What Marjane Satrapi Made
Arriving in the United States in the wake of 9/11, Satrapi’s “Persepolis” shattered common preconceptions about Iran, bringing the country’s complex history and the humanity of its people vividly alive for readers.
An outpouring of grief filled my social media feeds at the sudden death, last week, of Marjane Satrapi, the 56-year-old French-Iranian author, artist, filmmaker, and activist, best known for her comic book memoir-slash-novel, Persepolis.
Published in France in 2000, and three years later in a best-selling English translation, it used simple, black-and-white drawings to tell the story of Marji, an irrepressibly mischievous, precocious little girl growing up in a family of cosmopolitan intellectuals with aristocratic ancestors and leftist sympathies in Tehran of the 1970s and ’80s. Like Satrapi, Marji is 10 when Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution upends her world. Insurrectionary fervor sweeps the playground. Marji, who had once dreamed of being a Muslim prophet, is soon leading her friends in games where they play at being Fidel and Trotsky. But suddenly, new rules are imposed at school: boys and girls are strictly segregated, and girls must wear the veil.
Marji’s parents, like Satrapi’s, had demonstrated against the Shah’s corrupt regime, but changes wrought by his overthrow came to haunt them. In the Revolution’s early days, her beloved Uncle Anoosh, a poetic, Communist dissident, is released after years in the Shah’s jails. He’s initially optimistic about the new Islamic Republic, but its forces soon re-arrest and execute him. Satrapi recounts this and other devastating losses with childlike tenderness and ferocity, coupled at times with a subversive, gallows humor. Arriving in the United States in the wake of 9/11, Persepolis shattered common preconceptions about Iran, bringing the country’s complex history and the humanity of its people vividly alive for readers.
Born in 1969 in Rasht, a city on the coast of the Caspian Sea, and raised in Tehran, Satrapi was the only child of her father, an engineer, and her mother, a dress designer. She survived not only the Revolution but also her city’s repeated bombings during the eight-year Iran–Iraq war. And she endured a more-than-turbulent adolescence when, far from her family and despairing after her breakup with a boyfriend, she lived on the streets of Vienna for months. She told this story in a second volume of memoirs, which goes on to recount her struggles to adapt when, after a four-year absence, she puts on her veil and returns from Europe to a radically changed Tehran. Both memoirs formed the basis for a 2007 animated film, which she co-wrote and directed, and which was nominated for an Oscar.
By then, she had studied art in Tehran and Strasbourg, had been briefly married at 21 and divorced, and had finally settled in Paris, where she became a French citizen and where, on Friday, news of her death made the front page of every major paper. President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to “a freedom-loving artist” and scores of figures from the worlds of comics and film, and in the Iranian diaspora at large, expressed their shock and dismay.
Her maverick spirit had appeared indomitable. In 2024, she published Women, Life, Freedom, a collection of texts and essays by her and others in support of Iranian feminists, whose widespread protest movement, following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, in custody in 2022, had threatened to topple the government. (Amini had been detained by the morality police, who claimed that stray locks of hair were peeking out from under her hijab.)
The West did not escape Satrapi’s scrutiny, either. Last year, she turned down the Légion d’honneur, the highest state honor of her adopted country, citing France’s “hypocrisy” in refusing visas to Iranian dissidents. She was full of ideas and passion. How could such a volcano, a French editor on Instagram wondered, go extinct?
Members of Satrapi’s close circle issued a statement to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), saying that her “sadness” following the death last year of her longtime husband, Swedish film producer and actor Mattias Ripa, was the cause of her death. My first thought was that, if sadness can kill, who, reading the news from the Middle East, will escape alive?
In the meantime, we can turn to Satrapi’s other graphic novels, including Embroideries (2005), a charming peek into the private conversations of a multigenerational group of Iranian women discussing their bodies and love lives; and Chicken with Plums, which is based upon the story of her great uncle, a supremely gifted musician who suddenly loses the ability to play the tar (an Iranian lute) and lies down to die. It is a meditation on the art that emerges from grief, and the pleasure that is a prerequisite for the will to live.
