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Maryam Madjidi, words to live and make people love life

Writer and French teacher, Maryam Madjidi was born in Iran. Exile, family, social classes, his atypical career crosses his literature, but also his daily life with the most disadvantaged.

French-Iranian writer Maryam Madjidi. © Fabien Mugneret / RFI

Text by: Anne Bernas Follow

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The steps of the Place de l'Opéra Bastille are empty on this windy Monday afternoon in early spring. Sitting in the middle of the gigantic staircase, a small woman with curly black hair, crimson lips, foolproof smile. Maryam Madjidi has not always assumed her Iranian physique.

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Exile also involves a body that is rejected in adolescence! The mono-eyebrows, the hair, the mustache, the hyper curly hair, the matte complexion, all this embodied the elsewhere, the strangeness. I wanted to look like a young Nordic European girl, blonde with blue eyes," she recalls, laughing at the top of her lungs. "It's as if I had embedded in me a form of racism so deep that I didn't realize it. Acceptance of myself was impossible for me.

Forced into exile for political reasons, Maryam Madjidi and her parents left Tehran in 1986. The girl was then six years old, had lived the revolution from the womb of her militant mother and came close to death. "I was happy and had a normal life, to say the least, but I still felt that something was afoot, that danger was hovering over our heads," she recalls. There was also my parents' activism...

With her father and mother, she left behind all the other members of her family, some of whom would be imprisoned for many years, and began a journey of integration. "The word 'integration' bothers me, it means that we fit someone into a mold, but since this is the one we use, then I must say that my integration was done through school and learning French. " From then on, the whole Persian culture of the girl was set aside.

It was only much later that Maryam Madjidi realized that several cultures could coexist very well and enrich her personality. A long process then began to assert its own identity. An undeniable success.

Books, a breath

Her method to "grow" goes through words, writing, a founding element of what Maryam Madjidi is today. "There's life and then there's books," she says, smiling until she narrows her eyes. In the form of an autobiographical novel, the one who defines herself as Iranian and French recounts, in Marx and the doll (Prix Goncourt for the first novel in 2017) this exile from Tehran, but especially her arrival in France and the feeling of being doubly exiled: by the absence, therefore, of her country where the girl that she was lived a very happy daily life, but also by the lack of all his books that kept him company in Iran.

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I think I started writing around 9 years old. Poems, tales, but also my diary. A diary that today's writer likes to reread from time to time, which moves her, but also makes her laugh a lot. "Writing has allowed me and still allows me to lighten moments that may have been difficult in my life. I thought, "It doesn't matter, there's writing." It is a real force that protects.

To expose oneself through books is also to assume oneself, to strengthen oneself in front of the readers, and especially when one writes in an autobiographical way, analyzes Maryam Madjidi who, in her latest novel, Pour que je m'aime encore, tells her adolescence in the suburbs of Paris and the difficulty of penetrating the world of the beautiful neighborhoods of the capital, even if one is a good student.

Another theme that recurs, even overwhelms, Maryam Madjidi's writings and life is that of the family. "I don't know if I should say 'alas'," she says, laughing loudly. "Family is omnipresent! It is as much a source of joy, a very strong attachment, as a mental load that we want to get rid of! Maybe that's why I don't have children," she says, laughing.

But the writer found the parade infallible: when she says she writes, she is "given peace". A ruse that is not without compensation, she likes to tell, because "this pretext actually puts me under pressure not possible to write! " It is therefore no coincidence that Maryam Madjidi's next novel will focus less on her, but on the life of one of her family members. Superstitious, she will not say more, but there is no doubt that the talent of the writer will be at work again.

Exile and the stranger are never far away for the artist who has also published two children's books on this theme. Writing, but also giving the taste of the language to others. "Every place of teaching, it's like I'm going to sort something out with myself," she says. An approach that might seem unaltruistic, but it is, a kind of win-win. And it is no coincidence that Maryam Madjidi teaches FLE (French as a foreign language), first with prisoners, then with the physically disabled, but also during exile in China or Turkey. For seven years, she has done so alongside unaccompanied minors within the Red Cross, especially since the writer has another theme that is dear to her and that we find in her novels: that of marginality and social classes. "Either we have decided to be marginal, or we suffer it." This also explains his time in politics alongside the French Communist Party in 2019.

Cut bridges, or not, with the native country

Meeting Maryam Madjidi inevitably raises questions about the link she has, at 43 years old, with her native country. "In 2003, I returned to Tehran, arguing for official reason that I had to find in Persian works by the poet Omar Khayyam and the novelist Sadegh Hedayat for my thesis on comparative literature." Or literature as a common thread in Maryam Madjidi's life. The pretext of books to see Iran again and reconnect with its land.

And to remember: "It was very strong to find myself in a country where people looked like me. I felt a very strong recognition. I was then revolted that I had to be an exile, I resented my parents. I didn't want to go back to France. I was completely delirious.

It was only when she returned to France a month and a half later that she realized that her country was indeed the France, that it was there that she had built herself, that her language was French. But "I am French and Iranian, it cannot be quantified, both are in me everywhere, all the time." For Maryam Madjidi, the return of the exile is a double-edged sword and upsets everything, as a deep questioning. Hence the question of a possible return or not. Today, the choice is made for the young woman: "I will not go back as long as the regime is what it is.

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