“I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor.”
When I was thirteen, life was not particularly entertaining. My parents were constantly on my back because of my poor grades, and all I cared about was having fun, whether that meant drawing, reading, or watching a TV show. Any method that allowed me to escape reality was a good one. I was like a kite without a string, drifting wherever insignificant currents carried me, the wind nothing more than a tool fulfilling its purpose.
I discovered Persepolis thanks to one of my high school teachers. One of the good ones. The kind of teacher who can change a person's inner world with a few simple words without ever realizing it. Throughout my life I have been fortunate enough to meet many teachers like that, right up to the present day. They have contributed far more to the pages of my story than they could ever imagine, or than I have ever managed to express through anything more than quiet admiration.
Ever since I was very young, I have admired teachers. To me, they are genuine heroes, standing on the front lines every day, trying to piece together the shattered vase that is our educational system while shaping future generations. Ironically, what I remember most about my teachers is not the subjects they taught me, but the values they passed on. Their perseverance within an increasingly harmful educational system that feeds on the enthusiasm with which they enter the classroom and face the difficulties of everyday life.
The day I discovered Persepolis, I went down to my school's library during recess. I still remember the exact shelf where the book stood: to the right of the librarian's desk, on a shelf slightly above my head. There it was. It was the first time I had ever seen such a large graphic novel, and I knew absolutely nothing about the story hidden within its pages. All I knew was that, despite its length, I had plenty of time to read it.
I opened it at a random section and found a cheerful young girl wearing a veil, sneakers, a Michael Jackson pin, and a punk jacket. I did not think twice. I checked the book out and took it home.
I read it in a single night. I cried, laughed, and felt things with an intensity I had not experienced in a long time.
Marjane's grandmother reminded me of my own grandmother, whom I had lost not long before. Through that character, I could hear her voice again. My grandmother wore a perfume I loved, and I could smell it whenever I hugged her in her armchair after arriving at her house. I remembered that scent while reading the scene where flowers fell from Marjane's grandmother's bra, giving her the fragrance that comforted her granddaughter. Smells are comforting. They carry us back to happy moments, preserving them forever in tiny time capsules tied to a particular scent.
Uncle Anoosh, the importance of family memory, Marjane's relationship with God, and the circumstances that forced her to leave her country in order to survive all awakened something inside me.
For the first time, I became acutely aware of how alive I was in a world where someone could endure all those things, publish them, be read by thousands, and still the planet would continue spinning as though nothing had happened. Because that is life, isn't it?
It filled me with a strange sense of indignation, and for the first time I met what would become a noisy tenant living inside my body. A neighbor who constantly banged a broom against the ceiling of my chest to express her outrage, yet never dared open the door and complain properly. She wanted to scream, but she was mute.
It is unjust that a child should have to endure all that. It is unjust that she had to grow up the way she did. It is unjust that the world is so rotten and that war is a cruel game in which people like her do not even rank as pawns. Thousands, no, millions of people never had the opportunity to draw, write, or tell stories like hers because they died at the hands of the usual perpetrators.
Most of all, it is unjust how many people simply accept it. What has already happened. What is happening right now. All those stories we will never know because their authors became victims of a cruel game rigged from the very beginning, one whose rules are known only to a privileged few sitting comfortably behind the white walls of luxurious homes.
Walls stained with blood. So much blood that it could fill an ocean, and people would still swim in it because it smells like the sea.
History repeating itself over and over again.
You scroll. You read. You get angry. It goes out of fashion. You forget.
Marjane suffered from severe depression in early adulthood, and I deeply empathized with that period of her life. Now that I have reached a similar age, I empathize even more.
I have grown up. I am now at university. Since that first reading, I have lost count of how many difficult moments in my life have led me back to Marjane Satrapi's stories.
Because after finishing Persepolis, I discovered Embroideries, and I sat down to drink tea with that group of women who satirized the experiences they had endured throughout their lives.
Alongside Hedy Lamarr, Satrapi is one of the women I admire most. Even without having had the privilege of knowing her personally, I have always felt profoundly connected to her.
