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The first decade of the third millennium saw a rise in the publication of memoirs by Iranian women living in Europe and North America: more than ten titles, including Funny in Farsi (2003), Journey from the Land of No (2004), and Prisoner of Tehran (2007), appeared between 2000 and 2010. Much has been written about the reasons behind the success of these books, ranging from their literary merit and the allure of “an autobiography penned by an Iranian woman—still a taboo in traditional Iranian society,” to more critical accounts that situate their popularity within a post-9/11 political and cultural climate mixed with some neoconservative and Orientalist attitudes to prepare the public for a “morally necessary” war with Iran under the pretext of saving women. Given the author’s recent passing, it is important to ask: Where does Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis stand among these works?
Reading Persepolis (Again)
My own first encounter with Iranian women’s memoirs in English was with Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, published while I was a second-year student in the English department at the University of Tehran. What began as pride in an Iranian woman’s American bestseller gave way to anger and alienation, not because Nafisi was “airing our dirty laundry,” but because the suffering she described seemed to eclipse everything else. That is why I approached Persepolis with trepidation. By the time Satrapi’s graphic memoir circulated widely in English, a recognizable genre had emerged: Iranian women narrating their suffering under the Islamic Republic and finding, however painfully, some form of freedom in the West. I expected another story in which Iran appeared as a prison, the West as paradise, and the Iranian woman’s body as the privileged site on which civilizational differences were staged. Persepolis was more generous than that. It was more self-aware, more attentive to the hypocrisies of imperial power, and more willing to make room for moments of joy. Its images did not simply ask for pity and its landscape was less flat than Reading Lolita. Satrapi wanted, as she says in the introduction, to resist the idea that “an entire nation should be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists” (ii). She did remind her readers that Iran had histories, that Iranians discussed gender, class, and power, rose against injustice, were abused and betrayed by foreign powers, endured a devastating war, and still danced, drank, loved, lied, rebelled, despaired, and laughed. In the United States especially, where Iran had so often been reduced to hostage crisis, nuclear threat, clerical rule, religious fundamentalism, and women’s oppression, this was no small achievement.
I read Persepolis again after Satrapi’s tragic death in June 2026, and I grieved for her as I do, especially, for anyone who dies away from home. But grief was one thing, and reading Persepolis during the 2026 US war with Iran, under threats of “a whole civilization” dying, “never to be brought back again,” was something else. It was a reminder that the book’s legacy was not merely literary. Persepolis has become one of the main ways Iran is read in American classrooms, book clubs, liberal magazines, and public discourse. The book was popular enough to be banned by the Chicago Public Schools. The event itself inspired another coming-of-age graphic novel, Wake Now in Fire. This all matters now, in a time of another war, because the Iran made available through Persepolis—secular, rebellious, wounded, anti-regime, culturally familiar, and waiting to be free—can too easily become the only Iran that Western readers know how to sympathize with.
Persepolis and the “Real Iran”
A memoir written in the late 1990s about one person’s experience of Iran from the late 1970s to 1994, became, for many readers, a map for understanding Iran. A childhood became a country. A particular secular, left-leaning, upper-middle-class Iranian family became, in the eyes of many readers, the face of the “real Iran.” When the particular is taken to be the universal in this way, the people outside that frame begin to fade. Religious Iranians, poorer Iranians, pro-government Iranians, ambivalent Iranians, Iranians who do not organize their lives around the desire to be legible to the West, even Iranians who do not care about politics, largely disappear. When they do appear, they are often rendered as crowds who have lost the ability to think, as superficial women, or worse, as bearded men and veiled women, as obstacles to the freedom of the “real” Iran. They have bodies and costumes, but rarely interiority. And therefore, they are not allowed to be counted as the “real” Iranians.
These background figures are burdened by the weight of religion and tradition. Religion, as Satrapi understands it, is everywhere in Persepolis: in the veil, the school, the slogans, the war, the murals of martyrs, the moral lectures, the separation of boys and girls, the surveillance of the street, the rhetoric of sacrifice, the punishment of pleasure. It manifests as law, spectacle, coercion, or stupidity. “Good” religion is not entirely absent: young Marji wants to become a prophet to save the poor and the oppressed and talks to a Marx-like God; later, the only “true religious” person in the book is the clergy member in charge of her ideological interview, who rewards her honesty even though she fails to answer his questions. He does not have a face, only a spectral figure drawn wholly in black except for the white lens of his glasses. Religion, people, reduced to pro-government crowds, appear as opportunists, fools, or victims of indoctrination. For the “good” Iranians like Satrapi, participating in anti-veil demonstrations, showing hair, wearing makeup, and following fashion are portrayed as meaningful acts of defiance. By contrast, fighting and dying in the war, or taking pride in being the mother of a martyr are not treated as expressions of agency, but acts committed due to coercion, blind faith, or pure stupidity. What is largely missing is religion as a complex language of everyday life; religion is merely ideology.
