'The Guardian' - 11 December 2003: Marjane Satrapi
I have worn a hijab, and it was a question of survival. When I was 10 the revolution happened in Iran, where I lived, and from that point I was forced to wear the veil. If I hadn't done it, I would have been jailed.
That is why I am absolutely opposed to the veil. Forcing women to put a piece of material on their head is an act of violence, and even if you get used to it after a while, the violence of insisting that women must cover their heads in public with a small piece of cloth does not diminish.
But I also think that to forbid girls from wearing the veil, as the government of France is considering doing, is to be every bit as repressive. Yesterday a government-commissioned report recommended that all "conspicuous" signs of religious belief - including the hijab - should be outlawed in state schools.
I passionately believe that the young women who have been expelled from school for wearing a veil should have the freedom to choose. It is surely a basic human right that someone can choose what she wears without interference from the state.
Critics argue that it is not the girls themselves who want to wear the veil, rather they are forced to do so by their parents. But if that is the case, if these are the kind of parents who will force their daughters to wear a veil, they are probably the kind of parents who will be happy to withdraw them from school and then to marry them off to a distant cousin at 15 with whom they will bear five children. If we want to give these girls any chance of emancipation, any chance that one day they will decide for themselves that they don't want to wear the veil, it will come from education. It will certainly not come from being withdrawn by their families.
It amazes me that so little of the debate here in France has centred round the ages of the girls in question. The fact is, they are adolescents, and when you are adolescent if you are told you cannot do something, you will surely do it. So it could become a fashion - worse, a symbol of rebellion. If wearing a veil becomes your symbol of rebellion, then you certainly know about irony! Scarily, these women might come to believe that they are asserting their freedom, not their oppression.
When I was a student in Iran, I did so many forbidden things just because they were forbidden. Now these schoolgirls are going to wear the viel just because it will be forbidden. I know what it felt like to be pushed into being religious, so I know what it must be like to be pushed into being secular. Let's not make the same mistake that the fanatics made with the Iranian women. It is the same violence. I can be as opposed to the veil as I am, but I am also a defender of human rights.
We need to explain to young women that this interpretation of the Koran is a very masculine interpretation. It is time for women to read the holy book themselves, to interpret it themselves and to realise that the holy texts can be interpreted in so many different ways. Why has it been interpreted in this way? This is what these women need to ask.
But are we putting our finger on the real problem? Aren't we simply scared of Islam, and of talking about Islam? Instead of having an open debate about the religion, France wants to ban a symbol of Islam.
It is important to consider what has happened in this country (France). In the 1970s, women who had come from North Africa didn't wear a veil, but now their daughters want to. Why? The answer is these people may be French, but they have to live in the suburbs where there is cheaper housing, without good jobs, without equal opportunities, and they have no other way to express their identity than through their religious identity. The problem is not the veil, it is their exclusion from society.
I have been incredibly surprised by the reaction of French feminists, who have publicly campaigned for the banning of "this visible symbol of the submission of women". The western woman is so entranced by the idea that her emancipation comes from the miniskirt that she is convinced that if you have something on your head you are nothing. The women who are forced to wear the veil, and the women who are portrayed naked to sell everything from car tyres to orange juice, are both facing a form of oppression. But for me, anything that uses the language of banning is wrong.
The example of Iran is a good one. When the father of the last Shah of Iran became king in the 1930s, he banned the veil. It was probably a good thing because many women who believed that if they removed it they would be turned to stone, realised that they wouldn't. After one or two generations it became more accepted. But why was the Islamic Revolution able to overturn that, to force everyone to wear a veil, so quickly? It was because in Iran we wanted to force through a whole social revolution overnight.
Today in Iran everyone is increasingly in support of secularity and democracy. Women now wear the tiniest peice of material on their heads, and they are ready to remove that, when they are eventually permitted. In Iran, 63% of students are now girls; society has changed completely. It has been another revolution. But it has happened in their own time.
Everywhere I go the first thing anyone wants to talk to me about is women's veils in Iran. And I ask them, if tomorrow we take off the veil, will the problems of which it is a symbol be solved? Will these women suddenly become equal and emancipated? The answer is no.
'The Guardian' - 14 May 2003: Esther Addley
By the time she was six, Marjane Satrapi knew she wanted to be a prophet. Girls didn't become prophets, she knew, but there seemed to be so many things wrong with the world - the family maid had to eat in another room, for instance, her father had a Cadillac when lots of people didn't have a car at all and her grandmother's knees ached all the time. Growing up in Tehran, she had already drawn up her own prophet rule book: old people suffering, she decided, would simply be forbidden.
