Remembering Satrapi—Prophet of the Personal

pp. 100, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Translated by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris, Pantheon Books, 2003.

Faceless soldiers with keys slung around their necks are flung to martyrdom in a minefield bombing during the Iran-Iraq War. They are the teenagers to whom the Islamic Republic under Ruhollah Khomeini distributed “keys to heaven”, in exchange for joining the Iranian forces. On the very same page, a young Marji dances with glee, accompanied by laughing friends. She is attending her first party. 

This jarring panel is typical of the irreverence and sharp humour that have led to the extraordinary popularity of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic narrative series, Persepolis. How do youngsters in war-torn nations pass their time? Do they listen to punk records, do they read Marx? The answer—for Satrapi’s upper-middle class avatar, the precocious Marji—is yes. Persepolis spans a grand sweep of historical events, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the devastations of the Iran-Iraq War. Satrapi, however, tells this coming-of-age story from within, drawing from the minutiae of everyday experience, from classrooms, dining table conversations, the teenage exhilarations of discovering communist literature or making a new friend. The ordinary, more often than not, is a rare and precarious luxury amid the repression and unrest in Tehran, where Marji is growing up; for Satrapi, it depicts her youthful escapades concurrently with the violence unleashed on others her age in the very same country. 

Marji, witness to the shocks of a war that spans her entire adolescence, as well as the brutal isolation of teenage exile, is never written as a traumatised victim. She brims with life, argumentative and endlessly curious, worshipping Bruce Lee and Kim Wilde, getting into trouble for standing up to schoolteachers, eluding the Revolutionary Guard, suffering lover’s spats, grappling with the death of dear friends and neighbours. Satrapi is at her most powerful in her elasticity; her work concerns itself with how ordinary people manage to think and laugh and dream and breathe despite and alongside the realities of war. In a disarmingly funny panel, we see Marji being hospitalised after a breakup with her Austrian boyfriend—

pp. 239, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Translated by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris, Pantheon Books, 2003.

This intimacy of tone is certainly one of the reasons why Persepolis, and Satrapi's subsequent works, have been so widely read across the world. Perhaps that is why news of her death left a particularly painful vacuum—one akin to the loss of a dear friend. Tributes have poured in from renowned authors, artists, academics and filmmakers who knew her, and readers who certainly felt as though they had. Persepolis (2000–2003), now a staple across bookshelves,school and university classrooms, is arguably the most widely read, translated and taught work by an Iranian in recent times. 

Satrapi is literally present in the work—the graphic novel form allows her to draw herself as child, adolescent, narrator and witness. Hillary Chute argues that graphic narrative allows authors to "literally reappear—in the form of a legible, drawn body on the page—at the site of [their] inscriptional effacement," making visible not only history but the act of remembering itself. The use of solely black and white drawings is also Satrapi’s deliberate flouting of the flattened, binary representations of Iranians in the West. This formal distinctiveness is of some importance. Photographs taken in war-torn regions often capture the blood and the gore inflicted by the perpetrators. Drawings allow the artist to reconstruct the moment through their own lens—it is already an act of remembering. Graphic narratives therefore operate in the space between documentation and memory, fact and experience, depicting not only what happened but how events were perceived, feared, misunderstood—and most crucially, survived. 

Yet the extraordinary afterlife of Persepolis cannot be explained solely through Satrapi's craft or the formal innovations. The work emerged at a particularly charged historical moment. Its release in the early 2000s coincided with the aftermath of 9/11, when perceptions of Iranians in the West were increasingly shaped by the rhetoric of the “War on Terror.” President Bush had slotted Iran under the “Axis of Evil”, and amid harmful depictions of Iranians as violent extremists, Satrapi’s work managed to cut through the noise. The life led and described by Marji was a prescient reminder that Iranians were “individuals with life, love, hopes… [that] their life is worth the life of anybody else in the whole world.” Persepolis caught on as a pedagogic tool in schools and universities—students could “learn with” Marji, encountering the history of Iran through the eyes of a narrator close to their own age. Botshon and Plastas argue that the novel yielded “significant results in terms of students’ critical thinking” when tackling post-9/11 stereotypes about Islam and the Middle East.

What does it mean for a work so invested in questioning authority to become authorial in its own right? Today, Persepolis occupies a somewhat canonical place in school libraries and universities across the world—an ironic fate for its protagonist, who spends much of its pages thinking through ideological dogma, talking back to teachers, suffering punishment and expulsion for her relentless honesty. Questions have been raised about why the novel has become such an institutional favourite. Critic Masoud Golsorkhi points out that although Satrapi offers "a subtle and powerful analysis of the politics of Iran", Marji's family belongs to a wealthy, secular and intellectual milieu whose anxieties were hardly representative of Iranian society as a whole. In Brown Skin, White Masks, Hamid Dabashi similarly argues that certain post-revolutionary Iranian memoirs attained particular visibility in the West because they narrated Muslim societies through a liberal, secular framework readily legible to Western audiences, thereby investing familiar assumptions with the authority of insider testimony. It seems that the problem here has less to do with the graphic novel’s intensely personal, singular account than with a crude Western tendency to elevate one situated experience into a culturally representative portrait of Iran itself, which read and appropriated this work in ways Satrapi never intended. 

She has always refused the role of spokesperson. "I might be unsure of many things," she once remarked, "but I'm not unsure of what I've seen with my own eyes. This is not the story of Iran. I'm not speaking for the Iranian people. It is the story of Iran through my eyes. This was my truth." Her own life already frustrates any linear account of identity or belonging: Iranian by birth, an exile, a student in Vienna, later a French citizen and a secular intellectual, she occupied multiple, often contradictory positions. "I am a foreigner in Iran . . . nowhere is my home any more," she admitted, adding that "Persepolis I wrote for the other ones, not for Iranians." What she defended, with characteristic stubbornness, was not the authority to speak for a nation but the irreducibility of personal memory itself—the conviction that one person's experience, however partial, possesses a truth and dignity that neither sentiment nor institutional canonisation can entirely subsume. 

With Satrapi gone, the world prepares to mourn the loss of a storyteller as wry and rebellious as she was tender. Somewhere in Persepolis, Marji asks her idol, the Marxist revolutionary uncle Anoosh, about the torture he had endured under the Shah’s regime. He jokes that what his wife made him suffer had perhaps been harder to bear.

pp. 69, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Translated by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris, Pantheon Books, 2003.

Perhaps Satrapi’s work will endure—not for explaining Iran to the West, or cementing the graphic novel’s place as a serious cultural form, but for depicting how history is lived through ordinary, lush, often contradictory lives, irreducible to ideology or nation. Hers is a history-writing capacious enough to carry the weight of schoolyard rebellions and family arguments, the joy of first loves and grandmother’s tales. It is ordinary people, she reminds us, who suffer the bloodshed of war, who rally together in demonstrations, who laugh and joke amid catastrophe—who are as shaken by the gnarledness of grief and the vagaries of love as anybody else.

“I tell you all this because it’s important that you know, our family memory must not be lost. Even if it’s not easy for you, even if you don’t understand it all,” Anoosh tells the ten-year old Marji during their conversation. “Don’t worry”, she replies. “I’ll never forget.” 

The world Satrapi drew in stark black and white was never meant to stand for everyone, its strength lies precisely in its refusal to do so. Persepolis is one life, a promise kept to a loved one, the story she made sure to tell. In an age ever-eager for easy certainties and sweeping representations, readers will return time and again to Satrapi, and her stubborn fidelity to the fragmentary truths of memory. The candour and affection across her pages may be her most radical legacy.

(Edited by Anamta Husain.)