I was sorry to hear of the death of Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian artist, author and filmmaker. In my twenties I loved the Persepolis graphic novels that illustrated her coming of age under a repressive regime.
I have also never forgotten her Guardian interview in 2008:
We meet in London. She can’t stand Britain because of the smoking ban. She suggests that we talk in her hotel room because at least she will be able to smoke there. She lives for her cigs, and is quite happy to die for them, she says. ‘For me smoking is like looking at your soul,’ she says in a rasping hybrid accent. […] She has no truck with the kill-joys who want to stop us doing all the things that we enjoy – simply because it might prolong our life. ‘Anything that has a relationship with pleasure we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about Aids; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It’s a very sick society that rejects pleasure.’
The right to smoke in public buildings is a trivial issue, particularly compared to Satrapi’s subject matter in Persepolis, growing up under a regime that made Gilead look like Disneyland. But it’s not nothing and I loved that interview because it revealed her as a genuine freethinker. Not many of those these days.
Satrapi escaped Iran and published Persepolis in 2000. The Iranian regime carried on as a modern-day theocracy, pretty much the same as it was portrayed in her books. Every now and again, there’d be some brief hopeful eruption. People would take to the streets, women tore off their hijabs, city crowds demonstrated for freedom. And then the regime would start killing people in the street. The regime arrested and tortured and executed. Then things would quiet down. The odd name is still remembered – Neda Soltan, Mahsa Amini – but otherwise it was as if the protests had never happened.
This time there were demonstrations everywhere, not only in the liberal cities but more conservative rural towns. Everyone on the streets in the early days of 2026 knew exactly what the risks were. The regime duly massacred thousands of protestors. In the time period of January 8-9 it is said to have killed as many as 40,000 people. Again, the world watched this with folded arms. It wasn’t our war, even though the Islamic Republic is very much a global facing regime with spies and terrorists operating all over Europe. British Iranians complained that journalists weren’t covering the story. It’s hard for journalists to work in hostile countries, but I saw their point. Some Iranian Londoners, protesting against the regime, were met with far left thugs waving Khameini flags.
In retrospect it seems crazy to hope Trump’s war would remove the Islamic Republic. It was great to see senior regime leaders and military targets being totalled by American bombers. But the regime couldn’t be destroyed just with an air war, under a morally and cognitively compromised Commander-in-Chief. All too soon everything got tangled up in the strait of Hormuz. And that’s when the rest of the world finally began to pay attention. These days when you see news of Iran, it is focused on the strait – whether it’s open or closed, the price of a barrel of oil, the implications for pump prices and holidays. In a dark way it’s fascinating how completely the market has captured our thinking on Iran. The slogan ‘no blood for oil’ has never seemed more apt. The Iran war is treated as a kind of global Brexit with everyone yearning for the status quo. The status quo of Iranians, generation after generation, living and dying under this regime. Neoliberalism at its worst. Human rights have left the building.
We have come quite a way from the art of Marjane Satrapi, and I would also recommended this tribute by Siyavash Shahabi, fortunate to know Satrapi in life. I am just sorry that the regime didn’t fall before Satrapi died. I hope that one day the Islamic Republic does fall and its remaining leaders are held accountable for their crimes.
I hope it’ll be one day soon.
Max Dunbar 