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Marjane Satrapi, a writer and filmmaker, has died in Paris at the age of 56. She was someone who managed to wrest a piece of the Iranian experience from the grip of the state, war, propaganda, Orientalism (the perspective that views the East from the outside, through fixed clichés), and the nostalgia of exile, and transform it into a story.
Her loved ones described her death as a loss that followed the passing of her husband. This information raised a question that is usually overlooked in the lives of those who struggle: how does the political activist, the person in exile, the person who resists, deal with love, loneliness, physical contact, loss, and exhaustion?
Stories from the Heart of Iranian Life
Marjane Satrapi was born in Iran in 1969. Her childhood was shaped by the 1979 revolution, the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the Iran-Iraq War, and political repression. Her family was politically active. She witnessed firsthand how major historical events enter the home, sit at the table, manifest themselves at school and on the streets, control women’s bodies, and change children’s language.
That is how Persepolis came to be. It tells the story of a young girl’s childhood and adolescence in Iran after the revolution. It draws on experiences of family, school, war, migration, return, repression, anger, and confusion. The work was first published in France and went on to become one of the most well-known graphic novels about Iran. The film adaptation of Persepolis won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. That success transformed Satrapi from a writer and illustrator into a figure known around the world.
Neither through the eyes of the State nor of the West
What mattered in Persepolis was her perspective. Satrapi told the story of Iran neither through the eyes of the state, nor through the eyes of the Western media during wartime, nor through the orientalist gaze that understands Iran only through the veil, backwardness, violence, or mystery. She told the story of Iran through the journey of a little girl, a family, a woman’s body, a home, a school, and exile.
It seems simple, but in the politics of image, it’s a huge deal. Governments and the media usually erase the human being. The Islamic Republic turns people into symbols. The West, obsessed with security, turns people into a threat. Crisis media turn people into victims. Satrapi, with her black-and-white drawings, has put the human being back at the center.
Neither a saint nor the spokesperson for all Iranians
Marjane Satrapi is not immune to criticism and should not be turned into a superhero. One may disagree with certain aspects of her work, her language, her social stance, or her political choices. No artist is the absolute representative of a society. No personal story can stand in for millions of lives.
That is precisely what makes her work so important.
Satrapi was not the voice of all Iranians. Among millions of Iranian experiences, she recounted a specific one: the experience of a young woman from a politically active, urban family, belonging to a specific social class, as she grappled with the revolution, war, womanhood, migration, and exile. The strength of her work lay in translating this specific experience into a language in which many Iranians saw something of themselves—even if their lives were not exactly like hers—and which millions of people around the world also understood.
Satrapi’s contribution has been to turn her personal experiences into a public narrative, and then to use the influence she has gained to defend freedom, women’s rights, and the fight against executions in Iran.
Art Challenging Iran’s Official Image
Satrapi has explained on many occasions that one of the main goals of her work was to humanize the image of Iranians. In an interview with The Guardian, she spoke of a hidden racism in the West—a perspective that views Iranians as a people unworthy of human rights, or that seeks to understand Iran only through outdated, silent, and timeless images.
In another interview, she had said that the Iranian people do not speak for the ayatollahs, just as the American people did not speak for George Bush. That statement still holds true. Satrapi has taken the same stance that many of us still hold: she does not defend the state, nor does she accept the war-mongering image of Iran propagated by the West.
This is not an easy position to be in. The state wants you to side with the government against the West, and part of the West wants you—in order to be accepted—to turn your own people into its favorite stereotypes. At the best moments of her work, Satrapi has managed to avoid this trap. She has shown that it is possible to fight both religious despotism and the racist image of Iran prevalent in the West.
From Persepolis to Woman, Life, Freedom
Satrapi didn’t stop where *Persepolis* left off. Embroideries and Chicken with Plums revealed another facet of her work. In Embroideries, the world of women, private conversations, the body, marriage, desire, and humor became central to the narrative. In Chicken with Plums, love, failure, art, death, and loss took center stage. In film, she moved from the adaptations of Persepolis and Chicken with Plums to films like The Voices and Radioactive.
