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.
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