The Political Cage: Marjane Satrapi and the Burden of the Non-Western Memoir, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 23 June 2026

From Mina’s Substack

When Marjane Satrapi passed away on June 4—tragic, unexpected, and far too soon—the tributes to Persepolis were accompanied by a critique that has followed the book for years: a demand that her memoir be something other than a memoir. The most persistent version faults Satrapi for speaking from too narrow a position: a secular, upper-middle-class family affluent enough to send their daughter to Europe in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War. What is missing, critics suggest, are experiences outside her own: those of another social class, another religious background, another political formation.

That a memoir expresses the author’s experience does not place it beyond critique. It can be challenged for what it does on the page: how it represents the world and what assumptions it carries. What cannot be demanded is that the memoirist have lived a different life. The problem with such critiques is that they ask one person’s memoir to do the work of collective representation, as if Satrapi should have written the critic’s memoir, or someone else’s.

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Mina Khanlarzadeh (Ph.D., Columbia University; B.Sc., Physics, Sharif University of Technology) is a historian whose interdisciplinary work engages global political thought, literary and translation studies, gender studies, and the history of science.

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