Editor’s Note: Many thanks to Sima Shakhsari for allowing this reprint from their social media account.
I wish for an in-between space to neither make Satrapi into a hero nor a villain.
If you expect a comic book that is narrated from a child’s eye in the 1980s—a child who lived through a revolution and a war and who left Iran— to capture the nuances of almost 50 years of post-revolutionary Iran and its politics, then you have unrealistic expectations. To reduce Satrapi to a tool of imperialism who was enamored by Western commodities is ridiculous. And it’s equally ridiculous to make Satrapi’s experience as an upper-middle-class child in the 1980s seem like THE TRUTH about the lives of all Iranian women in 2022 and beyond, or to make her into a hero of Iranian women’s liberation.
If you grew up in Iran in the 1980s, you would know that Gasht-e Zainab was horrifying and ridiculously restrictive to young women. If you were alive then, you would know that middle-class Tehrani kids would walk along Vali-Asr street after school and buy Michael Jackson’s tapes or badly reproduced photos of American actors and singers to put on their walls. And they had to hide them, as if smuggling drugs, in case they were stopped by Gasht-e Zainab. And no, it was not a sign of “westoxification.” It was the desire to listen to trendy music and more of a reaction to strict “cultural revolution” of that time. Even this communist kid had Wham photos! (It figures! I had gaydars long before George Michael came out!) We didn’t have Instagram or TikTok, so yes, buying “Jichael Mackson” or screaming to the lyrics of “Eye of the Tiger” was a way to be “cool” in a time when all we heard as kids and tweens and teenagers was the “red siren” or “mamad naboodi bebini” (war and post-revolutionary songs about which I am very nostalgic now).
A lot has changed since the 1980s and after the Iran-Iraq war, thanks to Iranian women’s unwavering challenge to the state’s disciplinary apparatus (and no thanks to the U.S./Israeli “liberators”). And Satrapi telling the story of that period through a child’s eye does not make her alienated from her culture or westoxificated. Her story about that time is the experience of a privileged leftist kid (she came from the princely Qajar family) during years of revolution and war.
And on the other end, you have to admit that Satrapi, as someone who lived in France with its Islamophobic laicité and anti-hijab sentiments, was influenced by the hegemonic culture of the place where she lived most of her life. And she was familiar with anti-Iranian racism and critical of it as well. While she was entitled to her views on hijab, I don’t think she was in the position to be a spokesperson for women’s rights in Iran (she was neither a researcher of gender nor someone who was in touch with the realities of Iranian women on the ground in Iran, especially 3 decades after she had left Iran). Of course, many Iranians in diaspora, including Satrapi, joined the Woman, Life, Freedom bandwagon without thinking about the price that those in Iran had to pay for the international appropriations of the movement (her collaboration with Abbas Milani, which I posted before is an example). And of course, orientalists who are happy to reduce Muslim women to victimhood, or regime change diaspora groups who were eager to take parts of her books about hijab and run with it (of course, they conveniently omitted parts about the critiques of the Pahlavi era).
The bottom line and what I’m trying to say is this: Give the dead woman a f’ing break and let people who were touched by her work have a moment to mourn. Her book is a good teaching tool about the Iranian revolution, and you can (and should) talk about what is missing from it, what has changed since the time she left Iran, and how the book’s content is taken out of context and made into a timeless truth about Iran in a particular temporal juncture.
Satrapi was neither a hero nor a villain. She was a talented artist who really cared about Iran. You can be critical of the shortcomings in her work and still appreciate her talent and her love for the Iranian people. And you could allow criticism of her work without making her into an idol. She was all too human, as Nietzsche would say.
Sima Shakhsari
June 2026
Featured Image: Marjane Satrapi Creative Commons License:
