Marjane Satrapi, graphic novelist, holds her latest book Woman, Life, Freedomat her home in Paris, France.
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Marjane Satrapi, graphic novelist, holds her latest book Woman, Life, Freedomat her home in Paris, France.
Eleanor Beardsley/ NPR
PARIS — In her bright Parisian apartment, Marjane Satrapi prepares coffee, her cat rolling at the feet of a visitor. The author of the internationally renowned graphic novel Persepolis, about a young girl coming of age during Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Satrapi thought she had left the comic strip behind. She has mainly worked in cinema in recent years.
But it was removed to the medium after a young Iranian woman died at the hands of Iranian morality police for not wearing her hijab properly. The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 sparked months of protests around the world. Iran. Satrapi gets goosebumps thinking about it. She said it was a story in the making.
“These teenagers are saying, ‘Stop, we want another world,'” she said, speaking of the massive protests launched by young Iranian women and joined by young men. “If it were just young girls, I would be extremely afraid. But the girls were carried by the young men. That’s the difference. A true feminist revolution can only succeed if men understand that ‘Equality between them and women is also good for them!’
Veiled Iranian women wave Iranian flags and placards as they attend a pro-government rally in Tehran, December 2022. The rally took place in opposition to unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in custody in September 2022.
Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Veiled Iranian women wave Iranian flags and placards as they attend a pro-government rally in Tehran, December 2022. The rally took place in opposition to unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in custody in September 2022.
Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Satrapi says the protests were the first real pushback against the patriarchal culture that underpinned Iran’s mullahs’ regime, which came to power in 1979.
The title of his latest book takes up the slogan of the demonstrators: Woman, Life, Freedom. The anthology – a collaboration between more than 20 artists, activists, journalists and scholars – depicts in words and art the historic uprising and its context.
One contributor is Abbas Milani, who fled Iran in 1987 and is now director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. Like Satrapi, Milani believes the recent protests were very different from the 1979 revolution that replaced the U.S.-backed secular regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with a Shiite theocracy.
“The Iranian women’s movement, through its civil disobedience, defiance and perseverance, is undoubtedly one of the most important civil disobedience movements of the 20th century,” Milani said. “It is completely comparable to the civil disobedience movement led in the United States by Martin Luther King.”
Milani says only Satrapi, with her connections and international stature, could bring together such a diverse and talented group and produce this book in just five months. Woman, Life, Freedom was published in Persian and French on the first anniversary of Amini’s death last September. The English version, translated by Una Dimitrijević and published by Seven Stories Press, was released in March.
Spanish artist Patricia Bolaños says she thought it was a prank when she received an email announcing she would be working on the project with the famous author of Persepolis. It was only when Satrapi made contact herself that she believed him. Bolaños, who lives in New York, says Persepolis is one of her favorite graphic novels, but she knew little about Iran.
So she worked with one of the project’s Iranian specialists to illustrate the book’s chapter on the “Aghazadeh,” or nobles, a term connoting nepotism and corruption used to describe the children of Iran’s elite, the mullahs. in power and the Revolutionary Guards.
An illustration by Patricia Bolaños featured in Satrapi’s book Woman, Life, Freedom.
Marjane Satrapi
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Marjane Satrapi
An illustration by Patricia Bolaños featured in Satrapi’s book Woman, Life, Freedom.
Marjane Satrapi
Bolaños says she was inspired by one of their Instagram accounts, “Rich Kids of Tehran,” which showed the Aghazadehs wearing bikinis on the beaches of the French Riviera, drinking alcohol and partying .
“It was really scary because these are the children of the people who make the rules, but they don’t follow them,” she says. “For me it was: How is this possible? Especially for women. These children are perpetuating this corrupt system. And at times they have to collide with this other world of other women who are fighting and dying for freedom.”
Bolaños wanted to know what those moments were like. The final drawing in her chapter shows a stylish Aghazadeh checking her Instagram account. “She watches videos of women burning veils and shouting ‘freedom,'” says Bolaños, “and the reader sees that reflected in her sunglasses. And someone asks her: what are you looking at? And she says…nothing.”
Satrapi says it was important to involve people outside of Iran in the project to show Iranians that the world is watching and is behind the protesters’ cause. The author thinks that no one would read a 280-page book on Iranian history and society. But a graphic narrative, she says, attracts readers.
“A comic book has this advantage, because the first language of the human being is drawing,” explains Satrapi. “So it’s an immediate relationship that we have with the image. Instead of using 1,000 words, you draw a picture and the human being understands what that picture is about.”
She flips through the book. “Each artist has their own style,” she says, stopping at the chapter titled “In the hell of Evin prison.”
“Mana Neyestani was actually in Evin prison,” she says, “so he was the best to draw that part.”
The Iranian cartoonist, who now lives in France, is the winner of the Cartoonists Rights Network International Award for his courage in editorial cartooning. He was jailed for three months in 2006 over a cartoon he drew in an Iranian publication that was considered offensive.
Satrapi wrote the chapter on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, the notoriously vicious guards of the 1979 revolution. “Without the Revolutionary Guards, the Islamic Republic would not last a month,” she wrote. “They control the weapons and the finances. For now, at least…”
Satrapi says her hand hurt while she was working on this chapter. “I didn’t want to draw their dirty faces,” she says.
Illustration by Marjane Satrapi on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Marjane Satrapi
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Marjane Satrapi
Illustration by Marjane Satrapi on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Marjane Satrapi
The 55-year-old artist, who has lived in Paris for more than 25 years, says his generation was exhausted after living through the Islamic Revolution, followed by a massive wave of political executions and eight years of the Iran-Iraq war.
But Satrapi believes that today’s generation, with its educated women and the mobilizing power of the Internet, will bring change.
“It’s such courage,” she said. “And that is why I believe that this revolution, sooner or later, will give its results.”
Milani agrees. “I think this is the beginning of the end of the regime,” he says. “This does not mean that the regime will fall tomorrow because it still has money, a small support base, and still has the brutality to kill hundreds and imprison thousands. But it is illusory to think that this corrupt and incompetent regime of septuagenarians and nonagenarian clerics, whose ideas date back 1,400 years ago, can lead Iranian society today, where more than 60% of university graduates are brilliant women who, in all fields, inside and outside Iran, have created wonders through their work.
Satrapi says the millions-strong Iranian diaspora can be a voice for what’s happening in Iran, but change must come from within.
“It’s not up to us,” she said. “What am I going to decide for a young Iranian who is in Iran? I haven’t set foot in my country for 25 years. So what am I going to tell them?”
Still, Satrapi has no doubt that changes will come. She says it’s just a matter of time.
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