Marjane Satrapi, a graphic novelist, holds her newest book Woman, Life, Freedom, in her house in Paris, France.
Eleanor Beardsley/ NPR
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Eleanor Beardsley/ NPR
Marjane Satrapi, a graphic novelist, holds her newest book Woman, Life, Freedom, in her house in Paris, France.
Eleanor Beardsley/ NPR
PARIS — In her brilliant Paris condominium, Marjane Satrapi makes espresso, her cat rolling at a customer’s ft. The author of the internationally acclaimed graphic novel Persepolis, a couple of younger woman coming of age throughout Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Satrapi thought she had left comics behind. She’s principally been working in movie lately.
But she was pulled again to the medium after a younger Iranian lady died at the fingers of Iran’s morality police for not correctly sporting her hijab. The demise of Mahsa Amini in 2022 sparked months of protests throughout Iran. Satrapi will get goosebumps enthusiastic about it. She says it was historical past in the making.
“These adolescents are like, ‘Stop, we want another world,'” she says, talking of the large protests begun by younger Iranian girls and joined by younger males. “If it was only young girls, I would be extremely scared. But the girls were carried by the young guys. This is the difference. A real feminist revolution cannot succeed until men understand that equality between them and women is also good for them!”
Veiled Iranian girls maintain Iran flags and placards whereas attending a pro-government rally in Tehran, in December 2022. The rally was held in opposition to unrest following the demise of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody in September 2022.
Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto through Getty Images
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Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto through Getty Images
Veiled Iranian girls maintain Iran flags and placards whereas attending a pro-government rally in Tehran, in December 2022. The rally was held in opposition to unrest following the demise of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody in September 2022.
Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto through Getty Images
Satrapi says the protests have been the first actual pushback in opposition to the patriarchal tradition underpinning Iran’s clerical regime, which got here to energy in 1979.
The title of her latest book adopts the demonstrators’ slogan: Woman, Life, Freedom. The anthology — a collaboration amongst greater than 20 artists, activists, journalists and teachers — depicts in phrases and artwork the historic rebellion and its context.
One of the contributors is Abbas Milani, who fled Iran in 1987 and is now the director of the Iranian research program at Stanford University. Like Satrapi, Milani believes the latest protests have been very completely different from the 1979 revolution that changed the U.S.-supported, secular regime of 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 U.S. led by Martin Luther King.”
Milani says solely Satrapi, along with her connections and worldwide stature, may deliver collectively such a various and proficient group and prove this book in simply 5 months. Woman, Life, Freedom was printed in Persian and French for the first anniversary of Amini’s demise final September. The English-language model, translated by Una Dimitrijević and printed by Seven Stories Press, got here out in March.
Spanish artist Patricia Bolaños says she thought it was a prank when she obtained an e mail about engaged on the venture with the famed author of Persepolis. It was solely when Satrapi obtained in contact herself that she believed it. Bolaños, who lives in New York, says Persepolis is one of her favourite graphic novels however she knew little about Iran.
So she labored with one of the venture’s Iran students for instance the book’s chapter on the “Aghazadeh,” or noble-born, a time period connoting nepotism and corruption that is used to explain the kids of Iran’s elite, its ruling mullahs and 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 impressed by one of their Instagram accounts, “Rich Kids of Tehran,” which confirmed the Aghazadeh sporting bikinis on French Riviera seashores, consuming alcohol and partying.
“It was really scary because these are the kids of those setting the rules, but they don’t follow the rules,” she says. “For me, it was like, how is this possible? Especially for the women. These kids 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 needed to know what these moments are like. The final cartoon in her chapter exhibits a classy Aghazadeh checking her Instagram account. “She watches videos of women burning veils and yelling ‘freedom,'” says Bolaños, “and the reader sees it reflected in her sunglasses. And someone asks her, what are you watching? And she says… nothing.”
Satrapi says it was essential to contain individuals from outdoors Iran in the venture to point out Iranians the world is watching, and embracing the protesters’ trigger. The author believes no one would learn a 280-page book on the historical past and society of Iran. But a graphic narrative, she says, attracts readers in.
“A comic has this advantage, because the first language of the human being is drawing,” says Satrapi. “So it’s an immediate relationship that we have with image. Instead of using 1,000 words, you draw an image and the human being understands what this image is about.”
She flips by means of the book. “Each artist has his own style,” she says, pausing on the chapter titled “In the Hellhole of Evin Prison.”
“Mana Neyestani was actually in Evin prison,” she says, “so he was the best one to draw this part.”
The Iranian cartoonist, who now lives in France, is a recipient of the Cartoonists Rights Network International Award for braveness in editorial cartooning. He was jailed for 3 months in 2006 as a result of of a cartoon he drew in an Iranian publication that was thought of offensive.
Satrapi drew the chapter on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the notoriously vicious guardians of the 1979 revolution. “Without the Revolutionary Guards, the Islamic Republic wouldn’t last a month,” she writes. “They control the weapons and the finances. For now, at least…”
Satrapi says her hand ached as she labored on that chapter. “I didn’t want to draw their dirty faces,” she says.
Illustration by Marjane Satrapi about the Iranian revolutionary guards.
Marjane Satrapi
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Marjane Satrapi
Illustration by Marjane Satrapi about the Iranian revolutionary guards.
Marjane Satrapi
The 55-year-old artist, who has lived in Paris for greater than 25 years, says her technology was exhausted after residing by means of the Islamic Revolution, adopted by a large wave of political executions and the eight-year Iran-Iraq struggle.
But Satrapi believes the present technology, with educated girls and the mobilizing energy of web, will deliver change.
“It’s such courage,” she says. “And this is why I believe that this revolution, sooner or later, is going to give its results.”
Milani agrees. “I think it’s the beginning of the end of the regime,” he says. “This doesn’t mean the regime will fall tomorrow because it still has money, a small base of support, and it still has the brutality to kill hundreds and imprison thousands. But it’s delusional to think that this corrupt, incompetent regime of septuagenarian and nonagenarian clerics, whose ideas come from 1,400 years ago, can rule the Iranian society of today, where more than 60% of college graduates are brilliant women, who in every domain inside and outside of Iran, have created marvels with their work.”
Satrapi says the millions-strong Iranian diaspora is usually a loudspeaker for what is going on on in Iran, however change should come from inside.
“It’s not up to us,” she says. “What am I going to decide for a young Iranian person who is in Iran? I have not put my feet back in my country in 25 years. So what am I going to tell them?”
Still, Satrapi has little question change will come. She says it is only a matter of time.