'YOU HAVE TO BE A MANIAC TO WRITE AND DRAW COMICS'
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MARJANE SATRAPI is dubbed the greatest living female graphic novelist in the world. Here, she clears up a few misconceptions about Iran with Paul Dale.
he fact that Persepolis was published in
Liberation for two years running has made me
much more famous than I was supposed to be. To tell you the truth. I don‘t give a shit about being considered this or as that.‘ Talking down the phone from her Paris studio where she is working on the animated film version of Persepolis. the graphic novel about her family‘s life in pre-revolution lran. she is everything I hoped she would be: fluid, funny. impassioned and fearsomer pragmatic. ‘Don’t get me wrong.‘ she continues in a French accent deeply inflected by a Middle Eastern growl. ‘I do my work. I make comics. make murals and once in a while I do something with a fashion magazine. But I don‘t care for fame.‘
Her new book Embroideries is just out. It‘s a comic book look into the sex lives of women through the conversations that used to take place at Satrapi's grandmother's all-women afternoon tea drinking sessions. She describes it as being ‘a conversation
which is open. inside and out; it has no pretence of
teaching or being pedagogical’. And she has another one called The Clzieken and the Plum. Satrapi's reticence masks a winking delight at her position as a torch-bearer for the Parisian-Iranian diaspora.
‘I left Iran in I984 and I994 and when I’lrsepulis came about. I heard people talking about my country and l was like. “What the fuck are they talking about‘." It was not an lran that Satrapi recognised. so she tried to explain to people some simple truths about dictatorships. ‘But I am not a sociologist. I am not a
historian. I’m not a politician. I don‘t belong to any
movement: I hate groups in general. But l was sure of what I had seen and felt. so I based the book on my humble life in Iran. But a country is a very abstract concept when you don‘t live there. So. of course. Chinese or (‘hilean people can relate to my books.
because when you deal with totalitarian dictatorships. 3
it‘s always the same schema all over the world.‘
Noting filmmakers Kiarostami. Murnau and De Sica
as major influences on her work and with lilaubert as her guide. what is curious about Satrapi is that she does not see any other comic book artists as influences. ‘I don’t really come from a world of
comics; it was all a coincidence really.‘ she says. ‘I was
in a studio with comic artists and l was telling them
what Iran was like and they were telling me to do
something with these words just to get me to shut up.’ So. Satrapi gave it a go. but thought she may fail due to her own personality traits. ‘I never thought I could do it because I am extremely impatient and with comics you have to be patient because it takes such a long time to do. You have to be a maniac to write and draw comics: for me every time I start a
new book it is as if I have never made any comics
before in my life. I don’t know how to write or how to invent. because each story needs a different way to tell it. That is my madness.‘
Embroideries is out now published by Jonathan Cape. See review next issue.
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