Satrapi, Cigarette, and Sex

Marjane Satrapi in New York

Translated from Persian, the archive of Abdee Kalantari

20 October 2006 - Marjane Satrapi’s new book, Chicken with Plums, was published in English in the United States this week. Satrapi is one of the most beloved and bestselling contemporary authors in Europe and America. This week, she came to New York to speak before an audience of admirers.

On a rainy evening in October 2006, Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, one of the bestselling books of recent years on both sides of the Atlantic, arrived in New York to address a gathering of her readers. Satrapi belongs to that category of writer and artist known in the West as a comic artist: someone who tells stories through sequential images, marked by a distinctive visual signature and an unmistakably personal worldview.

Satrapi first rose to international prominence with Persepolis, a graphic memoir recounting her childhood in Tehran during the 1979 Revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq War. The sequel, Persepolis 2, follows her adolescence and university years in Austria. Originally published in French and later translated into English, both books became international bestsellers, bringing their author worldwide recognition and an unusually devoted readership.

Marjane Satrapi:

"I don't believe in so-called 'women's literature' or 'men's literature.' When I was in Canada, a feminist told me that women write with their wombs. I replied that I preferred writing with a pen, which happens to be phallic in shape but is considerably more practical when it comes to putting words on paper.

Like Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute, I believe writing has no gender. I feel a deeper connection to Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary, with all her pathetic flaws, than I do to the writings of Anaïs Nin. Nin's narrator is always adored by men, forever beautiful, fragrant as a flower, endlessly desired, and possessed of a miraculous sex life. I've never met such a woman in real life. Yet Madame Bovary, written by a man, feels far closer to my own experience as a woman."

That was Marjane Satrapi speaking about feminism and the notion of the so-called "female voice" mode of writing.

Satrapi has written several children's books, but the third of her works to appear in English was Embroideries, another graphic narrative. Its subject is the discreet industry of hymen reconstruction among Iranian women eager to ensure that their husbands feel suitably proud and triumphant on the wedding night.

Rendered entirely in black and white, Satrapi's books are often described as memoirs, populated by herself and a sprawling cast of relatives. Yet they are anything but private. They engage directly with politics, culture, and the social imagination. With a humor that is both dry and melancholy, and without resorting to overt judgment, Satrapi examines religious belief, social convention, compulsory veiling, Iranian theocracy, European Catholic dogmatism, the monarchy of the Pahlavi era, and the deprivations of wartime life under a religious state.

She tells these stories through the adventures and misadventures of her own family, a family with aristocratic Qajar roots whose intellectual members often gravitated toward the political left. With the same unsentimental eye, she illuminates class relations under both the monarchy and the Shiite theocracy that replaced it.

The target of Satrapi's visual satire is every form of cultural, religious, and political dogmatism. Yet she attacks these certainties neither with contempt nor with venom. Instead, she relies on distance, estrangement, astonishment, and a kind of persistent disbelief, the perspective of someone standing just outside the scene, unable to comprehend its absurdities.

Why, for instance, in a life-drawing class, should a Muslim instructor insist that a female student keep her eyes fixed on the classroom door rather than look at the nude male model she is supposed to draw? Satrapi recounts such episodes not as scandals but as puzzles. Equally important, she is capable of turning the same detached scrutiny upon herself, exposing her own weaknesses and contradictions with disarming candor.

Dressed in black, listening to heavy metal, and smoking one cigarette after another, Satrapi addressed the audience in her unmistakable French-accented English, speaking about bodily virtue on the one hand and bodily pleasures, cigarettes, food, sex, on the other.

Marjane Satrapi:

"One of the themes of Chicken with Plums is pleasure. Pleasure in every form, from food, the plum stew that Nasser Ali Khan adores, to Sophia Loren's breasts, which haunt his fantasies, to a few puffs of opium or a cigarette.

What interested me was this idea of pleasure, something every dogmatic ideology tries to prohibit. Churches and mosques, when run by frustrated and repressed people, want to deprive you of the pleasures of this world. But your culture here does exactly the same thing.

Mention good food and someone immediately says, 'cholesterol.' Mention cigarettes and they say, 'cancer.' Mention sex and they say, 'AIDS.'

Personally, I have no desire to hand over a perfectly healthy body to the worms. Why should I spend my life behaving like an invalid only to deliver a healthy corpse to the earth? This book is about those pleasures.

And if something that has given me thirty or forty years of joy eventually kills me, let it kill me. I'd rather be destroyed by the love of my life than by a car accident, a terrorist, or George Bush!"

Satrapi's new book tells the story of the final eight days in the life of a man who, in reality, was her mother's uncle. A gifted artist whose great passion is music and the playing of the tar, he suffers a devastating blow when, during a domestic quarrel, his wife smashes his beloved instrument.

Unable to replace it, or perhaps unable to replace what it represents, Nasser Ali Khan decides that he has had enough of life and resolves to die. Through a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, we gradually uncover the reasons behind this decision and witness his struggle against the values and expectations imposed upon him.

With Chicken with Plums, Satrapi once again confronts the moral orthodoxies and rigid certainties that make life intolerable for free-spirited individuals in Iran.

Marjane Satrapi:

"The story begins when a man's tar, his musical instrument, is destroyed by his wife. He can never replace it, no matter how many other instruments he tries. He becomes weary of life and decides to die. The book follows the last eight days of his life.

Eight days may seem brief, but they are packed with his thoughts, memories, and inner life. I wanted that compression to be reflected in the structure of the narrative itself.

I first became interested in the character when my uncle showed me photographs of his own uncle. He was an extraordinarily handsome man. His beauty fascinated me. Had he been ugly, I doubt I would ever have cared about his story."

The audience laughed.

"But I also wanted to write about death, and about an old Sufi tradition, the idea that one may choose the manner and even the timing of one's own death. The notion that a person might decide for himself how to leave the world."

Marjane Satrapi (November 22, 1969 – June 4, 2026)