In Marjane Satrapi’s imaginative universe, death is never the end of the story. The dead return through memory, image, and language. It is as though storytelling performs the same function as love itself: bringing back to life everything that has been lost to the world of existence. This is the legacy she has left behind for us after her self-chosen death—her memories, images, narrative voice, and a love that has become immortal through both her works and her passing.
In Satrapi’s work, death is not the opposite of life but one of the ways through which love is understood. Her characters often inhabit worlds where death is a constant presence: from executions and war in the graphic memoir Persepolis to suicide, illness, and loss in her other graphic novel, Chicken with Plums. Yet Satrapi’s world is never purely tragic. Love and death are intertwined in a curious way, as though human beings can only truly appreciate the value of love when confronted with their own mortality.
In Persepolis, an autobiographical work drawn from the author’s own life, death is part of everyday existence. Marjane’s childhood unfolds amid executions, war, and bombings. What makes the work distinctive, however, is the way love coexists with this violence-filled life. The love between her parents, her bond with her family, her deep relationship with her grandmother, and the friendships she forms all exist against a backdrop where death lingers like a shadow. As a result, love in Satrapi’s works is not merely romantic or sentimental; it is a form of resistance against death.
Another powerful element in Satrapi’s work is her remarkable sense of humor. Her humor is both warm and bitter at the same time. It strips death of some of its oppressive gravity and presents it as an inseparable part of life. This humor is not meant to diminish the tragedy of dying but to make it bearable. In such a world, laughter itself becomes a form of love for life. Satrapi shows us that even in the darkest moments of their existence, human beings remain capable of loving, joking, and carrying on.
Another important aspect of her work is the presence of absence. Many of Satrapi’s most significant characters are defined through loss. After death or separation, they often exert a greater influence on the narrator’s life than they did while they were present. Here, love depends not on presence but on memory. That is why the dead continue to live on in the lives of the living.
In the graphic novel Chicken with Plums, Satrapi depicts the final eight days in the life of Nasser Ali Khan, a musician awaiting his death. Throughout those eight days, he remains absorbed in thoughts of his lost love, Iraneh—a beautiful woman whose memory and the longing for a life they never shared have driven him, almost madly, toward his deathbed. Satrapi later adapted the book into a feature film in which Golshifteh Farahani plays the role of Iraneh. In the film, we see that love is never allowed fulfillment. Romantic relationships in Satrapi’s works seem doomed to failure. Although she herself found fulfillment in her personal life and spent three decades with the person she loved, in the end, after losing her beloved, she chose death. Like Nasser Ali Khan, she wandered through the seven cities of love in the agony of separation before finally surrendering to annihilation.
In truth, death and love are the two central poles of Marjane Satrapi’s intellectual and artistic world. Death gives meaning to love, while love makes death bearable. In her works, human beings fall in love because they are mortal, and because they love, they are able to come to terms with death. Perhaps that is why, despite all the suffering—war, separation, exile, and loss—that befalls her characters, her stories are always filled with music and dance, laughter and affection, emotional openness, childlike wonder, and an enduring sense that life goes on.
In the final years of his life, the renowned Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud proposed a theory that, like many of his ideas, became one of the most influential concepts in psychoanalysis: the perpetual struggle between Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the force of love, life, creation, and connection; Thanatos is the death drive, the impulse toward destruction, dissolution, and a return to stillness. Human life, in this view, is the stage upon which these two forces wage their endless battle.
From this perspective, Satrapi’s works can be seen as a visual narrative of that very struggle. In her world, death is present, but so is the desire for life. The crucial point is that although her characters ultimately face death, they remain full of vitality. They dance, fall in love, laugh, read books, and tell stories. It is as though Eros is engaged in a constant war with Thanatos.
In Persepolis, scenes of death are plentiful, yet what remains in the viewer’s memory are moments of love and life. These moments are manifestations of Eros—the force that refuses to let human beings be broken by violence. In Satrapi’s work, exile itself becomes a symbolic form of Thanatos. Leaving one’s homeland means the death of at least part of one’s identity. The exile is separated from their land, language, and past. Yet it is precisely at this point that Eros intervenes. Writing, storytelling, and reconstructing memories become ways of reviving life. The very act of narration becomes a form of resistance against forgetting and death.
Freud regarded humor as one of the psyche’s defense mechanisms, and Satrapi repeatedly uses humor to confront tragedy. In her world, laughing in the face of suffering is not merely a reaction; it is a victory of Eros over Thanatos. Humor allows individuals to preserve their dignity and inner freedom in the presence of death. Even visually, Freud’s theory can be discerned in Satrapi’s comic strips, where the stark contrast between black and white evokes the duality of life and death.
Marjane Satrapi was my fellow student at university in the 1990s. She was perhaps two or three years ahead of me at the Faculty of Art and Architecture of the Islamic Azad University in Tehran. I studied theatre, while she studied graphic design. She possessed a vibrant, creative, and deeply artistic personality. For her, life seemed to mean creation and artistic expression far more than allowing Thanatos room to dominate.
In both her life and her work, the final word has always belonged—and will always belong to Eros: to love, memory, storytelling, the impulse to create, and the desire to keep going.
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