No memoir owes us a sociological totality. The problem begins when readers ask one memoir to become the moral and political explanation for an entire nation.
I do not deny the atmosphere of fear and repression in Iran during the 1980s and early 1990s, when the state policed everyday life through street interrogations, intimidation, raids, and pervasive surveillance. I am arguing, rather, that there was much more. Iran did not remain frozen in the period Satrapi depicts. In the decades after her departure, transformations in education, healthcare, class, urban life, and religious practice produced a society quite different from that of the 1980s. There is, of course, much more to be done, but responsibility does not rest solely with the Islamic Republic. Decades of punitive sanctions and hostile policies pursued by a West that presents itself as “free” and “peace-loving” have also helped make basic necessities increasingly unaffordable for ordinary Iranians. But Iran is not the country it was in the 1980s or even 2010s. Its people have changed, and in the process they have also changed the state, however partially and unevenly.
To say this is not to ask Satrapi to have written a different memoir. She wrote about her own life, her own class location, her own wounds, her own family, her own losses. The people she knew were the people she knew. No memoir owes us a sociological totality. The problem begins when readers ask one memoir to become the moral and political explanation for an entire nation. In that transformation, Persepolis is made to do a kind of representative labor that no personal narrative can bear. Why, then, do so many readers imagine that Persepolis allows them to understand Iran?
The Legacy of Persepolis in the West
This question was raised in every political crisis deemed worthy of the Western audience’s attention since the book’s publication. After the 2009 Green Movement, during “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, and now in the shadow of another war, the same figure returns and the same fantasy is sustained: the “good” Iranian as the anti-regime protester whose desires are presumed to mirror liberal Western ideals of freedom. The “real” Iranian hates the veil, is secular, anti-clerical, culturally modern, and politically trapped. Others may exist, but they do not count as “the people.” They are regime supporters, dupes, fanatics, beneficiaries, cowards, or obstacles to freedom.
This is where the legacy of Persepolis becomes dangerous; not because Satrapi advocated war or consciously placed her work in the service of warmongering. Nor is the book unaware of imperial desires, class inequality, oil politics, and Western hypocrisy. Yet its moral landscape remains structured by a series of familiar binaries: freedom/oppression, modern/traditional, secularism/religion. One side is associated with agency and moral courage; the other, with coercion, credulity, and corruption. A graphic memoir may not be expected to question categories, but it can present them beyond the familiar fixed frame.
A related problem lies in reception. Even when writers from the “Third World,” working in metropolitan languages and publishing markets, portray complexity, their work is often absorbed into an inherited colonial and Orientalist way of seeing. The binaries through which this perspective operates do more than just describe difference: historically, they have ranked societies according to their presumed proximity to Western values and cast intervention as a civilizing or humanitarian act. The non-Western society thus becomes an object whose problem can be readily diagnosed by the self-designated modern and benevolent West, which also presumes itself uniquely capable of providing the cure. In this case, Iran is good; the Islamic Republic is evil; the people are imprisoned by the regime; therefore, any attack on the regime can be imagined as an act on behalf of the people and for their liberation.
What remains, then, after Persepolis? Not another demand for a better representative, another memoir, another woman who will explain Iran correctly. What remains is the refusal to let any single story (however moving, however brilliant, however beloved) stand in for a whole people. In a time of another war, Iranians do not have to be secular, unveiled, anti-regime, Western-facing, or narratively useful to be grievable. The urgent task is not to read Iran better, but to stop believing that reading a memoir amounts to intellectual mastery, that sympathy is knowledge, and that recognition means saving a people from its government, its religion, or itself.
There is, of course, much more left to be said about Satrapi, her art, her wit and irony, and her other works that never received the attention accorded to Persepolis, including Chicken with Plums or her movie about Marie Curie, Radioactive. She was much more than Persepolis. The memoir ends with Marjane’s mother’s parting words: “This time you’re leaving for good. You are a free woman. The Iran of today is not for you. I forbid you to come back.” And she obeyed. Marjane Satrapi passed away on June 4, 2026 in Paris.
!خدایش بیامرزاد
