Because History Was in the Making

In 2024, Marjane Satrapi was asked why she had returned to graphic novels after years away from the form. She had thought she was finished with them. Then in September 2022, Iran’s morality police arrested a twenty-two-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab incorrectly. Amini died in police custody. Young women across Iran poured into the streets.

Satrapi picked up her pen. “I felt compelled to draw again,” she said, “because history was in the making.”

She had been drawing history since she was a child. Born in Rasht, Iran, in 1969, into a politically active family, she was ten years old when the Islamic Revolution toppled the Shah and changed everything — the veil became compulsory, her male classmates were separated from her, the adults in her life were abruptly transformed by the new order. She absorbed it all. Decades later, she drew it in stark black and white as Persepolis — a graphic memoir translated into more than twenty-five languages, adapted into a film winning the Jury Prize at Cannes, banned in Iran, taught in universities across the world.

After her husband, filmmaker and translator Mattias Ripa, died on April 8, 2025, Satrapi’s Instagram page changed. She began posting one word at a time — one word per post, one after another, until the words formed a sentence: “I lost the love of my life.” She did not post much else after.

On June 4, 2026, Marjane Satrapi died. She was 56. A friend told AFP she had “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.”

The Élysée Palace announced her passing. “Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and an artist deeply committed to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the statement said.

She spent her life drawing what she had seen. Not what she had researched. Not what she had been told. What she had lived, in the place she had lived it, with the people around her.

Between 1810 and 1820, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya produced a series of 82 prints he called The Disasters of War. He had witnessed the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the guerrilla war of resistance. He had seen what armies did to civilians. He drew what he saw.

Beneath one of the prints, he wrote three words: “Yo lo vi” — I saw this. Not “I imagined this.” Not “I was told this.” He had been there. He wrote his presence into the work as a moral claim: this is the record of a witness.

The prints were never published in his lifetime. Too dangerous, too unsparing, too direct in their accusation of everyone who had participated in the slaughter. The Disasters of War was not published until 1863, thirty-five years after Goya’s death.

He drew them anyway. He drew them because he had been there and someone who had been there had to make a record. He did not know whether the prints would ever be seen. He made them from the obligation of a witness who could not leave the record unmade.

Satrapi drew in black and white deliberately. Not because color was beyond her — she was a painter, a filmmaker, an illustrator in many registers. She chose it because black and white holds the reader in the image. It does not let history become picturesque.

When she was asked in 2024 why she returned to draw again, she did not say she wanted to make a statement. She said she was compelled. History was in the making and she had been there before and she knew what it looked like.

She picked up her pen.

Goya drew what he saw and died before it could be published. Satrapi drew what she saw and was banned in her own country. Neither waited to be safe. Neither asked whether the record was convenient. Both understood: the obligation of the witness is not to publish. It is to make the record honestly and trust the rest to time.

The Power of Authors is about exactly this. Not craft. Not platform. The obligation of the writer who was present, who saw something from where they stood, who understands the record needs to be made.

You have been somewhere. You have seen something no one else saw from exactly where you were standing.

Someone will need the record someday.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.