“Only literature allows you to know a country. To understand today’s Iran, you have to read what is written there, and especially women’s books”: advice given by the Iranian writer Aliyeh Ataei, and which will not be difficult to follow, as publishers these days give pride of place to works translated from Persian or evoking Iran. “Woman, life, freedom”: since last September and the death of the young Mahsa Amini, killed in detention for a poorly worn veil, this simple and eloquent slogan has given rhythm to the protest in the Islamic Republic. These cries in the streets of Tehran find an echo today in our bookstores in France. One of the sensations of this literary production: Aliyeh Ataei’s gripping “The Frontier of the Forgotten” published by Gallimard and prefaced by the Franco-Afghan novelist Atiq Rahimi and whose author is just as moving as her prose, meticulously translated by Sabrina Fed. During a meeting in Paris, where she has been for a few months, this writer with an intense gaze confides her personal story, which is intertwined with that of this novel translated today, published three years ago in Iran. The forty-year-old grew up in an educated and politicized but simple environment, between two worlds, on the border between Iran and Afghanistan. It embodies the closeness between these two countries, which share a language and a certain amount of misfortune. “One day, I told my father that I wanted to write and he supported me”. Leaving her lost province to study in Tehran, Aliyeh Ataei realized her dream: she has been writing and publishing for over twenty years. In “The Frontier of the Forgotten”, she tells the story of a young woman confronted with cultural constraints and the difficulties inherent in her place of birth.
She also observes how this geographical space finds itself at the center of a much larger geopolitical game, and that in the middle of all this, women find themselves. “I know very well that for Westerners, Iranian women – or Afghan women – embody a ’cause’, one subject among others on the international chessboard… The real issues are elsewhere, oil, geopolitics. However, there are It’s about our real lives. We’re not weak, and even incredibly strong, but we need our voices to be heard. You can imagine the strength it took me to grow up there, then live in Tehran, and now be published in France by Gallimard?”, she asks. Upon its publication in Persian, this book enjoyed great success, like his previous novels. Her voice becomes cloudy and her inner rage becomes palpable when she talks about the working conditions of an author on site: “They don’t really need to censor me, I’ve integrated the system so much that every time I ‘open my computer, I have the impression that they are with me in the room”.
A testimony that echoes that of Nasim Marashi, who lives in Tehran, met in Paris, when she came to promote “Autumn is the last season” (Ed. Zulma, 2022), published more than ten years in Iran, translated into French only now. In this bittersweet novel, she evokes the fate of three young women who try to be free in a society that constantly imposes limits on them. A concise and striking work, read and appreciated in Iran, republished several times, proving that the aspirations of Iranian women are not new. “When the book came out, it was hugely successful, I didn’t think it could happen,” says the slender young woman, both sensitive and assertive. She shares her childhood dreams: a student from the Tehran middle class, she had studied music with the idea that she would continue her studies in France. Which never happened, his visa having been refused. So we had to reinvent ourselves. “I started to write to remember this rather difficult period, that of the time of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [2004 à 2013]. We were under strong pressure from censorship in my profession as a journalist, under economic pressure, under pressure from society… It’s not just about my story, but also that of an entire generation. I thought then that things were going to get better, they only got worse,” says the 30-year-old, who despite the difficulties, especially economic ones, aspires to stay living there.
A disillusion that is found in the pages of the incredible “Teheran Trip” by Mahsa Mohebali (Ed. La Croisée, 2023]. An explosive work in local literary production, and ranked in 2022 by the best books in the world by the magazine American New Yorker: the story of a young teenage girl who wanders the capital, looking for drugs and her friends, when an earthquake threatens to bring the city down. heroine crosses a city where all the stifling rules are suddenly lifted and where the youth, usually so repressed, tries to impose itself. houses”, points out the editor Emilie Lassus, who is already working on the translation of another work by Mahsa Mohebali. Tehran Trip, acclaimed by Iranians, awarded and republished several times, was written in 2008, but a striking topicality, evoking this youth without illusions. A boldness that Mahsa Mohebali pays dearly for: as her editor explains, she has been sentenced to a ban on her literary activities since 2012, and cannot speak publicly. In recent months, this pressure has become even more intense.
A very modern society
Reclaiming the lost country, from a distance, is also the quest of those who cannot return there: writers, journalists, filmmakers – it has become a forbidden territory that must be reconquered through art. This is partly the quest of Naïri Nahapétian, who left the place of his childhood at the age of 9, at the time of the Islamic revolution. After many successful detective novels, this time she devoted herself to an autobiographical story in “Leaving Tehran” (Bayard stories, 2023). A Franco-Iranian journalist, she stayed there several times in the early 2000s, in the middle of “spring”, at the time of the presidency of Mohammed Khatami when publications were flourishing and a certain wind of freedom was blowing. Through her childhood memories and snapshots of that time, as well as the daily echoes she has of her country of origin, she introduces us to a relatively unknown community, that of the Armenians of Iran. A story that ended in September but that she never stopped amending before her printing, in the face of the events she follows daily on social networks. “This movement shows that the population has had enough of the double life. In private, many things were possible, but nothing in public. This protest has made it possible to pass a milestone: people openly oppose the regime. Instead to simply divert the veil, women no longer wear it”. This veil is one of the reasons why she and her mother left Iran, even though her father could not leave the country, as she mentions in Quitter Tehran. “My thrillers [situés en Iran] have always had a lot of echo, because there is a fascination for this strange theocracy. But my books show that there isn’t the radical otherness that we think we find there. It’s a very modern society, and the lives of Iranians are much more like ours than you might think. The big difference is that it is not a rule of law, but a bloody dictatorship.”
An authoritarian theocracy where the aspirations of writers are sacrificed, like so many others. A reality that Nasim Vahabi describes with accuracy in the poignant “I am not a novel”, (Tropismes editions, 2022). In a story reminiscent of Kafka or Gogol, the author exiled in France evokes a writer who finds herself in the basement of the censorship office, surrounded by thousands of blocked works waiting in vain for a stamp from the administration. Also a publisher of short stories in Persian and a great connoisseur of literature in this language, Nasim Vahabi is delighted with this wave of publications, which does not seem ready to stop: indeed, most of these books were translated or written before even the “Woman, life, freedom” movement. Faced with the growing interest in Iran, other works should fill the shelves of the next literary seasons.