Then, in 1979, when Satrapi was 10, the Iranian revolution began. She was forced to leave her coeducational French school and attend one for girls only, and had to wear a veil at all times in public. Her beloved uncle was executed by the fundamentalist government on spying charges; her mother was forced to dye her hair and wear a disguise after protesting against the imposition of the veil.
Soon the family was dodging missiles when war broke out with Iraq. Satrapi's parents, fearful for the safety of their outspoken and rebellious daughter, sent her into exile at the age of 14, to live in Austria with a friend of her mother.
This month, Persepolis, her tale of this remarkable childhood, is published in English for the first time. It is an extraordinary book, outspoken and caustic on the suffering of so many of her fellow Iranians, but also funny and surprising and in parts extremely moving. It is told in graphic novel form, in stark monochrome drawings reminiscent of medieval woodcuts or ancient Persian murals.
Satrapi is now 33 and lives in Paris. She wrote Persepolis, she says, partly so that she didn't have to keep retelling the same crazy story. But it was also an attempt to put the record straight, she says, to correct assumptions about Iran that, despite all she had witnessed, she knew to be unfair: the notion that everyone was a religious fanatic, for instance, or that all Iranian women were cowed and submissive, or the assumption that her people in Iran were essentially different from Europeans.
Thus we see Satrapi and her classmates' bemused irreverence when first told they must don headscarves; later they are suspended en masse when someone greets their teacher's paean to the country's soldier martyrs with a muttered "Poo-poo". Her uncle, the family vintner, produces gallons of wine for clandestine parties with the help of his cleaning lady, who crushes the grapes underfoot in the bath while chanting furiously, "God forgive me, God forgive me."
In another episode, the teenaged Satrapi, dressed proudly in a denim jacket and sneakers that her parents have smuggled in from Turkey, buys two cassette tapes, by Kim Wilde and Camel, from an illegal street vendor. She is stopped by the "Guardians of the Revolution, Women's Branch", and interrogated about her "punk" clothing. The young teenager narrowly talks herself out of being arrested and beaten; later, back home and unable to tell her mother what has happened, she can only mosh furiously in her bedroom to The Kids in America, cranked up to full volume.
Such small revolutions are commonplace in her home country, she says, even if we never hear of them. "Do you think, in that society, if a woman has a scarf on her head she is not rebellious?" She scoffs. "Year by year, in Iran, women show a centimetre more hair, a centimetre less scarf. In my family I am the only brown-haired one now, because everyone, under their scarf, is blonde, they have bleached their hair. They have this bright pink lipstick, and prop their breasts up as high as they can, and that is their rebellion. I once saw a girl who shaved her head and wore a big jacket so that they would think she was a man - all so she could drive her car. That was her way of not wearing a scarf on her head."
She is captivated by the irony of her family in Iran telling her, a western feminist dressed in black T-shirt, flared skirt and wedge-heeled sandals, that she looks like a nun and should wear more make-up and dress less modestly.
Persepolis ends with Satrapi's anguished parting from her parents at the airport, but this is not the end of the story. Two further volumes are already planned, telling of her equally traumatic teenage years growing up in exile. She ended up living on the streets in Austria, then with a hippy community, before returning, aged 18, to her parents in Iran. But though she enrolled at university in Tehran to study art, Satrapi says that she realised almost immediately that she could not stay. Her life became defined by her small-scale rebellions.
"Take alcohol, for example. I don't like to drink, but in Iran at university, a friend of mine at noon always had vodka on her. So we drank vodka. I was prepared to die to do that. We knew that if they caught us they would kill us. The human is like that." She married her boyfriend - "because I couldn't do anything with him, we couldn't go to a hotel, it was forbidden" - but they knew straight away that it was a mistake, she says, and divorced soon afterwards.
Neither - it will come as little surprise - could she accept the hijab. "As a symbol it is something I reject completely, because by wearing a scarf you consider yourself to be half a man. You accept that the sight of your hair can excite people. And that makes women scared - the only subject you can think of is where is the position of the fucking scarf on your head: is it at the front or two centimetres further back? Can you think about the crucial issues, like what you want in your life? No, because you are under constant pressure." She wore it in Iran, however, because "it is better to be alive".
Eventually, in 1994, her mother told her to go. "She said, 'You came back once, I don't permit you to come back again. You just put this idea out of your head.'" So she went to Strasbourg to study art.
