Persepolis in Hindi: The graphic novel about Iran has new lessons for India
Rock bands, regrets, little rebellions — as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis turns 20, with the release of a Hindi edition, a look at ways in which the world has changed, and not changed enough, since the beloved story set in totalitarian Iran was first told.
In nearly every interview she’s given, Marjane Satrapi has refused to refer to her 2000 book Persepolis as a graphic novel. Call it a comic, she says. It sounds more fun.
She doesn’t like calling it an autobiography either. Even if it is the intensely personal tale of a young girl named Marji in Tehran, living through the Islamic Revolution of the 1970s and the oppressive authoritarianism that follows. “I use myself to tell a story that is bigger than me,” she said, speaking at the virtual the launch of a Hindi translation of Persepolis by Vani Prakashan earlier this week. “It’s a story of dictatorship no matter where it happens.”
The story has been a publishing phenomenon that’s left a trail of footnotes in its wake. The book and its 2004 sequel, Persepolis 2 (about Marji adjusting to a new life in Austria as a teen, an age at which Satrapi moved to that country to study) were published in an omnibus English edition in 2007. The film version of Persepolis was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in the same year. Over 2 million copies of the books have sold in 29 languages since.
No matter which edition you pick, Persepolis is funny, tragic, intimate and filled with rebellions big and small. Marji’s grandmother, in the darkest times, fills her bra with jasmine blooms to stay fresh. The family stalls soldiers at the door as they run upstairs to pour all the wine down the toilet rather than hand it over. Her parents, on a trip to Turkey, smuggle back posters of Iron Maiden and Kim Wilde in their lining of their overcoats. Little Marji herself tricks authorities when they discover her pin featuring Michael Jackson. “No, it’s Malcolm X, the leader of Black Muslims in America!”
Satrapi knew the story couldn’t be told without humour. Her original drafts, written in fits of rage, were unusable. “With distance comes humour,” she says. “When it’s bearable, you complain; when it’s unbearable, you either try suicide or you laugh.”
She’s had 20 years of distance since Persepolis was originally published in French. But for the 51-year-old who now lives in Paris, there’s still plenty to rebel against. Around the world, authoritarianism has steadily intensified. More curbs are enforced online, in the press, in courts, in the arts and public life. The Freedom in the World report, an independent country-wise assessment of political rights and civil liberties, downgraded the scores of more than 73 countries for 2021 (including the US, Singapore and Spain). India’s score, on a total of 100 points, slid from 75 in 2018 to 67. Satrapi’s homeland, Iran, scored 16.
Persepolis, the book and film, have been banned in several regions, including Iran, Lebanon and, for a while, Chicago’s public schools. But news of censorship invariably makes a book even more popular, and Satrapi delights in rattling cages. “If you want to get anywhere in the world, you’ve got to misbehave a little bit,” she says.
Despite the bans, like a poster hidden in the lining of a coat, the Persepolis story has slid past censors. The books ignited the very genre of the graphic memoir, inspiring writer-artists to document their own childhoods in conflict zones as far apart as Côte d’Ivoire and Argentina (see box). In 2009, Iranian activists replaced Satrapi’s original drawings with updated text, creating Persepolis 2.0, an online initiative that helped amplify public despair over the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“Many people found that it was part of their own life, which is extremely magical for me because it was from the beginning a very, very personal story,” she said in a 2008 interview with ABC about translating the work into English. “If they can understand a story like that, that means that everything is fine, that there is some hope for the future, that we don’t necessarily need to make war.”
Instead, she’s made more books. Chicken with Plums (2004) celebrates the final days of Satrapi’s great-uncle, a famous musician who finds one day that his instrument, the tar, is irreparably damaged, and plans to end his life. Broderies, her 2003 comic, follows an evening of tea and gossip, and examines sexual politics in Iran after the revolution (the title is a colloquial term for the sewing up of female genitalia to simulate virginity).
It’s another little fight in a long line of rebellions. Though Satrapi, in her ABC interview, refuses again to be pigeonholed. “I don’t think of myself as a rebel. I just say what I think.”
Post-Persepolis: Graphic novels to read next
Nylon Road (2006): Parsua Bashi adds a touch of A Christmas Carol magic to her memories of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. As an adult in Switzerland, she imagines childhood versions of herself through her graphic memoir, connecting past, present, Farsi and German public history and private memory. It’s funny and dark in parts, like Persepolis.
Aya of Yop City (2005): Written (and loosely inspired by the life of) Marguerite Abouet, who grew up in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1970s, and illustrated by her husband Clément Oubrerie, …Yop City follows the often-funny everyday adventures of a teen named Aya. It’s a refreshing look at an African nation that typically makes headlines for famine and civil war. A film adaptation was released in 2013.
Exit Wounds (2007): For those who liked Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Israeli illustrator Rutu Modan’s view of Tel Aviv is slower paced but just as haunting. A young taxi driver’s father goes missing. The man believes his father was killed in a bomb blast and starts looking for clues, unravelling a side of his parent he didn’t know existed. Modan’s view of the uncertainty of life makes for an evocative on-the-road tale.
I Remember Beirut (2008): Zeina Abirached grew up watching Christians and Muslims fighting on the streets of Lebanon. Her collection of stories, however, illustrates everyday life: Kit-Kat bars as a treat, her brother collecting bomb shrapnel as a hobby, blackouts, fuel shortages. It’s a companion work to her award-winning graphic novel A Game for Swallows, recounting the war in Lebanon.
Virus Tropical (2009): Power Paola’s tale of growing up in Ecuador sometimes feels like a tele-novela: she’s the youngest daughter fighting to establish her identity in a family of conservative women. Her father, a priest, has left the clergy, divorced his wife and then left the family too. Her humour is often self-deprecatory as Paola takes a critical look at herself as a young woman as well.