Adieu, Marji: How Persepolis graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi drew Iran’s untold story in black and white

“One can forgive but one should never forget,” wrote Iranian-born French graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi in the introduction to her acclaimed graphic memoir, Persepolis (the Greek name for Persia).

Satrapi, a vocal witness to what Iran was, what it became, and what its people still dared to hope for, remained a champion of Iran’s people throughout her life. She died in Paris on June 4. She was just 56. “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” the family’s statement to the AFP read. Ripa, a Swedish producer and screenwriter, passed away on April 8, 2025. The couple had been together for three decades.

“An entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists,” she wrote, referring to Iran, a country she believed had been shrunk in Western imagination to “fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism.”

Childhood during the Islamic Revolution

A scene from Persepolis depicting a protest turned violent, as black-clad enforcers demand women wear the veil. The young Marji watches her father attacked, witnessing political violence for the first time. (Credit:Marjane Satrapi / Persepolis / Pantheon Books)

Satrapi was born in Rasht in 1969 and raised in Tehran by leftist intellectuals who marched against the Shah only to watch the 1979 revolution devour its children. She was 10 when the Islamic Republic imposed the veil, closed the universities, and executed political prisoners, among them her own uncle.

The protagonist, a young Marji enamoured of Western heavy metal and rock bands, was exactly the kind of girl the new order wished to erase. Amid an escalating Iran-Iraq war and growing fundamentalism, her parents sent her alone to Vienna to study in 1984. When she returned to Tehran, she found it too suffocating.

When the four volumes of Persepolis appeared between 2000 and 2003, they were vastly different from the violent headlines and documentaries on the veil and religious leaders that had carved the image of Iran in popular Western imagination. Her graphic memoir, which uses black ink and negative space, followed the socio-political changes that defined the Iran of the 20th century through the eyes of a complicated young girl who argues with God on the sofa, buys cassettes on the black market and gets Kim Wilde and Iron Maiden posters, but also watches her friend’s father disappear into Evin prison.

In 2007, Satrapi co-directed an animated film adaptation with Vincent Paronnaud that shared the Jury Prize at Cannes and earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, the first woman ever to receive one. Accepting the Cannes prize, she dedicated it to all Iranians.

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Her 2003, graphic novel Embroideries gathered Iranian women around a samovar to trade stories about the indignities of living inside a theocracy, while her 2004 graphic novel Chicken with Plums told the story of her great-uncle, a musician who willed his own death after his tar was destroyed. Both graphic novels were adapted into films, as were The Voices and her biopic of Marie Curie, Radioactive.

Her final graphic work, Woman, Life, Freedom (2024), was created with a collective of activists and artists after Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police, having been arrested for wearing her hijab improperly.

“Bloody Friday in Zahedan”, a double-page spread depicting the September 2022 massacre in which snipers fired into a crowd of protesters, killing 66 people including children, in the deadliest single episode of the uprising that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody. (Credit: Marjane Satrapi/Seven Stories Press)

Refused Légion d’honneur

Satrapi, who became a French citizen in 2006 after moving to the country in 1994, famously refused the Légion d’honneur, the highest and most prestigious French national order of merit, over French visa policies that kept Iranian dissidents from entering the country.

Her graphic novels are immensely popular as she presents her protagonist as “a positive and successful heroine,” write scholars Chris Reyns-Chikuma and Houssem Ben Lazreg in Arab Studies Quarterly, adding that she gives Middle Easterners context, historically and politically in her story and outside.

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Cannes Chief Thierry Frémaux called her “an extraordinary artist and a likeable woman who embodied the joy of creation and the sadness of exile and painful memories.”

Satrapi made the graphic novel a serious art form, and a testament to the Iranian diaspora’s refusal to be silenced.