Children Of The Revolution

I can hear Marjane Satrapi’s loud smoky bark a good five minutes before I can see her. Jollied along by a fierce intellect and gargantuan personality, her voice carries far beyond the Waterloo bar where we meet, spilling out into the streets where it may, on its own accord, be instructing passing tourists to get the hell out of the way. One is tempted to attribute her aural gravitas to a sense of entitlement. She is, after all, a princess, a great-granddaughter of Nasser-al-Din Shah, Shah of Persia from 1848 until 1896.

“Oh that,” she waves dismissively. “The kings of the Qajar dynasty had hundreds of wives and thousands of kids. Do the multiplication and you have ten or fifteen thousand princes and princesses. There’s nothing too special about that.”
Fans of Persepolis, her thrilling autobiographical account of growing up during Iran’s Islamic Revolution, will already know that Marjane Satrapi is far better than some dumb old princess.
At 38, she is immediately recognisable as the impossibly precocious, cocksure little ragamuffin of that graphic novel. Today she’s mouthing off about London’s smoking laws. She’s even thinking about leaving Paris, her home for the past decade, when the non-fumeur legislation hits.
“I agree that not every place should be for smoking,” she says. “But I don’t like all these regulations against anything that’s pleasurable. How is it different from prohibition? I’m a fucking grown up. Leave me alone. It’s typical of the way the West do things, always focusing on small details and personal pleasures so they never have to think about the real misery and poverty of the world.”
Persepolis belongs to a cerebral sub-genre of graphic fiction that includes David B.’s Epileptic and Art Speigelman’s Maus. Combining the acute autobiography of the former and the epic political dimension of the latter, Marjane’s memoir has bust out of its expected demographic and into the mainstream, where it has featured on bestseller lists for months at a time.
“I still think it’s funny,” she says. “I was hoping a couple of hundred people would take pity on this starving Iranian artist and maybe buy the book.”
Radicalised by her Marxist-anarchist uncle at an early age, the older Marjane still seems to think in dialectics. She is opposed to the imposition of the hijab yet sees France’s recent attempts to ban the veil as equally appalling. She is unhappy with the political situation in Iran where her parents still live, though she is equally displeased with how that country is represented by the wider world.
“The world is complex,” she sighs. “In my book I show the mullah who waved me through the ideological test. So I can never say ‘All the mullahs are bad.’ When I visit the US I am supposed to be the axis of evil and they are supposed to be the Great Satan. Ha! It says a lot about George Bush that he uses the exact same language as a fanatic, theocratic regime.”
No book has done more to banish our notion of compliant veiled Iranian women than Marjane’s beautifully illustrated account of growing up during the fraught years between the Shah’s murderous régime and the equally restrictive administration headed by Ayatollah Khomeini.
The young Marjane is the model rebellious teen. Fearful that her tastes for Iron Maiden and prog-rocksters Camel will bring her to the attention of the mullahs, her parents send her to stay with friends in Europe. She does not adjust well to Catholic school where the nuns call Iranians stupid. A spectacular row led her onto the streets of Vienna. For four years, unbeknownst to her parents, she was homeless, selling drugs, doing whatever it took to survive.
“Oh well,” she says cheerily. “You have to laugh.”

Persepolis is released April 25