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Sexual Revolutionaries
April 24, 2005 | Beneath their black robes and mandatory head scarves, the women in Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoirs about Iran after the revolution are worldly even by Western standards. Outdoors in Tehran, where the guardians of the revolution prowl, men and women don't so much as hold hands. Inside, behind closed doors, they have affairs, marry and divorce, drink and dance, and revel in dirty jokes and sacrilegious samizdat. Their sensuality is a rebellion against the mullahs' pinched and brutal theocracy, so they take their pleasures seriously.
By inviting outsiders into this intimate world, Satrapi makes contemporary Iran seem both less foreign and more terrifying. In "Persepolis" and "Persepolis 2," she used deceptively simple comic-book imagery to tell a riveting story about her childhood in Iran, her teenage exile in Europe, and her not-at-all-triumphant return home. (She's now adapting "Persepolis" into an animated movie for French TV.) The life she draws -- with her cosmopolitan, politically engaged parents, her adolescent obsession with punk rock, her search for solace in books and boyfriends -- is typical of well-off, precocious city kids everywhere. The familiarity makes readers feel the Satrapi family's horrified disbelief as fundamentalists obsessed with sex and death take over their country.
To be a secularist in America right now is to feel some faint shadow of that same horror. When I spoke to Satrapi by phone from her home in Paris, I was reluctant to make comparisons between Iran's tyrannical mullahs and our homegrown Christian theocrats, because I didn't want to trivialize her country's exponentially greater suffering. She, however, had no such qualms. "They are the same!" she said in a rush of slightly broken, accented English, launching into a plea for solidarity among all enemies of fundamentalism. "The secular people, we have no country. We the people -- all the secular people who are looking for freedom -- we have to keep together. We are international, as they" -- the fanatics of all religions -- "are international."
Satrapi's latest, "Embroideries," is less explicitly political than the Persepolis books. The earlier works combined the public and private, drawing surreal contrasts between the small currents of domestic life and the catastrophes of history. In "Embroideries," Satrapi confines herself to the dramas that happen inside, telling the romantic (or unromantic) tales of a group of female relatives and friends. Yet in the context of a regime determined to control women's sexuality, these stories are subversive.
The title itself sounds quaint and homey, but it's a spiky double-entendre. In a "full embroidery" operation, we learn, a woman's vagina is sewn to trick her husband into thinking he married a virgin. Satrapi's book is a mocking rebuke to the cult of chastity, and a statement about the way human passions find their way around the most determined repression.
One thing that comes through in all of your books is that the regime in Iran hasn't been able to change people's interior, human lives.
Absolutely. In the first place, when you look at the whole history of Iran, Iran has always been attacked. It has been attacked by the Greeks, by the Romans, by the Chinese. There has always been war, especially when you look at the last 200 years. And I think this creates a behavior that, if you want to survive, the only thing that you can do is to keep your interior life for yourself, because the rest is not up to you. I think this is something that has become part of our genetics.
For instance, when I was a child and I was going to school after the revolution happened, there were whole lessons to brainwash us, and we were supposed to become extremely religious and all of that. The reason that we escaped from that was that the parents, they would say, "Don't believe whatever they tell you in school. Learn the things that you should know about mathematics or geography. The rest of it is not true." And they would tell us what was their truth. It's in this way that we could keep who we were.
Your parents are so extraordinary in these books. Was the freedom they gave you common among educated Iranians?
I had extremely modern-thinking parents, even for Europeans or Westerners in general. They put a lot of faith in me. They trusted me. I was not brought up like a girl. I was the only child. My father taught me how to drive when I was 11 and a half!
They were young in the '60s and had all these ideas of emancipation and openness and all of that. In Iran, we were almost always under dictatorship, but in my private house where I was living, even if we wanted to buy a sofa, each person had one vote, and my vote counted just as much as my parents'. They had ideas about how a child should be, and they stayed extremely faithful to their ideas.
I don't know if this is common or not common, but in my [extended] family, most of the parents were very nice and open-minded and easygoing, and my friends' parents were the same.
I don't pretend that I am presenting the whole population of Iran. Of course if you come from a poor neighborhood or you come from a very small town in the middle of nowhere, probably your life is not the same. I'm always talking about my own experiences.
In "Persepolis," the familiarity of your family life makes it more harrowing and frightening when the revolution and the war with Iraq intrude. It makes you see how normality can be blown wide open.
