Marjane Satrapi has died and every Iranian woman I know is in shock and mourning, while none seems confused by reports of the cause. She died “of sadness”, according to those close to her. Of course she did. Iranians often do. And Satrapi felt everything so intensely.
For my cohort (girls who began their adolescence in 1980s Iran and ended it in the west) Marjane Satrapi was a spokesperson for our trauma, our upbringing and our particular flavour of shame, repression and outspokenness. She made us legible to our western peers in our 20s and 30s, and I was sure she would do it again in middle age.
Before her internationally acclaimed graphic memoir Persepolis, I thought the weird baggage I brought to the US, and the ways I tried to adapt, were specific to me. Satrapi captured it so elegantly and precisely in so few words. Every image was instantly recognisable: the items in a Persian living room, the hand gestures, the family dynamics, the terror or rebellion in a young girl’s face, the sneer of the Revolutionary Guards, the longing for grandmothers back home. She showed the full emotional force of a beloved relative’s murder in a single black panel.
Satrapi was born in Rasht in 1969 and grew up in a secular, politically engaged family in Tehran. Her childhood was interrupted by the 1979 revolution and the gender apartheid that followed, the many restrictions placed on women, the imprisonment and execution of dissidents, and the Iran-Iraq war. In 1983, when she was a teenager, her parents sent her to Vienna for school. She later returned to Iran, studied visual communication, married, divorced, and left for France, where she made most of her art.
I started reading Satrapi’s work in 2003, when the first volume of Persepolis was published in the US. I was a mere 14 years past my asylum, and I’d spent my whole adolescence explaining, hiding or apologising for myself to Americans. I was still traumatised and more confused than ever. And here was a graphic novel (I’d never read one before) laying it all out so honestly and powerfully that it didn’t seem as shameful any more. I wanted to read the rest of Persepolis, but it wasn’t then available in English, so I read the four-part series in French. Somehow it was better; reading each word slowly in my own halting French, I was 10 again, labouring over English books in my new country. I could imagine myself deeper into young Marjane’s mind as she, too, struggled to learn a new language.
After Persepolis’s success she found herself translating Iran for westerners, correcting their misconceptions about what Iranians want, what they talk about, how they live privately. In her 2003 graphic novel Embroideries, Iranian women from all walks get together for tea and share their weirdest sex stories: the surgeries, the superstitions, religious repression, vanity, humiliation, rejection and the absurdities of men. It helped me come to terms with my family’s strange, often traumatic sexual history, and to understand that they aren’t unique.
In 2023, after Mahsa Amini’s death, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, and fresh western misconceptions about what Iranians want, Satrapi published a graphic collection about the protests (including a brilliant explanation of the Revolutionary Guards). She explained how Iranian women of my generation lived “a kind of split life”, one self at home, one in public. But “today’s youth has said, ‘Fuck it, we don’t want to live that way: inside and outside, I want to be me.’ And what they are asking, really, is to be able to wear what they want, to be able to sing what they want, to be able to write what they want, to have the freedom to think.”
It is no exaggeration to say that Satrapi’s books brought me (and many women like me) out of hiding and taught us to stop apologising for ourselves (for our trauma, our loudness, our rage, grief, desire). “I’m stuck in the middle,” she told the Believer in 2006. “Everywhere I have to defend Iran. Because Iran is not understood at all, especially in the US.” Her books complicated the one-dimensional image of Iranians in western media. In a 2024 interview with the Guardian, she talks about the “hidden racism” of the west, “that views Iranians as people who are not culturally suited to human rights”. In film, Iran is “stuck in the dark ages”, with shots of “a hillside and a donkey”. “A tree … A woman … An apple … Fuck that, we live in cities, we have very complicated problems … [And] the government isn’t representative of us.”
For most of my 20s and 30s, Satrapi was the voice that told me not to let myself get pushed around. And she had only just begun to say other things I want to hear in middle age. In 2020, she told Le Monde, “How many times have I heard: ‘You’re not a real woman unless …’ Well, I am! I am a woman, fully a woman, without ever having given birth. And I will have experiences that others will never know. I have absolutely no need to be ‘completed’ by a man or by a child. I am more than enough on my own.”
And yet she loved fiercely: she died, her friends say, from heartbreak, leaving those of us who admired her, who felt seen by her, a little heartbroken, too.
• Dina Nayeri is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Who Gets Believed?
