Can We Forgive Our Artists?

There is no glorification of the West in the text. Maybe of a certain band, or of Marie Curie … but of the countries? Not at all. 

During her years in Austria—governed at the time by Kurt Waldheim, a former SS officer, whom she mentions—Satrapi depicts how she was subjected to overt and subtle racism, treated like garbage by men, cheated on, abused, robbed. At one point, she was even kicked out of her rooming house. She lived on the street, coughing blood, until she encountered a woman who owed her mother money. After collecting the debt, she purchased the ticket for a flight back to Iran.

Satrapi died heartbroken, grieving for the white Swedish man who was her partner and best friend. But in “Persepolis,” she tells the story of how, upon returning to her country, she married a fellow Iranian. He fought in the war against Iraq, which was a U.S. ally at the time. They enrolled in art school together. They had a life together. And she doesn’t depict him in the stereotypical manner in which men from the East are often portrayed; she doesn’t show him as abusive or conservative or cruel. They married too fast. They parted decently. 

She returns to Europe to live for the rest of her life, but the circumstances are complex … and, if you haven’t read “Persepolis,” I’ll stop here so that I don’t spoil things more than I already may have. 

Still, there are problems in “Persepolis.” 

For young Marjane, the veil is an imposition, and the women who choose to wear it—either covering part or all of their hair—are given no voice. As “Persepolis” was included in many curricula in Europe and North America—popping up in classrooms from Ontario to Illinois—this must have hurt and ostracized many young students who chose to wear hijab, who were suddenly depicted as either “oppressed,” like Satrapi and her childhood friends, or as the fanatical female members of the morality police. In the text, there is no middle ground for the veil, which has a cultural value just as much as a religious one and countless different meanings. 

When I taught “Persepolis” once in a Peruvian school—where none of the girls wore hijab—I had to first explain what the veil means in Islam, under what contexts it is worn, and that the woman who wrote the book isn’t careful or measured (likely because it was mandated by the regime, and her mother was harassed in the street on multiple occasions for refusing to wear it). That’s what the teaching of literature entails: context. 

Beyond the book, there are problems with the statements made by Satrapi. 

In a 2005 interview, she was vehemently against American interventionism. She even went as far as declaring, “If the United States of America attacked my country, no matter what, I would be against the United States.” But in subsequent years, she praised the genocidal Israeli society and fearmongered about Palestinians and Iranians. In short, she sounded very much like a hysterical Western liberal, without a word to spare about genocide or imperialism. 

But I remember in “Persepolis” how young Satrapi’s father tells her that Egyptian dictator Anwar Sadat and the kleptocratic Shah betrayed their countries and the Palestinians by “making a pact with Israel.” And I remember her describing the American- and British-backed coup against Mossadegh. I remember her leftist parents, her beloved characters, protesting the Shah. Her favorite uncle, a communist, was jailed and exiled by the Shah. But, as Satrapi belts back at her pro-government teacher, “It was the Islamic regime that ordered his execution.”

I don’t know what was in her heart. I am appalled by some of the things she said during interviews, and I’m troubled by the things she forgot to mention in her work. But unlike unreadable propaganda art that was churned out in the early 2000s—like “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” dedicated to Paul Wolfowitz, whom I consider a war criminal—“Persepolis” was, and remains, a masterpiece. It is not a story about how the Iranian government is evil. It is, simply, a young girl’s story, the same story that my mother could tell you about the years growing up in Peru under Juan Velasco Alvarado’s military government; the same picture that Reinaldo Arenas painted of a collapsing Cuban state; the same memories you find in James Baldwin’s essays and Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, of being robbed and being exiled. 

The graphic novel isn’t meant to be an all-encompassing document; it is a perspective, a work of art, the practice of autofiction and memoir. The colorless world is an aesthetic choice. It shows the dreariness that can cloud our hearts, that cloaks our lack of belonging. 

“Persepolis” is a story about placelessness and yearning—for more freedom to go out; for the ability to buy albums, clothes, and videotapes that are banned; for the experience of being loved dearly. And it will resonate with me always, no matter the cruel things the creator may have said or the important things she may have omitted. 

Should we really expect the people who entertain us to have greater moral clarity than those who govern us?

Should we really expect the people who entertain us to have greater moral clarity than those who govern us? Why do we place so much importance on people who, by definition, are supposed to be outside the systems that inflict violence? 

In the case of “Persepolis,” is it the publishing houses in Paris, London, and New York that have deliberately pushed aside other tales about modern Iran? Could it be, instead, the fault of libraries, school boards, and bookstores for having pushed only a single narrative about the country? Or perhaps nobody pushed anything. Maybe it was all that was available. Acquisitions editors are often just copying each other, trying to follow the market. 

Also, doesn’t an artist have the right to despise their rulers freely? Even if those rulers are on the correct side of a geopolitical battle? 

The virtue(lessness) of art 

When you read “Dreams from My Father”—which grapples with a 30-something-year-old Barack Obama’s wounds and joys—you wouldn’t think that, a couple of decades later, the same person would be hungry for money and power. You wouldn’t believe that someone who could write so beautifully could then stick his name on the shitty political books that followed. There is nothing that links the author of that memoir with the politician-celebrity. They are different people; they exist in different worlds. 

When we hear about an athlete or musician engaged in gambling, domestic abuse, or drinking and driving, we barely notice. For some reason, we don’t see those artforms as being innate to goodness. There is a persistent snobbery in our societies when it comes to painters, actors, composers, and writers. There is the assumption, for instance, that a woman who holds a Nobel Prize in literature (Alice Munro) wouldn’t be capable of letting her husband sexually abuse her daughter. 

Some of the most famous Jewish American composers who championed civil rights were arch-Zionists, incapable of seeing Palestinians as human beings. Great dramatists, such as Harold Pinter, and pioneering novelists, such as Carlos Fuentes, spoke out fiercely in public statements against Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush. But in their private lives, they were unfaithful men, who abandoned their families with a coldness that you don’t find even in their plays and novels. 

The struggle to be moral isn’t consistent in all parts of our lives. And our crafts, our talents, our passions—these are not necessarily related to how we act. The Nazis had fantastic libraries. Hitler was a painter before he was a politician. While carrying out a campaign of mass rape and enforced disappearances in Argentina, Gen. Jorge Videla sought the blessing of Jorge Bergoglio, a provincial superior of the Society of Jesus (now remembered as Pope Francis). After providing solace to millions of people through his lectures and books on compassion, the Dalai Lama was caught engaging in a sickening act with a small boy.

The power(lessness) of a boycott 

In 2024, I withdrew my novel from consideration for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, due to the prize committee and sponsors’ ties to Elbit Systems and Israeli settlements. I’m also part of a long list of writers who boycott interaction with The New York Times due to the outlet’s support for the Gaza genocide. 

But there are many authors whose work I love and who are not on those lists. And there are many frivolous authors whose work I loathe who are near the top of all those lists. You even have famous writers, such as Zadie Smith, who, just a couple of years before adding her name to the boycott of the apartheid state of Israel, clumsily smeared student protesters for Palestine in the pages of The New Yorker. Conveniently, she added her name when the tide turned. 

Opportunists don’t care about Palestinian writers and literature students being blown up; they care about their money, and they will virtue-signal whenever possible to draw attention to their books. 

There are, on the other hand, great artists—such as Ai Weiwei, actors Javier Bardem and Brian Cox, writer Annie Ernaux, cultural critic Pankaj Mishra, and so on—who are never disappointing. They bewitch us on the screen, on the page, on the canvas, and they make us feel proud in real life; they verbalize what we feel. But this is very rare indeed.