Comic book author Marjane Satrapi died last week in Paris at the age of 56, shortly before conflict between Israel and her native Iran flared up again. While her work has enjoyed enduring fame, the current conflict has made it more relevant than ever.
Satrapi’s work is unique in the way it interweaves her personal story with the history and politics of Iran. In her comic and movie Persepolisfor example, there is a scene where Iranian officer Reza Khan deposes Shah Qajar after World War I, seeking to establish a secular republic. The British, who had installed monarchies in Iraq and Jordan, encouraged him to be proclaimed Shah in 1925. This gave rise to the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran, which would in turn be overthrown during the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The Satrap characters inhabit these historical moments. They are influenced by them and their lives are defined by their results. Her stories are built on a deep understanding of Iranian resentment of foreign interference, told through a bold, monochrome comic format. But not always everyone liked it.
Polarized opinions
Her comic Persepolis in particular is not without controversy. The critics claim to contain historical inaccuracies, but this expectation of total accuracy is a common misconception of the Satrap. She was not a historian. She was an author based on her life experiences inside and outside of Iran.
I have first-hand experience of the controversy her work can cause. When I was teaching Iranian history at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2007, I assigned Persepolis. Students affiliated with the campus communist party protested that I had assigned the comic. They argued that, because much of Persepolis highlights religious oppression under the Islamic Republic, I had included it to covertly argue for regime change.
This was not the case. I assigned it for the reasons a teacher assigns any text: because it was relevant to the subject, artistically worthwhile, and I knew it inside out.
But it didn’t matter. The protests outside my classroom lasted to the point where I was forced to resign and leave the country.
Personal, political, historical
Persepolis begins with the revolution, when Marjane’s father, Ebi, tells his daughter why they took to the streets to fight: “2,500 years of tyranny and subjugation. First our emperors. Then the Arab invasion from the west. Followed by the Mongol invasion from the East. And finally modern imperialism.”
By “modern imperialism,” he refers not only to British support for the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, but also to a litany of foreign interventions in Iran, of which it was the beginning. After bringing the Shah to power, the British deposed him during World War II due to his pro-German leanings, replacing him with his young son, Mohammad Reza. After an internal coup led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, MI6 and the CIA reinstalled Mohammad Reza.
Since then, the US provided the newly restored shah with all kinds of weapons to counter the neighboring Soviets during the Cold War. Those included F-14the most advanced American fighter jets at the time. American military advisers and soldiers were present on Iranian soil, further contributing to the nationalist sentiment that led to the 1979 revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy.
Like the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution led to the overthrow of a monarch. But just as it took time, effort and violence for the Bolsheviks to take and keep power, the road to power for Khomeini’s Islamic republicans – and for the Iranian people – was not smooth.
Persepolis tells us what it was like to come of age during this period, when Khomeini’s faction consolidated power as a result of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980. The resulting war led to a resurgence of Iranian nationalism and support for the republic.
‘Hey Iran’
During the first years of the Iran-Iraq War, Marjane remembers hearing the song “Hey Iran” on Iranian state radio, to accompany the news that Iran’s fleet of F-14s had raided Iraq in retaliation for the bombing of Tehran and other locations.
But the song was not the anthem of either the monarchy or the Islamic Republic of 1979. Its origins date back to World War II, when American troops entered Iran, joining British and Soviet forces that had occupied the country to prevent it from falling to the Germans.
The presence of so many foreign troops on Iranian soil led to a nationalist reaction among Iranians. “Ey Iran” was written by poet Hossein Gol-e-Golab after he saw an American soldier beating an Iranian greenback. Its opening lines are:
O Iran, O land of jewels
Oh, your soil is the fountain of arts
Far be evil thoughts from you
May you be eternal and eternal
O enemy, if you are made of stone, I am made of iron
May my life be sacrificed for my pure motherland
Of Iran’s fleet of 79 F-14s, one was flown by the father of Marjane’s schoolmate, who died in the attack, fulfilling the last line of the song played on the radio to celebrate the raid.
It does not shy away from the complex and awkward spot the twentieth century left on the Iranian people. She describes how her father – a leftist who initially called for the overthrow of the Shah only to end up angrily forming the Islamic Republic – would shed tears when he heard the song.
To this day, every Iranian student of mine who hears the song is moved to tears. If an encounter with an American soldier during World War II created such a lasting artistic legacy, we can only wonder what the outcome of America’s latest war with Iran will be.
While the ubiquitous words and melody of “Ey Iran” emerged from the upheavals of the 1940s, Perspolis was a product of the 1980 invasion and the early days of the Islamic Republic. Satrap’s unique and irreplaceable talent lay in synthesizing so many pieces of her lived experience – the occupation, the many regime changes, the songs, the stories, the wars – and capturing them in black and white.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an adjunct professor, IE School of Humanities, IE University; California State University San Marcos.
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
