π§Listen Now
By Can ΓztaΕ
Marjane Satrapi's family said she died of sadness brought on by a profound sense of loss. It is difficult to think of Satrapi without the vocabulary of loss. What she drew, again and again, was loss, the loss of childhood, country, language and return. In the end, according to those closest to her, another loss, the love of her life, silenced her.
The clinical name for a severe shock to a heart is broken heart syndrome, a state in which grief can mimic a heart attack. We do not know whether this was Satrapi's case. What we know is perhaps more devastating. Her family did not reach for the language of illness. They reached for the oldest word grief has: Sadness.
The word sadness cuts deeper since Satrapi had already taught many of us to read politics through loss. Persepolis was never simply a book about Iran, nor merely a book about revolution, exile or the veil. It was the story of a child discovering that politics had entered the house before she could understand what politics was. It came through school rules, forbidden music, frightened adults and suitcases packed too early.
IRAN AT EYE LEVEL
For most readers, Iran is already packaged β war, nuclear files, the morality police β the tired vocabulary of the strategic analyst who has never sat in a Tehran kitchen. Satrapi drew a country without letting it become a headline, a regime or a foreign policy problem. She drew Iran at eye level, from within, from the child's eye. She gave it back to the family room and the dinner table, to the people who experienced it.
Her story was in black and white, and that made evasion harder. Faces, rooms, cigarettes, laughter and fear, all rendered without color and somehow more vivid for it.
In this, she belongs to a wider family of drawn memory. We might think of Art Spiegelman's Maus, Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia's Marzi, Romain Dutter's Goodbye Ceausescu, or Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir. These works do not describe comparable events, nor should they be forced into a competition of suffering. They understand that catastrophe becomes legible only through the small human frame, a child, a kitchen, a silence.
Persepolis reminded us that politics is not only what governments declare, what armies do, what courts approve or what experts explain. Politics is also what enters a child's bedroom, what changes a mother's voice, what makes a father pause before he answers.
In Turkey, we know too well how politics enters the home. It arrives through schoolbooks, television screens, court decisions and womenβs clothing. Here the authorities have always taken a close interest in what a woman wears, what a child is taught and, of late, who is permitted to win an election. Turkish readers do not need to imagine another country in order to understand Persepolis. They need only to remember how public power changes private life.
CHILDREN AROUND US
The future black-and-white stories of Turkey may already have their authors, who are children now. A Syrian refugee child may draw the word temporary, the one stamped on a life she has lived here for as long as she can remember, and a homeland she is told to return to and has never seen. A Kurdish child may draw a family album through what is missing from it, the emptied village, the road to prison, the language lowered indoors. A girl may draw the day she understood that her body was no longer entirely hers, that her hair, her clothes, even her laughter had become public questions, a national argument she was not part of, settled before her childhood had ended.
Satrapi did not turn the child into a symbol. That is what politics so often does with children. It makes them symbols of innocence, suffering, nation or future and then forgets them as real people. Satrapi let the child stay a child, difficult, funny, vain, frightened and loving, in other words, human.
To remember Satrapi, then, is not only to mourn the author of Persepolis. It is to keep faith with the form she gave us. A form that distrusts official language. A form that knows history does not happen only in palaces, parliaments and war rooms, but also at school, in kitchens and at airport gates.
The question she leaves behind is simple and uneasy. Who will draw the children now living through the histories around us? Who will draw them before they are turned into statistics, slogans or footnotes? One day, perhaps, someone will. And if we are lucky, or honest enough to deserve it, we will recognize those children before history has finished with them.
