Marjane Satrapi’s New Book Is About Women’s Rights Protests in Iran: NPR

PARIS — In her bright Paris apartment, Marjane Satrapi makes coffee while her cat rolls around at a visitor’s feet. The author of the internationally acclaimed graphic novel. Persepolis, about a young woman who comes of age during Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Satrapi thought she had left comics behind. In recent years she has worked mainly in film.

But she was removed to the media after a young Iranian woman died at the hands of Iran’s moral police for not wearing her hijab correctly. Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022 sparked months of protests across Iran. Satrapi gets goosebumps thinking about it. She says it was history in the making.

“These teenagers say, ‘Enough, we want another world,'” she says, speaking of the mass protests started by young Iranian women and joined by young men. “If it were just young girls, I would be very scared. But the girls were taken by the young men. This is the difference. A true feminist revolution cannot succeed until men understand that equality between themselves and women is also good! for them! “

Veiled Iranian women hold Iranian flags and banners as they attend a pro-government rally in Tehran, December 2022. The rally was held in opposition to unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in police custody in September 2022.

Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Veiled Iranian women hold Iranian flags and banners as they attend a pro-government rally in Tehran, December 2022. The rally was held in opposition to unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in police custody in September 2022.

Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Satrapi says the protests were the first real pushback against the patriarchal culture underpinning Iran’s clerical regime, which came to power in 1979.

The title of his latest book adopts the protesters’ motto: Woman, Life, Freedom. The anthology, a collaboration between more than 20 artists, activists, journalists and academics, describes in words and art the historical uprising and its context.

One of the contributors 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 secular regime of U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with a Shiite theocracy.

“The Iranian women’s movement, in its civil disobedience, defiance and persistence, is absolutely one of the most important civil disobedience movements of the 20th century,” Milani says. “It is completely comparable to the civil disobedience movement in the United States led by Martin Luther King.”

Milani says that only Satrapi, with his connections and international stature, could bring together such a diverse and talented group and publish 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, came out in March.

The Spanish artist Patricia Bolaños. says he thought it was a joke when he received an email about working on the project with the famous author of Persepolis. Only when Satrapi got in touch did she believe it herself. Bolaños, who lives in New York, says Persepolis is one of his favorite graphic novels but he knew little about Iran.

So he worked with one of the Iranian academics on the project to illustrate the book’s chapter on the “Aghazadeh,” or born into nobility, a term that connotes nepotism and corruption and is used to describe the children of the Iranian elite. their ruling mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard.

An illustration by Patricia Bolaños included in Satrapi’s book Woman, Life, Freedom.

Marjane Satrapi

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Marjane Satrapi

An illustration by Patricia Bolaños included in Satrapi’s book Woman, Life, Freedom.

Marjane Satrapi

Bolaños says he was inspired by one of his Instagram accounts, “Rich kids of Tehran” which showed Aghazadeh in a bikini on the beaches of the French Riviera, drinking alcohol and partying.

“It was really scary because these are the children of those who make the rules, but don’t follow them,” he says. “For me, I thought, how is this possible? Especially for women. These children are perpetuating this corrupt system. And at certain moments they have to collide with this other world of other women fighting and dying for freedom.”

Bolaños wanted to know what those moments are like. The last cartoon in her episode shows an elegant Aghazadeh checking her Instagram account. “She sees videos of women burning veils and shouting ‘freedom,'” says Bolaños, “and the reader sees it reflected in her sunglasses. And someone asks her, what are you seeing? And she says…nothing.” .

Satrapi says it was important to involve people from outside Iran in the project to show Iranians that the world is watching and embracing the protesters’ cause. The author believes that no one would read a 280-page book on the history and society of Iran. But a graphic narrative, he says, attracts readers.

“Comic books have this advantage, because the first language of human beings is drawing,” says Satrapi. “So it’s an immediate relationship we have with the image. Instead of using 1,000 words, you draw an image and the human being understands what that image is about.”

She flips through the book. “Each artist has her own style,” she says, stopping at the chapter titled “In the Hell of Evin Prison.”

“Mana Neyestani was actually in Evin Prison,” he says, “so he was the best one to draw this role.”

The Iranian cartoonist, who now lives in France, received the Cartoonists Rights Network international award for bravery in editorial cartooning. He was jailed for three months in 2006 for a cartoon he drew in an Iranian publication that was deemed offensive.

Satrapi drew the chapter on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the notoriously cruel guardians of the 1979 revolution. “Without the Revolutionary Guard, the Islamic Republic would not last a month,” he writes. “They control the weapons and the finances. For now, at least…”

Satrapi says her hand hurt while working on that chapter. “I didn’t want to draw dirty faces on him,” he says.

Illustration by Marjane Satrapi of the Iranian revolutionary guard.

Marjane Satrapi

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Marjane Satrapi

Illustration by Marjane Satrapi of the Iranian revolutionary guard.

Marjane Satrapi

The 55-year-old artist, who has lived in Paris for more than 25 years, says her generation was exhausted after living through the Islamic Revolution, followed by a massive wave of political executions and the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

But Satrapi believes that the current generation, with educated women and the mobilizing power of the Internet, will bring change.

“It’s so brave,” he says. “And that is why I believe that this revolution, sooner or later, will give its results.”

Milani agrees. “I think it’s 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 it 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 come from 1,400 years ago, can govern today’s Iranian society, where more than 60% of university graduates are brilliant women, who in all areas inside and outside Iran, have created wonders with their work.”

Satrapi says the Iranian diaspora of millions of people can be a voice for what is happening in Iran, but change must come from within.

“It’s not up to us,” he says. “What am I going to decide for a young Iranian who is in Iran? I haven’t set foot in my country again in 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.