ABSTRACT
Most of Chahdortt Djavann’s work is structurally and ideologically dependent upon a stable and universal enunciative position that, at least at first glance, erases by virtue of its absolute authority the estuarine possibility that colliding differences produce. This chapter aims at complicating this initial reading. It argues that in many of her novels where Iran and theocracy are pitted against the West and democracy, the tension between the two is not simply resolved by preferring the democratic West over an Islamist Iran. The narrative voice often creates a third enunciative position that is supposed to negotiate the distance between the two poles of the binary. This chapter examines whether the initial clash of difference between past and present, Iran and the West, French and Farsi produces estuarine relational conditions, under which circumstances and to what extent. A close reading of La muette, a text which maintains and reinforces the third-term relational structure that Comment peut-on être français first introduces and Je ne suis pas celle que je suis and La dernière séance develop and enhance will serve as foil: La muette dilutes the estuarine potential of the initial conflict between silence and speech that it stages by reducing its own material production into a commercial object aimed at satisfying the expectations of the host cultural and political economies by shedding light on the atrocities perpetrated by non-democratic regimes.
