Chronology of Bad Listening (I): Satrapi's Radioactive Flashbacks
Beyond Persepolis: Marjane Satrapi and the Cost of Bearing Witness
This two-part essay has been sitting in my drafts for a couple of months, postponed for what felt like a lack of timing. Today, I finalized it after hearing the devastating news that Marjane Satrapi is no longer with us.
This is not an obituary, but it’s about why her work was still being attacked the month she died, and what that tells us.
Donna Haraway, an American scholar of science and technology, once argued that the disorder of our era is unnecessary. It exists, yes, but it is not a structural necessity of our existence. She was speaking about a multi-species problem, but her claim extends well beyond ecology.
People lay bare their private traumas in public, no matter how excruciating, to ring an alarm, while nature rings its own in a different tongue. But when these traumas are denied, questioned, or ridiculed, that denial changes nothing, because the harm is already in motion, and what it leaves behind outlasts every dismissal. What follows is a chronology of bad listening, not the failure to hear these alarms, but the refusal to: receiving a testimony and deciding before it is finished that it does not count.
Marjane Satrapi was one of those rare people who opened her life to ring that exact alarm. Persepolis, her four-volume comic masterpiece about life before, under, and far from Iran’s Islamic regime, was adapted into a film in 2007 and won the Jury Prize at Cannes. That was a long time ago. Things, it seems, have changed.
But recently, on March 5, 2026, France 4 announced it would air Persepolis. Over the weekend, the film came under a coordinated attack on X. The critics claimed it was “Islamophobic,” that it “dehumanized veiled women,” and that screening it while Iran was under bombardment served as Western war propaganda.
The timing made the subject raw, but the moment carried a sickening sense of déjà vu. The objection folded neatly into a much older grievance: that the film tells the revolution from the view of a pro-Shah bourgeoisie. It is an odd charge to level against an author whose family were literal communists, whose uncle was jailed by the Shah and then executed by the very regime the revolution installed. The accusation of privileged birth has become its own secular auto-da-fé.
This controversy gives any serious observer a much more violent flashback to 2011. That was when this exact film was used to campaign against, and eventually attack, the Tunisian Nessma Channel and the home of its owner. Nessma had screened a Tunisian Arabic version of it. The justification for this violence by emerging radical Islamist groups was “depicting God,” an unusual, imported theological argument to make in Tunisia. At the time, that small North African country was the pioneer of free expression, riding the high of a revolution that had promised a higher ceiling for liberty. Many were sophisticated enough to realize this was never about “envisaging a deity,” yet the broader institutional reactions did nothing to stop the slide. The events escalated until the owner of Nessma apologized, and a case was filed against the channel for insulting “the divine entity”. By the time the verdict neared, Salafists gathered outside the court demanding his execution under the black banners of the caliphate. All over a film. He was convicted on May 3, 2012, ironically, World Press Freedom Day.
Let us be clear, while critics contest that this francophone work contains certain historical inaccuracies, Satrapi was not a historian. She never claimed to be. She used her story as a lived experience. What actual Iranians dispute is not whether her story happened, but whether hers is the whole story.
Yet, while these Westernized critics argue about the Iran she drew decades ago, the Iran of the present keeps making her case for her. Since the war began on February 28, 2026, the Islamic Republic claims it has arrested more than 6,500 “traitors and spies”. By its own account, only 567 of them are tied to any organized opposition group.
These are the regime’s words, not mine.
A figure that size is mathematically absurd for a spy network. This leaves two choices: either thousands of ordinary Iranians have reason enough to side with absolutely anyone against the state, or they are not spies at all, but people who protested. Six thousand five hundred people, counted one by one, is a small town taken into custody. The number is official. Yet, the voices that endlessly question whether Satrapi’s story was “the whole story” have said absolutely nothing about it. The doubt reserved for the witness never reaches the people filling the cells.
From outside Iran, a particular question gets asked: Why does this keep happening there?