Exactly, and suddenly it's completely leaning the other way, and you have to react very fast. Suddenly there's this really big change and nobody was expecting it. Talking and laughing was the only way to survive. Either we had to laugh or we had to die.
Reading your books, I sometimes think that people are the same everywhere. But even though the women in your stories are very ironic and sophisticated, there is still a big difference between the sexual mores of Iran and the West. How significant is that difference?
The subject of sexuality is, I think, both more and less a taboo in Iran. In the West I have the feeling, living here for a long time, sex is much more related to sin. In Iran, sex is not considered a sin. A woman, even in the Islamic Republic of Iran, if she can prove that her husband cannot do it with her, then she can ask for a divorce. It's not a sinful thing, the sex act itself.
I'm not talking from the legal point of view. I'm talking about the way the people think about it or talk about it. But then comes the issue of virginity, and virginity for me is really the sign of a patriarchal society. In a patriarchal society in which the father is the chief of the family, he owns the land and he owns the cow and he owns the house and he owns his wife, and so it's better if she is not secondhand. If you want to buy a pair of shoes, it is better that nobody else has worn them before you -- it is something like that.
But at the same time, nobody stops any divorced woman from remarrying. Divorce is not considered something terrible in Iran. In Tehran, actually, one couple out of two gets a divorce.
In Iran, sex is a problem before marriage. After marriage, it's much less of a problem. Here in the West, I very rarely hear older women, 60 or 65, talking about sex. From the moment they have menopause, sex is over for women. In Iran, I think it goes for a longer time.
America is much more open than Iran, and our public culture is more sexual, but the women in your books strike me as more down to earth about sex and relationships than we are. In the United States right now there's an absolute panic about divorce, that it's destroying our culture. And there's a hysterical romanticization of marriage...
Absolutely, absolutely! They show the belly of pregnant women every second, and write that this actress and that actress is pregnant ... they consider that the belly of the woman is just made to make children.
And also they teach in the schools -- I know American teenagers -- instead of teaching them how to have safe sex, they tell them that they shouldn't **** at all! It doesn't work. People, when they are 17, they are so full of hormones, and the only thing they think about from the morning until the night is sex, sex, sex. Teaching them how to have safe sex is much more logical.
You have gone through a period in the '60s with sexual liberation and all of that. Now there is this whole thing in America about having to be secure -- security makes us very conservative. And there's a very big coming back of these very moral, religious, heavy things -- not having sex before marriage and all of that.
On the contrary, in Iran people are on the way to make a sexual revolution. It's a little bit later than what has happened in Europe.
By inviting outsiders into this intimate world, Satrapi makes contemporary Iran seem both less foreign and more terrifying. In "Persepolis" and "Persepolis 2," she used deceptively simple comic-book imagery to tell a riveting story about her childhood in Iran, her teenage exile in Europe, and her not-at-all-triumphant return home. (She's now adapting "Persepolis" into an animated movie for French TV.) The life she draws -- with her cosmopolitan, politically engaged parents, her adolescent obsession with punk rock, her search for solace in books and boyfriends -- is typical of well-off, precocious city kids everywhere. The familiarity makes readers feel the Satrapi family's horrified disbelief as fundamentalists obsessed with sex and death take over their country.
To be a secularist in America right now is to feel some faint shadow of that same horror. When I spoke to Satrapi by phone from her home in Paris, I was reluctant to make comparisons between Iran's tyrannical mullahs and our homegrown Christian theocrats, because I didn't want to trivialize her country's exponentially greater suffering. She, however, had no such qualms. "They are the same!" she said in a rush of slightly broken, accented English, launching into a plea for solidarity among all enemies of fundamentalism. "The secular people, we have no country. We the people -- all the secular people who are looking for freedom -- we have to keep together. We are international, as they" -- the fanatics of all religions -- "are international."
Satrapi's latest, "Embroideries," is less explicitly political than the Persepolis books. The earlier works combined the public and private, drawing surreal contrasts between the small currents of domestic life and the catastrophes of history. In "Embroideries," Satrapi confines herself to the dramas that happen inside, telling the romantic (or unromantic) tales of a group of female relatives and friends. Yet in the context of a regime determined to control women's sexuality, these stories are subversive.
The title itself sounds quaint and homey, but it's a spiky double-entendre. In a "full embroidery" operation, we learn, a woman's vagina is sewn to trick her husband into thinking he married a virgin. Satrapi's book is a mocking rebuke to the cult of chastity, and a statement about the way human passions find their way around the most determined repression.
