings would go off during school children would come to her classroom concerned about a certain story's ending. I feel that this was a very dramatic point of where children would ignore danger for the taste of something new. I'm pretty sure these kids weren't given many opportunities to explore literature before the arrival of Dr. Nafisi. Now that what i just said seemed bad but during that time period assuming that the government wasn't focused on education.
Opening a book creates escape for Nafisi and her students. I believe this could be true. There are so many books out there that have such rich meanings that can take you to a better place like the beautiful plantations of the south in Gone With the Wind...(before the Civil War of course). When I try to find escape I do not run to the nearest book. I draw. I sketch. I distract my mind away from whats going on around me. Much like a book would do. Listening to a certain genere of music while sketching or drawing can put a certain twist in your work. Similar to how a plant reacts to negative energy. If positive energy, like a book, is given to read to a large amount of people who are in a rough place good things with flourish. So this article about this university in Tehran gives perfect examples to the uses of literature being used as a tool to mend the broken.
kmd
I think what you're pointing to is how people compose things in times of crisis or unrest in order to makes sense of the world, create hope, or something else palliative. I wonder if as a society, we are too addicted to the written word, which makes us ignore other ways of expression.
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