Unfortunately, Marjane was human, just like the rest of us. Humans die, and that is one of life's greatest lessons, yet somehow it is a lesson we never truly learn.
Marjane died far too young, and life was not fair to her, not even in the end.
Life has no morality of its own. It is our actions and reactions that shape it.
She could have died many years ago. She might never have shared her experiences. Yet we were fortunate enough that she did.
To live and leave a mark.
Because a person does not die when they exhale their final breath. They die when their name is spoken for the last time.
And today, after learning of her passing, I wanted to shout it.
I wanted to shout her name.
I wanted the neighbor living in my heart to release all that pent-up rage, to open the door she has kept closed for so many years "just in case," and finally be free.
I wanted her to shout so loudly that God, whether He exists or not, would hear her.
Because we are human beings, and human beings possess a culture that should never be lost.
The legacy of artists and writers forms the foundation of our existence and our passage through this world. We are soaked in it, and I believe it is one of the most valuable things in life.
We are canvases, novels, notebooks, blank napkins waiting to be filled with brushstrokes, stories, words, and stains that make each of us different from one another.
Now the neighbors are no longer neighbors.
Everyone remains locked inside their own rib cages because what is one more death when there are billions of us?
What does one fewer book matter when there are already so many and no one can read them all?
Why should that war matter if it is not happening on my street?
Why should that woman matter if she is not part of my family?
That is the state of mental fog and absolute indifference in which the world sleeps.
And often I think about it.
Part of me wishes I could sleep too.
Part of me wishes I could fall into that lethargy where nothing matters except myself.
A rest designed to brick up the door of that neighbor we all carry inside us, the one whose hands are left raw from pounding against it.
Music turned up loud enough to drown out the noise.
The noise of the knocking.
The noise of those who still scream.
Those who, exhausted and under no obligation whatsoever, continue to raise their voices for those who cannot speak, trying to create a fairer world.
Individualism is the silent sentence hanging over us.
A set of shackles tightening around the wrists of human decency.
A noose around the neck of humanity itself, slowly choking away the spirit that defines us.
She was not merely a writer.
A woman who represented countless values, countless voices, countless words that otherwise could never have been spoken.
She embodied the power of culture, the way it travels into each of our homes and shapes who we become.
Because if there is one thing I want to emphasize, it is the importance of education.
Of learning about the world and about other people's lives.
You may not always understand why something matters so deeply to someone else. You may even find it ridiculous.
But empathy is the fragile thread that, in times like these, still holds us together.
Death is an uncomfortable presence.
Grief is acceptable for a predetermined amount of time, but afterward you are expected to move on.
Sadness has been condemned as a negative emotion, something harmful and toxic that can consume you until you "die of sorrow."
It is better not to think too much.
Become both executioner and victim.
Search so desperately for who you are that you destroy the very essence you seek, forgetting that identity often lives within mystery itself and within a lifetime of exploration.
Progress throughout history has come from reflection, dissatisfaction, discomfort, fists slammed on tables, from saying "enough is enough," from death, and from the questions we are not supposed to ask because they threaten the fragile bubble in which society has settled.
Death is uncomfortable because it requires no invitation. It is always there. We simply choose not to see it. Death is not something to romanticize. It is something from which we should learn. Something through which we inherit countless legacies.
It is the beginning of a story.
A story that, fortunately, will continue to be told for years, allowing thousands of people to enjoy it, empathize with it, grow through it, and learn from it.
Because stories are beautiful.
And the human mind is beautiful too.
It can read the same story and interpret it in a thousand different ways through a thousand different lenses.
Different perspectives that will, in turn, create their own stories and contribute to our collective legacy.
Marjane's story is not merely another comma in my own story.
A chapter that I close today with tears in my eyes and my heart wide open.
From her, I carry my stubborn refusal to settle.
And a voice that today I raise in her name.
“We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the crap we eat--not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it's AIDS. Before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there's the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of me going under a truck, that's fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don't want to eat me. F@#$ck the worms.”