The question sounds innocent, but a lazy assumption sits inside it: that this is simply how Iran is. It assumes the place and its rulers are one organic organism, that the suffering is native to the soil and not actively inflicted by men with guns. It treats autocracy as the natural lay of the land, so there is nothing to examine and nothing to be done.
Satrapi saw the contradictions facing the Islamic Republic, and diagnosed this exact logic from inside France. In January 2025, she refused the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest honor, rather than accept it from a state whose stance toward Iran she had come to see as hypocritical, one that spoke of solidarity with Iranian women while turning away their dissidents and artists at the visa counter. She called out that hypocrisy plainly. This passivity is not indifference; it is a structural belief that Iranians chose what rules them and are simply living inside their own cultural choice.
Many completely miss the point of why people open their personal history to the public. A compromise like this is enormously sacrificial. It is a piece of one’s own life given up, and the reason for giving it up is to force a realization: that our contemporary, ossified “oppressed-oppressor” dichotomies are broken. The world should have been intelligent enough to examine this a long time ago.
After Persepolis, Satrapi seemed desperate to write about anything else. Broderies (2003) sat her down for teatime with the grandmother who would die while she was abroad. Poulet aux prunes (2004) followed a tar player in Iran. She made Radioactive (2019), a film about Marie Curie, and Paradis Paris (2024), set far from her homeland. Even Femme, Vie, Liberté (2022), built from other people’s accounts of the Mahsa Amini uprising, was still Iran. She kept reaching for other subjects, and her country kept calling her back.
Those who bear witness and share what they lived, even with all the evidence, even through art and literature, even at the cost of prison or death, are systematically filed away as collateral damage in a “misunderstood” Middle Eastern country. Their suffering is explained away as the result of Western demonization. Meanwhile, the regime, which built its entire narrative before and after taking power on a cult of victimhood and marginalization, attracts none of that intellectual scrutiny.
For a certain strain of the postcolonial and anti-imperialist mind, the only oppressor permitted on the table is the West. The others are never named, because so little is expected of them. The ordinary standards for judging tyranny do not apply to an authoritarianism that wraps itself in the language of “authenticity” and “resistance.” We are asked to treat these regimes as minors, to excuse them, to hold them to no account, and to look away from the monstrous results of a nurturing that has run, by now, for almost half a century. The present reality refutes the very framework that hardened these conditions.
This inability to listen to these stories, and the active unwillingness to do so, did not begin in the 2000s. It comes from a long, painful history, and not only a Persian one, but an Arab one too. For decades, local writers tried to sound the alarm about what it would cost to romanticize Islamist movements while those movements promised, and then predictably delivered, authoritarianism.
When the communities cried out, they were silenced by Western apologists and local enforcers alike. When minorities objected, they were told they disrespected the will of the majority. When the majorities objected, they were told they were insensitive to minorities. The ideological alarm points every way at once: today it is us, tomorrow it will be others.
What persists, unnamed and unchallenged, is a state that imprisons and executes its own people while presenting itself to the world as the ultimate wronged party. Alongside it is a wider audience that looks on and decides this is simply the natural condition of that part of the world.
Both endure precisely because people are unwilling to name them for what they are. They remain radioactive in the truest sense. The harm they cause keeps emitting long after the events that produced it, and nothing within their reach can heal while they continue to do so.
This is what it meant for Satrapi to carry her own history. She did not remember the past so much as remain irradiated by it. Like uranium, it did not fade with distance or time; it kept emitting, kept damaging, long after she had left the country that produced it. The horrors and violations she lived through were never sealed off in some finished chapter. They stayed alive, decaying and radiating in the present tense, because the conditions that caused them never ended. She was affected by her past for the simplest and cruelest of reasons: it was never actually past. It went on happening, to other people, in the cells and the streets, every day she lived. To remember it was to be exposed to it again.
The fault was never Satrapi’s. It lay in conditions that were never necessary but only left unexamined. Had those conditions not existed, her story would never have drawn a single attack, because she would never have had a reason to tell it in the first place. She told it anyway, and that was a burden she was never free to choose.
To Marjane Satrapi, whose past was radioactive, and whose world never gave her the closure she deserved.