In The Economist issue of June 13th, in print; on June 11th on-line:
Obituary: Veil and beard and nuclear weapon
Marjane Satrapi set out to correct the West’s views of Iran
The author of Persepolis, an international sensation, died on June 4th, aged 56
The book. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, an autobiographical comic book, originally published in French in four parts from 2000 to 2003 and in English in two parts, as Persepolis (2003) and Persepolis 2 (2004) — about her childhood in Iran and adolescence in Europe following the Iranian revolution
The book, then, seeks to explain a very specific world to those who live in a more general one, from the point of view of someone who has moved through both of them. An enterprise of obvious significance to an understanding of the political world we currently live in, and also analogous to the description (both literary and scientific) of minority communities and subcultures, of the sort that engage scholars of sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and gender & sexuality studies — of people like me, and especially of those of us who work as participant-observers or as creative writers exploring the communities and subcultures we belong to or have lived among.
Just to explain why I am recommending Satrapi’s work and mourning her way too early death.
From the Economist‘s death notice:
France loudly claimed her, but Iran was still home. Despite the beauty of Paris, Tehran with all its ugliness was where she would rather be.
Yet in Iran now she was a Westerner, while in the West she was Iranian. Her identity risked falling between them. She wrote Persepolis not only to preserve her own memories of her country, pinning down who she was, but also, explicitly, to explain Iran to the West. To most Americans, it could be summed up as “veil and beard and nuclear weapon”. Its 4,000-year history, its glorious poets and philosophers, were ignored. Worse, there was no understanding of ordinary Iranians. They were not dead-eyed terrorists or donkey-riding peasants from the Dark Ages. Most lived in cities, modern people resisting every day the rulers who did not represent them. Freedom she was sure, must arrive in the end.
All done with extraordinary grit, jaunty resolution, amused contempt for authority, and unaccountable optimism.
July 26, 2026 at 11:17 am |
In my 8/18/12 posting “Marjane Satrapi”, I used the occasion of an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition with Marjane Satrapi, about the movie of her graphic novel Chicken With Plums, to write about her work more generally.
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/08/18/marjane-satrapi/