Traumatisme postrévolutionnaire et romans autobiographiques : La deuxième génération d’exilées iraniennes en France

Abstract

The Islamic revolution of 1979 and its developments have been the major reasons for the mass migration of Iranian intellectuals to the West and the main topic of the Iranian diaspora’s literary texts. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, especially in France, a new generation of Iranian women novelists has created a shift in traditional post-revolutionary memoir writing by focusing on more individual themes such as childhood, the body, and trauma. In this article, the author explores the various ways in which two of these novelists, Negar Djavadi and Chahdortt Djavann, have represented levels of trauma in their auto-fictional narratives of the Islamic revolution. In this regard, starting from a conceptual representation of trauma as reliving the historical past by protagonists, it is shown how both psychological and cultural definitions of the trauma are depicted in these novels. The article suggests that this multidirectional approach allows the authors to overcome the alienation caused by the Islamic revolution's contradictory nature in a postcolonial era.