Leaving Iran illegally at the age of 11, Negar Djavadi experienced the upheavals of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Coming from a family committed against the Shah, then against the mullahs, she acquired a political conscience very early on. It is in the cinema first that she stands out, both by writing numerous screenplays for the big and the small screen. She proved herself in literature with the success of the fabulous Disoriental (2016, Liana Levi), family fresco where a magnificent talent for storytelling is fully expressed. She signs her second novel in 2020, Arena, still with Liana Levi, a striking picture of contemporary society, French this time, where pretense reigns. In an interview with L’Express, she recalls her memories of the 1979 revolution, her feelings about the protest movement in Iran and what it inspires in her as a writer.
The Express: Mahsa Amini was killed in mid-September. Since then, young Iranians, and in particular women, have multiplied demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience, facing fierce repression. Did the mullahs finally win?
Negar Javadi: The mullahs who rule Iran did not win, because the way they fight to stay in power is a defeat, everyone sees it now. Before, that was not the case. Before September, it was very difficult to convey here that Iranians lived under a totalitarian dictatorship. It was not the canons of Nazi totalitarianism, one-party type, in a Hannah Arendt style of reading totalitarianism. But there, everyone discovers that it is indeed a totalitarianism. The efforts they make to stay in power, the hangings, it’s too big… They’re ready to do anything to stay in power, it’s already a defeat, at least a moral defeat.
Over a thousand Iranian students were gas poisoned in their school. How do you feel about this terrible case?
When I first heard about this story of poisoning, I instinctively thought that the regime was punishing young girls within the school itself, where very often, since the death of Mahsa Amini, they revolted. We remember their image, which has gone viral, holding the middle finger at the portrait of Khomeini hanging on the wall, we remember their gatherings in courtyards shouting slogans. I thought that, since this fall of 2022, the show of force of Iranian women against the regime – regardless of their age or social background – could not go unanswered.
The regime has been attacking women’s bodies for more than forty years… This body which attracts, which awakens temptation and which is essentially sexualized through various taboos, perhaps neglecting their ability to think, to reflect, to protest. , to organize, to challenge the world. These almost military capacities that the Islamic regime prides itself on possessing through its virile militias. In fact, these poisonings give the impression that it is no longer the tempting woman that the regime wants to control, but the one who opposes. This strategy, the desire to evacuate young girls from the public space, is all the more stupid since one of the qualities that observers recognize in today’s Iran is the level of education of women, and the fact that they represent the majority of students in universities.
Négar Djavadi, a Franco-Iranian author, supports the protest movement against the Islamic Republic.
© / afp.com/JOEL SAGET
Do you think this is a form of “Talibanization” of the country, in order to restrict access to education?
In fact, I don’t think this is Talibanization, a radical movement that would banish women from education forever, but a stern, deadly warning, a way once again to create terror, to freeze the impulses. Because this regime operates essentially on fear and terror, it is its weapon to bring the population to heel and crush any attempt at change. The hangings of demonstrators were part of this strategy of terror, as is now the poisoning of demonstrators.
But, as the case lasts, we are once again confronted with the contradictions and lies of the Iranian authorities, unable to face the consequences of their own actions, trying to justify this wave of poisonings with increasingly fallacious arguments. . They speak of rumours, of equipment failure, then promise investigations… There again, it is a question, step by step, of the way in which the Islamic regime proceeds as soon as it is caught at fault. As a result, there is something pathetic that emerges from this line of defense which, instead of clearing them, accuses them even more.
Are young people still able to mobilize?
I lived through the revolution and the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war. The next generation grew up with parents who lived through the war when they were 20 years old. The current generation has not experienced these traumas. So she can focus on her freedom. She doesn’t believe in the fable that the foreigner is an enemy, that America is coming to bomb us. The youngsters rather shout that their enemy is inside. The vocabulary imposed on us for forty-three years – “internal enemy”, “external enemy”, “martyr” – is now turning against the Islamic Republic.
And today’s martyrs are Mahsa Amini and Nika Shakarami [NDLR : jeune femme de 16 ans tuée dans les manifestations], they are buried as such and the internal enemy is the regime itself. We saw it with the fall of the Ukrainian plane [NDLR : abattu par erreur par l’armée iranienne le 8 janvier 2020] : it was not America who struck from above, they were the ones who struck from below. All this recuperation of the language is something very dynamic.
Something in the collective state of mind has changed and society has regained its freedom of thought?
Society has recovered its language, its culture. For the first time, there is a unity that goes beyond personal interests or fights. During the protests of 2009, not voting, I did not feel so concerned. I wasn’t going to say “where’s my vote”. Also, Mir Hossein Moussavi [NDLR : candidat malheureux à la présidentielle de 2009, où la réélection de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad avait été imposée par le régime] was the Prime Minister in power when I left Iran, and I couldn’t imagine how suddenly he could become the saviour.
Today it is different, because there is no watchword. There is no fight for the right to vote, for elections that are not rigged or against an economic crisis. On the other hand, there is a feeling, a despair too, shared which is the same between the Iranians over there and those over here. The million may not be on the streets but they are there on social networks, we are in a digital society. Sending an image on the networks is an act. We must change our way of thinking, we are not in October 1917 in Russia. It’s a revolution that’s as feminist as it is digital.
Beyond the political issue, what is your view as a writer on all these events?
This brings me back to the Iran of the revolution, which was very present in my family because of the political activities of my parents. I want to be there. I want to open the door, to go there, like any Iranian in exile, I presume. But there remains this taste of unfinished business. The 1979 revolution was something grandiose. What happened at that time, for good or bad, was extraordinary because it also stemmed from a desire for freedom in a country that was freer on many levels, it’s true, than Today. We see photos of Iranian women from the 1970s, in short skirts, etc. But there was no ultimate freedom, political freedom. Iran then is a bit like China today, where you can go dancing in cabarets. But “don’t think, don’t think, don’t read”: at some point, that doesn’t hold. When there is a lot of freedom, there is no reason not to have THE freedom.
Is it a difficulty not to return to Iran?
I’m lucky not to have the identity confit of the second generations, I know where I come from and I know that’s how I am. I’m not talking about my parents, whose exile is much more inflammable. Their exile is another pain, it’s like the titanic which sank. To go into exile is to witness one’s own murder. It is a form of moral murder, where we witness the erasure of everything you have built, of everything you are. You are totally obliterated and you are killed, in that country you are dead. Which is not my case: something in me has been killed. We have all been murdered somewhere but to different degrees.
There may indeed be a lack of understanding among current generations about what led to the 1979 revolution…
It’s true. But at the same time, me who lived it, I was a child and the Savak [NDLR : milice du Shah] was everywhere, the population was constantly under surveillance. My mother, for example, was a teacher, and read books in class. These books, like Mister President, of Miguel Angel Asturias, were not against the shah, but she was fired from her post for that. Which means someone inside the class went to report her.
When a new neighbor arrived, we wondered if it was a real neighbor or Savak. In family reunions, we didn’t talk because we didn’t know which cousin was from this militia. There was this extraordinary facade of Iran, a bit like in Agatha Christie, the perfect Orient, with the sun. But it was still very guarded. Something from that time remained unfinished, a desire for freedom. There is this debt, which is transmitted from generation to generation and which one day will be torn off. Anyway, dictatorships are made to fall.