When I was writing in Iran, it became clear to me that certain words or tones would immediately agitate the authorities. To write about the books I loved, I had to adopt an academic approach to themes that clamored for feisty and colorful language. (Once again I was writing in code.) I wanted to write about Nabokov, for example, some of whose novels had crept past the authorities, and about the intersections between fiction and reality. But I soon realized this was an impossible task, not only for political reasons but also because I couldn’t speak honestly about my own life: I couldn’t mention my boyfriend’s affectionate inscription on the flyleaf of “Ada, or Ardor,” or what that novel had meant to me as a young woman.

Instead I learned to produce pure literary criticism — and to limit myself to writing about the literature of the past. I was freer there; I could talk more openly and critically about society. The more I consigned myself to older books, the more I learned how central and subversive literature has been in Iranian history. I hadn’t realized the extent to which our sense of identity was rooted in poetry — no wonder even the illiterate can reel off lines from classical Persian poems. I learned how the radical changes in culture were as central to the creation of modern Iran as the political revolution. I began to read writers from the 10th century, starting with the epic poet Ferdowsi to more contemporary feminist poets like Forugh Farrokhzad and Simin Behbahani.

The real reason for government surveillance is fear, in this case the state’s fear of its citizens. Governments that spy on their people want to gain information and thus control not only over their enemies but over everyone, keeping them perpetually suspicious. What begins as a political action quickly permeates every aspect of life, including our most private spaces. What originates in fear of an enemy, sometimes founded in reality, quickly attaches to the familiar and mundane. The enemy becomes our eccentric colleague, the new neighbors speaking in a foreign tongue, those three people talking quietly to one another on the metro. Soon, every bag carries a bomb, every question contains a trap and all the places where we felt comfortable are no longer safe.

It stays with you, that fear. It burrows under the skin. Even after you escape and are thousands of miles or many years away, you will still sometimes feel you are being watched. Something within you has been permanently damaged by the terrible knowledge of the human capability for cruelty and your own weaknesses in the face of it.

When I came to America in 1997, for a long time I was in a state of euphoria, basking in the freedom to say anything to anybody. But euphoria doesn’t last long, in the real world or the fictional one. The fear I thought I had left behind when I immigrated caught up with me. In Iran surveillance and violence against citizens are naked and obvious. Here it is insidious. Here we are threatened by indifference. I fear the reign of ignorance, of citizens uneducated in their own and others’ histories and cultures. How can we find answers to the predicaments we face, without knowing what the questions are?