Marjane Satrapi, la voce che ha restituito un volto all’Iran

Translated by Federica Conti

Marjane Satrapi died on June 4th at the age of 56. The news of her death was shared by her family through a statement issued by the France-Presse Agency, saying that the polyhedric artist “died of sadness, almost a year after the loss of Mattias Ripa, her husband and love of her life.” Ripa, a Franco-Swedish producer and screenwriter, had died in April 2025 at the age of 53.

The words of the family immediately touched the public opinion, reopening the debate on that phenomenon defined by medicine as “broken heart syndrome”: the possibility that a loss might deeply affect physical health. However, Satrapi’s heritage goes beyond the news.

For millions of readers, her name will remain linked to Persepolis, the autobiographical graphic novel set at the beginning of the 2000s. Its publication, between 2000 and 2004, transformed contemporary comics writing and the way the Western public perceives Iran. Her work was not only a publishing success but also a demonstration that comics can address history, politics, and identity with the same force as literature.

Born in 1969 in an educated and progressive family, Satrapi spent her childhood in Tehran during the outbreak of the Islamic revolution in 1979. She was a teenager, and her parents decided to move her to Vienna to escape this repressive atmosphere instaurated by the new regime. After her return to Iran and a failed marriage, in 1994, she moved to France, where she built her artistic career.

Her point of view derives from the experience of exile. Satrapi would often state that she did not want to explain Iran through politics, but she wanted to talk about it through the people of Iran. While international debate was focused on the mullah, the nuclear armies, and religious integralism, she demonstrated a child who used to listen to Western music, fought with her parents, dreamed about her future, and was looking for her own place in the world. In her pages, Iran was described as a society constituted by individuals and not only a geopolitical symbol.

The turning point arrived in France. As a young girl, she did not have a particular passion for comics, and she did not find Tintin, the famous work of Hergé, interesting. In Paris, though, she came in contact with the world of the bande dessinée (the French name of comics), and she was encouraged by other authors to use that language to talk about her own story. Finally, a turning point is the reading of Maus, written by Art Spiegelman, his masterpiece that demonstrated how comics can face complex historical and political themes.

In this way, therefore, Persepolis was created. Published between 2000 and 2004 from the independent publishing house L’Association,the graphic novel conquers the readers and the critics rapidly, becoming one of the most influential graphic novels of the XXI century. Her essential characteristic, rigorously in black and white, contributes to rendering universal a deeply personal story.

The success soon oversteps the French borderlines. The work is translated into various languages and, in 2007, adapted for the cinema by Satrapi herself, working with Vincent Paronnaud. The movie received the Jury Prize at the Festival of Cannes and definitely consolidated the author’s international prestige.

In the years after, Satrapi continued to tell stories in which the personal stories were constantly connected to political insights. Chicken with Plums, published in 2004, is about an existential crisis of the musician Nasser Ali Khan and earned its author the award for Best Album at the prestigious Angoulême International Comics Festival. This was followed by Embroideries and numerous other artistic projects, culminating in her contribution to the collective volume Woman, Life, Freedom, dedicated to the protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in 2022.

Her public engagement, however, was never limited to art. Satrapi became one of the most authoritative voices of the Iranian diaspora and consistently denounced the repression carried out by the regime in Tehran. At the same time, she always rejected simplistic portrayals of her country. She often argued that a dictatorship reveals only what it wants the world to see, and that reducing a people to their rulers amounts to another form of injustice. For this reason, she viewed all forms of ideological simplification with skepticism. Although she was a committed feminist and a strong advocate of secularism, she resisted rigid labels and rejected the role of being Iran’s definitive spokesperson. Following the protests of the Women, Life, Freedom movement, she explained that Iranians living abroad could only serve as “a megaphone” for those who continued to struggle within the country, rather than as the protagonists of their fight.

In 2025, she also declined the French Legion of Honour, denouncing what she saw as France’s hypocritical stance toward Iran at a time when a new wave of repression was unfolding in her homeland.

Her most important legacy, however, remains a cultural one. Marjane Satrapi taught us that no people can be equated with their government, that no woman should be reduced to a symbol, and that no exile should be defined solely by their distance from home. Persepolis continues to be read not only because it tells the story of Iran, but also because it speaks to the universal difficulty of seeing others beyond stereotypes.

Perhaps this is precisely why, more than twenty years later, its publication, her work is still extraordinarily contemporary.

Mondo Internazionale APS - Riproduzione Riservata ® 2026.