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I’m in my car, in a Trader Joe’s parking lot in South Pasadena. On the phone, my friend Monika is telling me about a lost dog in her Salt Lake City neighborhood, a blue heeler who’s been seen limping and has evaded capture.
I scroll through Instagram, passively, as I try to imagine what a blue heeler looks like. Then I see it, a post from a literary organization announcing the death of Marjane Satrapi. She died of a broken heart, the family has said.
Degh kard, is how we would say it in Farsi. More poetic and nuanced.
I am gripped by a forceful and unexpected sadness. I tell Monika the news.
“She wrote Persepolis ,” I say.
Then, I get off the phone and weep.
Ten minutes later, pushing a cart through the store, I am heavy with grief and perplexed by the weight of my own reaction.
She wasn’t someone I knew personally. I wasn’t an avid fan or follower of her work and I hadn’t read or watched Persepolis since its release, two decades ago. Yet, as the day wore on, I sunk into darkness.
This person who took up no space in my life when she lived, had left a deep void in death.
*
I came here, to this country, with my mother. Both of us, refugees from Iran. I was nine. I came with a backpack full of books and a suitcase full of clothes. I brought one Cabbage Patch doll, one stuffed animal, a fox I’d had since birth, passed down to me by my older brother, and a one square foot powder blue quilt that I gripped to my chest each night, since I could remember. I called her azizam. Dear one.
When we came, I was told to not say anything about what had happened in Iran. I could say my father had died. I could make up how he had died. But I could not say, he was imprisoned by the Islamic Regime. I could not say I visited him eleven times in different prisons, including Evin. Or that I touched the tips of his fingers through the holes in the plexi glass that divided us; that I took off my hijab and showed him how long my hair had gotten in the time he’d been imprisoned; that I sat on his lap the last time, and looked out the window, wishing he would walk out into the sun with us. Not knowing that it was the last time.
So I stayed silent. I didn’t talk about it at home because it was too painful. And I didn’t mention anything in school because I entered fourth grade without speaking English.
At the time it wasn’t my dead father that caused my classmates to bully me. It was my unruly curly hair, my emerging breasts (overdeveloped for my age), my inability to speak their language and, finally, the country I was from.
My classmates and their parents couldn’t point to Iran on a map. They couldn’t even pronounce its name. What they knew of Iran was that it was a bad place full of bad people. Their image of my home — the birthplace of human rights, first enshrined by Cyrus the Great 2500 years ago — was informed by a decade of footage on nightly news showing American hostages held at gunpoint, and chador-clad women and bearded men shouting “death to America” with their fists punching the air in opposition to those great American values of “freedom” and ‘equality.”
Worst of all, I arrived the same year that Sally Field portrayed Betty in Not Without My Daughter . My family and I went to the cinema, excited to see our country on the big screen. What was reflected back to us still makes me cringe.
In the film, which was based on a Pulitzer Prize nominated memoir, Betty escapes the clutches of her barbaric Iranian husband (played by Alfred Molina) and courageously smuggles herself and her daughter out of Iran.
Sweet, white, brave, American Betty. My classmates’ mothers loved her.
Those first years were so hard. As I worked to assimilate, I let go of my past. I let go of what had happened to my father. I let go of the war I’d lived through. I forgot the bombs and the sirens. I lost chunks of my language. And my memories of Iran, of its streets and bazaars, faded.
I learned English. I watched 90210 . I bought my clothes at The Gap, I lost my accent, I rolled my eyes at my mother. I started to say I don’t care . I don’t care . I don’t care.
Still, I didn’t fit in. Not with my Iranian family and not with the other kids. This is the painful plight of the child immigrant. The in-betweener who tries and tries to blend in, to be normal, to be cool, to be good, to be liked.
*
By the time Persepolis , Satrapi’s most renowned work, was published, I was attending a small liberal arts university in the Pacific Northwest. On a campus drenched in Gore-Tex, sneakers and carabiners, I was a strange creature, wearing an electric blue wig and outrageously ornate heels to class. I wanted to become a writer, and a filmmaker. Like most everyone else around me, I was on the arduous path of finding myself. But unlike most of my (white, American) friends, I had no role models to reach for, in the culture that had reared me since immigrating.
The things I could not say, Satrapi finally said for me.
There weren’t any Iranian characters on TV shows or films, there weren’t any Iranian women who were famous directors or actors. There weren’t any “great American novels” written by Iranians. The most famous Iranian on TV was Christianne Amanpour. Hoping to inspire me, my uncle would mail me burned DVDs of her newscasts from CNN. But she wasn’t exactly cool. And she wasn’t Iranian like I was. She was middle aged, and half white, born in London to a wealthy family, and educated outside of Iran.
Persepolis was momentous because it was the first time I saw a young Iranian woman and her work, embedded in American pop culture. Satrapi was an artist, a writer and a filmmaker. And, she was undeniably cool, even though she wrote about Iran. Even though she was Iranian! And, all of my American friends, the ones who had never asked me anything about my life in Iran, were raving about Persepolis !
I picked up the two books and read them in one breath. Later I watched the film and told my family about it.
Finally, there we were: the Iranians no one saw, reflected in culture. Satrapi has said that she wrote the book to counter misconceptions about Iran in the west.
“I wanted to give at least one more point of view,” she said. “My own personal one.”
*
I come home from Trader Joe’s and put the groceries away. I trim the gerberas and peonies and arrange them in a vase. I give the dogs their treats. I do all of this in a daze. I am still thinking about Satrapi and the books I read so long ago. I go to my office and search my bookshelves for them, but after so many times moving houses and cities, they are no longer with me.
My spouse notices my gloom and asks if he can do anything.
I consider going to the bookstore to get another copy and then I remember the film.
“I want you to watch Persepolis with me.”
I need to see it for myself again. And I need him to see it, too.
An hour after the news of her death, I am lying on the couch, sobbing as we watch Persepolis and my spouse holds me.
In the film, I see everything that I’ve put away for so many years.
I see a weird little Marjane who is just like the weird little me. Defiant and angry and brave in Iran and in exile. Growing up in the Revolution’s shadow. I watch Marjane and her family running to a bomb shelter, stricken by fear. And I remember that I had done that, too. I see people dying of heart ache and recognize my own parents’ friends dying of that specifically Iranian experience, after the revolution. I see a young man in a wheelchair who has come back from the war and I remember the handsome young soldier I met as a child, who sat on the floor in the corner of a family friend’s house, unable to talk to anyone. I remember the paper rose he handed me, folded from a gum wrapper. I see the secret dorehs (get togethers) that my parents hosted, the illegal wine and moonshine that my dad made in our house. Marjane depicts our terrifying teachers, the violent morality police and our collective and perpetual fear that we might be caught, hurt, arrested, killed. I watch her visit an uncle in Evin prison, just before he is executed. And I say to my spouse, “I was there too, when I was that little. Saying goodbye to my dad.”
I also see her leave Iran and struggle to fit in with her European classmates who can’t understand the pain of what we’ve gone through.
I remember all the things I couldn’t say.
I realize that it wasn’t just that she brought Iran to life in culture, that her books were cool and she became famous, that touched me so deeply. More than that, it is the sense that as long as she lived, there was someone in the world who had felt what I’d felt, seen what I’d seen, been scared and brave in the same ways I had.
The things I could not say, Satrapi finally said for me. And in saying them, aloud, in showing them to the world, she opened the door and gestured for me to follow.
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