My father was a journalist he was fired so many times. What does it mean to be Oriental when you’re not living in the Orient? What does it mean to be Iranian when you’re not living in Iran? When I started to write the book it became the title of a chapter, and the editor told me, “Keep it, but what do you think of it as the title of the book?” For her, it was the perfect title, because Kimiâ is in that same situation.
When people ask if I’m Oriental or not I always say yes – because I’m Iranian, and Iranians are always polite, we say yes to everybody – but in my head I say to myself, “ Tu es désorientale”. Because in Paris, and when I was in Belgium at film school, everybody always told me they can’t situate me. Before the book I had this word in my head. At what point in the writing did you realise that single, loaded and invented word was a perfect fit? MR: The book’s title immediately evokes a sense of separation and uncertainty, and the pressures on an immigrant from the East to shed her past. We caught up with Négar in Paris, right after her trip to launch the book in the US.
Her in-the-moment musings at the clinic intermingle with colourful details of her family’s past, going back to the last throes of Persian Empire and feudal courts in the mountains and coastal plains of Mazandaran, through multiple historical struggles and coups d’état – each heavily influenced by outside pressure from Britain, Russia and the US – and the dissident writings and teachings of Kimiâ’s parents Darius and Sara in pre-Revolution Tehran that forced the family’s exile. After some wild times in Belgium, Holland, Berlin and London, she has settled down with her lover, and is waiting at the fertility clinic of Paris’s Cochin Hospital to discover whether her IVF treatment has been successful. Kimiâ Sadr is a lesbian punk rocker who spent her teenage years in the French capital after the family fled the trauma of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
French-Iranian screenwriter Négar Djavadi’s illuminating, richly entertaining debut novel Disoriental combines a sweeping family history in 20th-century Iran with an intimate study of identity and motherhood in contemporary Paris.
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