The Four Color Media Monitor

The UK Guardian says the author of Persepolis, following recent disturbing news in Iran of new oppression against women, has taken to illustrating again:

When Marjane Satrapi began drawing again, depicting the violence recently enacted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, she was so disturbed that she felt physical pain. “I get finger cramps when I have to draw them,” she shudders.

It is 24 years since Satrapi’s bestselling comic-book masterpiece, Persepolis, transformed western readers’ image of Iran. Her graphic memoir was told through the eyes of a cheeky, outspoken young girl growing up during and after the 1979 Islamic revolution, buying Kim Wilde cassettes on the black market, and trying to make sense of arrests, torture, the “morality police” and the carnage of the Iran-Iraq war, before being brutally uprooted to Europe, alone, aged 14, because her parents felt she would be safer there. [...]

Now, Satrapi has – exceptionally – returned to her drawing board to tell a story she feels is so important that only the comic-book narrative will work. Woman, Life, Freedom, coordinated by Satrapi, is a collective book by 17 Iranian and international comic-book artists, working with Iranian academics and researchers. They have come together to tell the story of how the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman detained for allegedly not properly wearing the Islamic headscarf in 2022, has led to the largest wave of popular unrest in recent years in Iran. The Iranian authorities’ insistence that Amini died from natural causes, amid her family’s allegations that she was beaten, sparked protests against the clerical establishment that have grown into a broad movement to challenge the theocracy that has ruled Iran since 1979.

From images of crowds chanting the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”, to women removing their mandatory headscarves, and of the regime’s brutal crackdown and the young Iranian men who have been executed after taking part in the protests, the book honours the dead and depicts a young generation’s protest, its deep-rooted desire for freedom and equality.

“I call it a revolution,” Satrapi says. “It’s not a revolt, it’s not a movement, it’s a proper revolution. I’ve said it many times and nobody says the contrary: I think it’s the first really feminist revolution … and it is supported by men.”

Satrapi's doing the right thing. Iran's Islamic regime has surpassed Saudi Arabia's today in terms of an oppressive dictatorship against women, and in terrorist financing. She has an interesting point: in a way, it's a feminist revolution, but of the kind left-wing feminists in the west will not give their backing to, based on how they sold out to the Religion of Peace long before, and still are. Exactly why, tragically enough, no chance they'll support her new GN project, and for all we know, they likely didn't support Persepolis back in the day either.

So let's wish Satrapi good luck with her new comic project. She'll need lots of it.

Labels: Europe and Asia, good artists, history, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, politics, terrorism, violence