Art of rebellion | Review of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ by Marjane Satrapi

Discover the powerful graphic anthology "Woman, Life, Freedom" exploring feminist uprising in Iran through poignant narratives and diverse art styles.

It’s been more than two decades since Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis (2000), took us behind the scenes of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Through the everyday life of a lippy, young girl growing up in this period, we experience and eavesdrop on the senselessness and strangeness of religious revolution. The arrests and brutal torture that follow; the constant, choking surveillance of the morality police; and the effects of the Iran-Iraq War — after all of this time, Persepolis remains plucky, poignant and powerful.

With similar expectations, I dove into Woman, Life, Freedom, an anthology of graphic essays, because 54-year-old Satrapi is the headliner and is credited with creating this collection. This volume takes its title from the protest chant, ‘Jin Jiyan Azadi’, of the 2022 feminist uprising in Iran following the beating to death of Mahsa ‘Jina’ Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for wearing her headscarf “improperly”.

Over three sections, and through 24 graphic narratives, the 20 writers and artists collectively lay out the events surrounding Amini’s custodial death in a Tehran prison and the protests ignited by her death. We get a refresher course on climate and characters of the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath, and finally, we are witnesses to the daily acts of continued resistance.

Through these comics, we learn “Iran’s mythical history is brimming with fierce women who break chains and inspire freedom”. We learn their names. We are given a sense of living under round-the-clock state censorship and the insidious networks of the ‘Nofuzi’, or Iran’s morality police. We are visitors to Evin prison, a “windowless and stinking” “hellhole” where the imprisoned women are tortured into signing false confessions of their immoral crimes. We learn the names of more women. We are told of Shakiba who cross-dressed as a man to watch a men’s football match and of Sahar Khodayari, called the “the Blue Girl” who was caught sneaking into another one, given jail time and self-immolated in protest. These stories of courage from the everyday to the extraordinary are heartbreaking and inspiring. Cynically, it gives us an idea of the little it takes to upset the applecart.

A pleasure coaxed by the collaborative quality of Woman, Life, Freedom is the range of artistic styles showcased — from parodying political cartoons, seeming like illustrations in an artist’s sketchbook, to some others that simply illuminate the text. There’s Deloupy’s realistic sensibilities with clean lines and clear backgrounds to Bee’s graphic style — most reminiscent of Satrapi — simple but emotive, to Coco’s thickly applied lines and colourful panels to Joann Sfar’s untethered, liberated lines. Touka Neyestani’s caricature stylings in ‘The Winter of Executions’ is a standout, it speaks to the role of men in making the 2022 feminist uprising different from the previous times. These men were hanged to death, and here, they are given the dignity of having their faces seen. But the echo of the state’s hand in their deaths haunts the pages with human legs swinging below each of their portraits. At the bottom of the page flows a river of blood, and the Ayatollah with a walking stick, drowning within it as we turn each page.

Also, the many drawings of Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the current supreme leader of Iran, become the commonality that allows us to gauge the varying styles of these artists. Here too, Neyestani’s nightmarish vision of Khamenei as Zahhak, a mythical, cruel, bloodthirsty king from Persian lore, is the most notable. To add to the horror, this tyrant has two, human brain-feeding serpents rising out of each shoulder — an image that gnaws even as I write this review.