When Marjane Satrapi, the author of the best-selling graphic memoir, Persepolis, was six years old, she believed she had been chosen by God to be the next prophet. In several of the panels from her illustrated memoir, she shows God embracing her. He calls her his “celestial light” and his “last and best choice.”
Though young Satrapi believes she has been chosen by God, her schoolmates laugh when she calls herself a prophet, and the teacher is so disturbed by her pronouncement that she schedules a parent conference. Satrapi’s parents defend her, but, later, they do express curiosity about her unusual ambitions. She lies to her mother and father, reassuring them that when she grows up that she wants to be a doctor .
But, then, she explains to God, with some embarrassment, that she still wants to be a prophet, and that her parents “mustn’t know.” Later, when Satrapi’s beloved Uncle Anoosh is imprisoned and then murdered for his pro-Communist, anti-Islamic beliefs, Satrapi banishes God from her life—but not before envisioning a strangely deific Karl Marx in His stead.
These pages from Satrapi’s work have been on my mind since it was reported that Satrapi died on June 3, 2026. Because I am 59, and Satrapi was 56, it certainly feels as if she was taken too young. Family members told the press that she died of “broken heart syndrome,” referring to the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and artistic collaborator of 31-years, in April of last year. Shortly after his death Satrapi posted on Instagram, “For I lost the love of my life.” More recently, she told a friend: “I am done fighting. I want to leave.”
Satrapi’s death is deeply personal—a phenomenon that we, as her acolytes, and not her intimates—might never fully understand. Instead, it might be easier to make sense of Satrapi’s extraordinary life’s work, beginning with her graphic memoir, Persepolis. During the Spring semester of 2026, in the English department at Carnegie Mellon University, I and my colleague Ed Simon (founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books), included Satrapi on the syllabus for our class on Banned Books and Authoritarianism.
Because the theme of our class was authoritarianism, we included Persepolis to help our students think about theocracy—a system of government in which the rulers are chosen, anointed, or guided by a belief in a particular interpretation of religion, and where clerical laws are made indistinguishable from civic ones. When Satrapi was 10 years old in 1979 the Iranian revolution toppled the US-backed Shah of Iran, and installed a government ruled by an Ayatollah.
The choice of Persepolis was portentous. We chose Persepolis before the United States launched its war on Iran, but missiles were already being fired at Tehran within days of starting the book. Then, on February 28th, US fighter jets struck an all-girls elementary school in Minab, Iran, with Tomahawk missiles, killing 120 school girls and 36 adults, an obvious and unequivocal war crime. US fighter jets hit the civilian target in part because Trump eliminated 90% of the Pentagon staff dedicated to “civilian casualty mitigation”—the people who double check military targets in order to safeguard against this kind of horrific error. Chillingly, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who without Congressional approval illegally refers to himself as the head of the “Department of War”) suggested that the bombing was the result of an AI error. Regardless of the reason, the attack on the girls’ school is the worst US-led civilian casualty event since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The attack on the girls’ school relates to Persepolis because the graphic memoir contains multiple illustrations of the all-girl’s elementary school Satrapi attended after the revolution. Persepolis demonstrateswhat it was like for her and her friends to have to wear the hijab. For Ed, myself, and our students, it was easy to picture Satrapi and her friends as very similar to the victims of the 2026 attack. A viral photograph of the tiny graves that were being dug for the Minab bombing victims looked a bit like the black and white comic style of Satrapi herself.
Our students easily connected the dots. As Amanda Barajas, a CMU sophomore, noted, the specter of mass death haunts Persepolis:
I found it interesting that the panels which included documentary illustrations of the war were often drawn with multiple figures, each individually rendered. For example, the top of page 96 shows Satrapi with several of her classmates, all wearing black hijabs. This imagery reminded me of the top panel on page 40, which featured an array of faces from the Black Friday Massacre. Both of these panels feature a large group of people, but what’s striking is how each person is drawn in the same amount of detail. I believe that this was an intentional choice, because it draws attention to all the individual lives affected by war. These panels also highlight the omnipresence of death for Satrapi and her peers under an emerging theocratic regime.
Another CMU sophomore, Carolyn Chakiris, was grateful to Satrapi for portraying war through the eyes of a child.
Something Persepolis did for me…was to place me into the civilian life of war. While I am blessed to never have experienced war close to home, it is a crucial form of experience for people to understand. Persepolis humanized Iranians and highlighted the terror, fear, and uncertainty of living during war time.
As the semester concluded, Ed and I found that our students were understandably anxious about the growing threat of autocracy, and even theocracy, in the United States. Then, in the first week of June, the Pentagon radically narrowed the number of religions that the military would officially recognize, in an affront to both the religious freedom and religious diversity that has marked America from our founding. And, as has been widely reported, Douglas Wilson, a Christian nationalist minister who has great influence over Hegseth, believes that women should not be allowed to vote, and that LGBTQ+ Americans should be behind bars.
The precipitous rise in book banning—the very subject of our course—is another marker of our country’s march toward authoritarianism. And, while American protestors are not currently being gunned down en masse by the US government, Renee Good and Alex Pretty – two civilian, non-violent protestors – were killed by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis at the start of this year. In US detention centers at least fifty migrant prisoners have died since Trump took office. Corruption is rampant. Journalists and government critics are being fired, silenced and prosecuted. The US government is becoming the tyrannical regime that Satrapi warned us about.
Satrapi and many of her family members survived Islamic theocracy. Lucky enough to have attended boarding school in Vienna, as a young adult Satrapi became a citizen of France. After publishing Persepolis in 2003 to great acclaim, she continued to write, draw, and speak out, and she also became a film maker. Her last film was Radioactive (2019), about the life of Marie Curie. In 2024 she edited Woman, Life, Freedom, a collection of graphic essays and stories in response to the Iranian government’s murder of Mahsa Amini, a woman accused of improperly wearing her hijab in 2022. Though Satrapi battled depression throughout her life, she could be hopeful, too. “I’ll always hope that a miracle could descend on us. My intellect sees no way out, but my instinct for survival is hopeful. It says: let’s try.”
She was not a prophet, but Satrapi was a seer. As she told The Guardian in 2024, she understood the atrocities that authoritarian regimes are capable of committing, but also their fundamental weaknesses. “Never forget, all the dictatorships are the same. A night before they fall, everyone says: they are so solid, it’s impossible they can fall. Then they fall, and everyone asks: how could they have held for so long?” As I mourn Satrapi, and reflect on what our class learned from her this Spring, I cling to the hope that led her to become an artist and an activist. May we each commit to writing, speaking, drawing, filming and organizing what we can to oppose our increasingly tyrannical US government. Let’s try.