In recent years, she has returned to Iran in a more direct capacity. As part of the Woman, Life, Freedom project, she has worked alongside other artists, writers, and researchers to document and explain the 2022 uprising. In a 2024 interview with The Guardian, she stated that Iranians outside the country should not dictate to those inside. In her own words, their role can only be that of a loudspeaker. This statement is significant. She avoided turning exile into a position of leadership. She portrayed exile as a position fraught with responsibility, distance, and limitations.
Satrapi has also been involved in human rights campaigns against executions in Iran. In November 2024, alongside other figures in the movement against executions in Iran—Shole Pakravan, Mina Ahadi, and Ladan Bazargan—she took part in a collective effort to stop executions. That campaign sought to unite the voices of families seeking justice, women’s rights activists, workers’ and teachers’ organizations, political prisoners, and human rights groups against the Islamic Republic’s execution machine.
This part of her life is significant. Satrapi did not merely build a cultural reputation outside of Iran. She used the standing she earned through her art to exert political and humanitarian pressure. One may disagree with her, but there is no denying that she has used her name to give a voice to the oppressed.
The person behind the symbol
The news of her death also had another angle. According to Agence France-Presse, those close to her attributed her death to the grief following the death of her husband, Mattias Ripa. Ripa had died just over a year earlier. This description should be treated with care. Grief should not be read as an autopsy report. This is the language of the family, the language of mourning, the language of those who have seen how loss quietly takes root in a life.
This very language of mourning reveals something that is usually erased from the lives of those who fight: love, attachment, fragility, and the need for another’s presence. We see people holding on as if they must never break. The woman who fights, the artist in exile, the global voice, the critic of despotism. All these titles are part of the truth about Satrapi. But behind them lies a human being who loves, who loses, who cries, and who, after a great loss, may no longer be able to return to her former life.
We don’t see this side of things as often. We know how to talk about repression, prison, execution, and exile. We’re less able to acknowledge that the person who resists also needs love, companionship, and someone to stand by them when the world becomes too much to bear.
Politics does not unfold only in the streets, at the border, and in war. Sometimes it remains within the body. The body of someone who has lived for years in a state of emergency, the body of the migrant, the body of the refugee, the body of a woman who works and cares for others at the same time—it is not merely a body of desire. The body is also memory. An archive of fears, humiliations, suspicions, and survival. Satrapi, too, has fought her entire life against states, borders, censorship, and exile, and yet the absence of a single person managed to bring her private world crashing down. This is not weakness. This is being human.
The Death of an Artist and the Question of What It Means to Be Human
Through her black-and-white illustrations, Satrapi has shown that great history is always woven into the lives of ordinary people. Through a room in a house, through a grandmother, through a child, through the body, through fear, and through love.
We talk a lot about refugees, artists in exile, political activists, and women who fight, but we often reduce them to a single role. The role of the victim, the role of the sufferer, the role of the witness, the role of the symbol. We rarely ask ourselves what these people are left with at night, or how, after years of living under pressure, they still manage to trust anyone.
The best tribute to Marjane Satrapi is not to erect a statue of her. She herself opposed the transformation of human beings into symbols. The right thing to do is to continue doing what Persepolis did: to see human beings within the context of politics. To see the woman, the child, the migrant, the exile, the lover, the mourner, and the frightened person. To see what states, the media, and sometimes the movements themselves erase.
A person who has lived for years in a state of emergency needs more than just physical safety. They need the chance to experience friendship, physical contact, trust, silence, and to have a conversation in which they don’t have to wade through the ruins of politics every time before they can reach their true selves.
For nearly thirty years, Satrapi has portrayed Iran through the lens of a home, a family, and a body. Continuing her work means maintaining the same perspective: the human being comes before the symbol.
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