Why atiq rahimi chose french

Kaustabh Sinha

Why would a person who wrote three books in one language write his fourth in another? Can a language actually disable you from writing on a specific subject? Those questions intrigued me and drew me to an interaction with the French-Afghan author Atiq Rahimi held in New Delhi on January 21 as part of the Bonjour India festival. Rahimi, who has written his three earlier novels in Persian, chose to write his fourth novel - Syngué sabour: Pierre de patience – in French (his adopted language since he now lives in France).

The book’s principal character is a woman and focuses on her long monologue with her husband, injured and prostate from a war. Suppressed for years, the woman finally drops her guard and launches herself into a cathartic verbal exercise… out come tales of unmet emotional and sexual needs, of her frustration with the incessant war in the name of religion. It’s the story of a woman in Afghanistan but it could be the story of a woman anywhere else.

So why did he choose French? Was this something he couldn’t write about in Persian? Rahimi replied that when he set out to write the book, without a thought to its final content, the first sentence came out in French. “I wanted to continue writing in Persian but it became impossible. And I didn’t really figure why even at the end of my book,” he adds. But in retrospect Rahimi thinks an adopted tongue “liberates” one from limitations imposed by one’s mother tongue. And that French helped him steer clear from depicting the Afghan woman as something that "always hidden, without a body or an identity".

But I think it’s unfair to blame a language for censorship. It sends out the misleading idea that some languages may be inept to express certain subjects. I think personal and sociological reasons rather than those that may be linguistic guided his choice of French over Persian. He probably grew up in a Persian-speaking home and environment where sex/eroticism wasn’t discussed openly, an environment that he perhaps associates with suppression of a woman’s voice. And Persian, unfortunately, happens to be linked intimately with this environment and becomes a victim. He chose to write in French to detach himself from such a milieu and from any self-censorship that may arise from it. By the way, the book's Hindi translator Sharad Chandra clarified at the session that she never felt hemmed in by Hindi.

Having written his first three books in Persian, Rahimi feels he still hasn't found "le langage romanesque" (the language for novels) in his mother tongue. That may be true because Persian is known more than anything else its poetry. In fact, he argues that any Afghan novel breaks long-held traditions because any novel requires the author to respect different characters and opinions in the book (which alludes to a respect for plurality that the Afghan society is not yet comfortable with). This is unlike in poetry where the poet's voice is the sole voice (according to him it's no coincidence that Afghans are known for their love of poetry). "I wrote three books in Persian. Unconsciously, they are very prude... modest. My first novel (Earth and Ashes) has two moments of insults and there were remarks by Afghans that I hadn't been faithful to my language. The second book uses the f*** word for a father and it still hasn't been published in either Iran or Afghanistan," he says. As a student of Persian, I am eager to listen to someone defend the language from this attack.