Author Abnousse Shalmani has visited Prague on the occasion of the publication of the Czech edition of her book Khomeni, Sade and Me by the Garamond publishing house. Khomeni, Sade and Me is a pamphlet combining anecdotes from the writer’s life with reflections on social and political questions.

In 1980s Tehran, the six-year-old Abnousse rebels against the compulsory wearing of the veil, expressing her revolt by running naked through the school yard. She gets into trouble at school and refuses to subordinate herself to the senseless malevolence of the “beards” and “crows”, morality police that fill the streets in the wake of the Iranian revolution. To escape pressure and harassment her family flee to Paris, though what Abnousse find there is not the freedom of which she has dreamed.

However, the girl, who gradually becomes a young woman, now has a very powerful weapon: French literature. Victor Hugo, de Sade, Colette and others become her allies in the battle against repression in all its forms and in the struggle for equal rights for women.

The discussion was chaired by Alexandre Pajon from the French Institute.

свернуть