One land, one author: in Iran with Chahdortt Djavann, angry and at war
Audio 29:00
French-speaking Iranian writer Chahdortt Djavann in studio at RFI.
© Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint / RFI
By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint
31 min
Born in Iran and exiled in France, Chahdortt Djavann is a French novelist and essayist.
She is the author of more than fifteen books, translated into ten languages, in particular “Bas les voiles!”, “La muette”, “I am not who I am”, “The last session "," Big Daddy "and" Veiled bitches will never go to heaven! ".
His new book, at the crossroads of the intimate, the pamphlet and the fiction, is a masterful book between cry of the heart and war cry.
(Replay)
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"And these beings without a penis!"
»© Grasset
"
I do not respect the rules of any novelist,
" says Chahdortt Djavann.
Indeed, here she is entering and leaving her novel in a virtuoso way, as if she were crossing the borders of a country.
Narrator of her fiction, she also becomes one of its characters.
After "fault of birth", a first intimate chapter where the author confesses her "indelicacy of being born without a penis after a dead brother", she tells us, from Tehran to Isfahan, the fate of several women who pay a terrible price. for playing around a fountain, refusing an arranged marriage while living in homosexual love, removing her veil in public or standing up to a powerful husband.
In the last story-like chapter, the author crosses Europe, Armenia and Azerbaijan and returns clandestinely to her native Iran, at the risk of being arrested as a spy.
She found two cousins there, who had become great resistance fighters, who would change the course of history.
(Presentation of
the Grasset editions
).
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Chahdortt Djavann, French novelist