Speak.Collaborate.Listen

I’ve quoted this talk at least four times since I found the trove that is the PEN American Soundcloud a week ago. Specifically the part where Satrapi describes her attempts to hold down a number of jobs (private investigator, fur salesperson, headhunter) before committing to the process of creating Persepolis, her celebrated graphic novel. Satrapi is forthright and eloquent, and she delivers each anecdote with perfect comic timing. The extracts below detail her insights on race, identification, identity, and the politics of representing Iran, but they don’t capture her cadence or charisma which make this the most charming Q&A since Binyavanga interviewed Chimamanda.

On abstraction, race & identification:

“People have lots of problems identifying with someone who does not look like them exactly and a geography that they don’t know. But the abstraction of the drawing means that anybody can relate to it, people they can even relate to a mouse, to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But if it’s another human being and the skin is not the same colour, the geography is not the same, they don’t relate.”

Parsing the dynamics of the postcolonial relationship

“I thought that, you know, three hundred people that really like these third world people and have a bad conscience, they would buy my book to feel better. You know like, we did something for this poor girl…” [smattering of laughter from the audience]

On writing as an Iranian

“Suddenly we became just the terrorists. Our problem was only the veil, the beard and the nuclear weapon. Nobody remembered that this country had the biggest poet in the world, and philosophers, and four thousand years of history, so, all of that was just to say, hey, we are human beings. So that was it.’

Why the books were a success

I kept on saying I wanted to be modest. But I’m not modest in reality so it’s not necessary to lie. But I was like: yeah, because I’m a woman, because I am in the right time etcetera … I think the books are good: that’s why.