One thing that comes through in all of your books is that the regime in Iran hasn't been able to change people's interior, human lives.
Absolutely. In the first place, when you look at the whole history of Iran, Iran has always been attacked. It has been attacked by the Greeks, by the Romans, by the Chinese. There has always been war, especially when you look at the last 200 years. And I think this creates a behavior that, if you want to survive, the only thing that you can do is to keep your interior life for yourself, because the rest is not up to you. I think this is something that has become part of our genetics.
For instance, when I was a child and I was going to school after the revolution happened, there were whole lessons to brainwash us, and we were supposed to become extremely religious and all of that. The reason that we escaped from that was that the parents, they would say, "Don't believe whatever they tell you in school. Learn the things that you should know about mathematics or geography. The rest of it is not true." And they would tell us what was their truth. It's in this way that we could keep who we were.
Your parents are so extraordinary in these books. Was the freedom they gave you common among educated Iranians?
I had extremely modern-thinking parents, even for Europeans or Westerners in general. They put a lot of faith in me. They trusted me. I was not brought up like a girl. I was the only child. My father taught me how to drive when I was 11 and a half!
They were young in the '60s and had all these ideas of emancipation and openness and all of that. In Iran, we were almost always under dictatorship, but in my private house where I was living, even if we wanted to buy a sofa, each person had one vote, and my vote counted just as much as my parents'. They had ideas about how a child should be, and they stayed extremely faithful to their ideas.
I don't know if this is common or not common, but in my [extended] family, most of the parents were very nice and open-minded and easygoing, and my friends' parents were the same.
I don't pretend that I am presenting the whole population of Iran. Of course if you come from a poor neighborhood or you come from a very small town in the middle of nowhere, probably your life is not the same. I'm always talking about my own experiences.
In "Persepolis," the familiarity of your family life makes it more harrowing and frightening when the revolution and the war with Iraq intrude. It makes you see how normality can be blown wide open.
Exactly, and suddenly it's completely leaning the other way, and you have to react very fast. Suddenly there's this really big change and nobody was expecting it. Talking and laughing was the only way to survive. Either we had to laugh or we had to die.
Reading your books, I sometimes think that people are the same everywhere. But even though the women in your stories are very ironic and sophisticated, there is still a big difference between the sexual mores of Iran and the West. How significant is that difference?
The subject of sexuality is, I think, both more and less a taboo in Iran. In the West I have the feeling, living here for a long time, sex is much more related to sin. In Iran, sex is not considered a sin. A woman, even in the Islamic Republic of Iran, if she can prove that her husband cannot do it with her, then she can ask for a divorce. It's not a sinful thing, the sex act itself.
I'm not talking from the legal point of view. I'm talking about the way the people think about it or talk about it. But then comes the issue of virginity, and virginity for me is really the sign of a patriarchal society. In a patriarchal society in which the father is the chief of the family, he owns the land and he owns the cow and he owns the house and he owns his wife, and so it's better if she is not secondhand. If you want to buy a pair of shoes, it is better that nobody else has worn them before you -- it is something like that.
But at the same time, nobody stops any divorced woman from remarrying. Divorce is not considered something terrible in Iran. In Tehran, actually, one couple out of two gets a divorce.
In Iran, sex is a problem before marriage. After marriage, it's much less of a problem. Here in the West, I very rarely hear older women, 60 or 65, talking about sex. From the moment they have menopause, sex is over for women. In Iran, I think it goes for a longer time.
America is much more open than Iran, and our public culture is more sexual, but the women in your books strike me as more down to earth about sex and relationships than we are. In the United States right now there's an absolute panic about divorce, that it's destroying our culture. And there's a hysterical romanticization of marriage...
Absolutely, absolutely! They show the belly of pregnant women every second, and write that this actress and that actress is pregnant ... they consider that the belly of the woman is just made to make children.
And also they teach in the schools -- I know American teenagers -- instead of teaching them how to have safe sex, they tell them that they shouldn't **** at all! It doesn't work. People, when they are 17, they are so full of hormones, and the only thing they think about from the morning until the night is sex, sex, sex. Teaching them how to have safe sex is much more logical.
You have gone through a period in the '60s with sexual liberation and all of that. Now there is this whole thing in America about having to be secure -- security makes us very conservative. And there's a very big coming back of these very moral, religious, heavy things -- not having sex before marriage and all of that.
On the contrary, in Iran people are on the way to make a sexual revolution. It's a little bit later than what has happened in Europe.
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