Speaking Silence: Translation in Chahdortt Djavann’s La Muette

Abstract

Published in 2008 by Flammarion, Chahdortt Djavann's novel La Muette tells the intertwined stories of the fifteen-year-old Fatemeh and her thirty-year-old paternal aunt, la muette—we are never told the muette's name but we do learn that as a child she lost the ability, or desire, to speak after witnessing her father, a violent drug addict, beating her mother to death. The novel is presented as a translation of Fatemeh's diary, composed in prison and delivered to a French journalist by Fatemeh's prison guard. In her diary, Fatemeh recounts the events that led to her imprisonment, namely the murder of her husband, a mullah in her native Iran, and her four-month-old daughter, Zynabe. The young women's destinies are set in motion when the muette falls in love with Fatemeh's maternal uncle. Shocked and scandalized, Fatemeh's mother convinces her reluctant husband to marry his sister off to a mullah of her acquaintance. Shortly before the wedding, the muette, who never really consents to the marriage, is found naked in the arms of Fatemeh's uncle and subsequently sentenced to death by stoning for having sullied the mullah's honor. In an effort to make the muette's sentence less inhumane, Fatemeh's father negotiates the punishment with the mullah who promises to reduce it to death by hanging provided that Fatemeh becomes his wife in the stead of the muette. A few months after her marriage to the mullah, Fatemeh gives birth to her first child and shortly thereafter kills both husband and daughter, making no attempt at escape, and is sentenced to death by hanging.