Satrapi is now married again, to a Swede she met in a bar at last orders. They are fantastically happy, she says, though she is anxious to stress that she doesn't believe in marriage as an institution. "I am anti all sorts of conventions. For me, everybody is free to do whatever they want to do. I can do whatever I want." Except, perhaps, return to Iran, even to visit - she is fearful of the authorities' reaction to her book.
But Iran remains her home, she says, and so she will not naturalise as French or anything else, even though when we speak she is having problems getting a visa for a book tour to the US: "We are the axis of evil, you know."
Persepolis, she says, despite everything, is a love story for her country. "I did it because so many people died in my country, because of politics, wars, internal policies. Nobody ever talks about these things. I couldn't live with that idea. I have found myself with a flat, a man, parties, a life of freedom in a city where I want to live, and the person I am now is the result of everything I have known. I owe something to the people who have given their blood in my country for freedom. So I had to do this book. I cannot leave their story."
I have worn a hijab, and it was a question of survival. When I was 10 the revolution happened in Iran, where I lived, and from that point I was forced to wear the veil. If I hadn't done it, I would have been jailed.
That is why I am absolutely opposed to the veil. Forcing women to put a piece of material on their head is an act of violence, and even if you get used to it after a while, the violence of insisting that women must cover their heads in public with a small piece of cloth does not diminish.
But I also think that to forbid girls from wearing the veil, as the government of France is considering doing, is to be every bit as repressive. Yesterday a government-commissioned report recommended that all "conspicuous" signs of religious belief - including the hijab - should be outlawed in state schools.
I passionately believe that the young women who have been expelled from school for wearing a veil should have the freedom to choose. It is surely a basic human right that someone can choose what she wears without interference from the state.
Critics argue that it is not the girls themselves who want to wear the veil, rather they are forced to do so by their parents. But if that is the case, if these are the kind of parents who will force their daughters to wear a veil, they are probably the kind of parents who will be happy to withdraw them from school and then to marry them off to a distant cousin at 15 with whom they will bear five children. If we want to give these girls any chance of emancipation, any chance that one day they will decide for themselves that they don't want to wear the veil, it will come from education. It will certainly not come from being withdrawn by their families.
It amazes me that so little of the debate here in France has centred round the ages of the girls in question. The fact is, they are adolescents, and when you are adolescent if you are told you cannot do something, you will surely do it. So it could become a fashion - worse, a symbol of rebellion. If wearing a veil becomes your symbol of rebellion, then you certainly know about irony! Scarily, these women might come to believe that they are asserting their freedom, not their oppression.
When I was a student in Iran, I did so many forbidden things just because they were forbidden. Now these schoolgirls are going to wear the viel just because it will be forbidden. I know what it felt like to be pushed into being religious, so I know what it must be like to be pushed into being secular. Let's not make the same mistake that the fanatics made with the Iranian women. It is the same violence. I can be as opposed to the veil as I am, but I am also a defender of human rights.
We need to explain to young women that this interpretation of the Koran is a very masculine interpretation. It is time for women to read the holy book themselves, to interpret it themselves and to realise that the holy texts can be interpreted in so many different ways. Why has it been interpreted in this way? This is what these women need to ask.
But are we putting our finger on the real problem? Aren't we simply scared of Islam, and of talking about Islam? Instead of having an open debate about the religion, France wants to ban a symbol of Islam.
It is important to consider what has happened in this country (France). In the 1970s, women who had come from North Africa didn't wear a veil, but now their daughters want to. Why? The answer is these people may be French, but they have to live in the suburbs where there is cheaper housing, without good jobs, without equal opportunities, and they have no other way to express their identity than through their religious identity. The problem is not the veil, it is their exclusion from society.
I have been incredibly surprised by the reaction of French feminists, who have publicly campaigned for the banning of "this visible symbol of the submission of women". The western woman is so entranced by the idea that her emancipation comes from the miniskirt that she is convinced that if you have something on your head you are nothing. The women who are forced to wear the veil, and the women who are portrayed naked to sell everything from car tyres to orange juice, are both facing a form of oppression. But for me, anything that uses the language of banning is wrong.
The example of Iran is a good one. When the father of the last Shah of Iran became king in the 1930s, he banned the veil. It was probably a good thing because many women who believed that if they removed it they would be turned to stone, realised that they wouldn't. After one or two generations it became more accepted. But why was the Islamic Revolution able to overturn that, to force everyone to wear a veil, so quickly? It was because in Iran we wanted to force through a whole social revolution overnight.
Today in Iran everyone is increasingly in support of secularity and democracy. Women now wear the tiniest peice of material on their heads, and they are ready to remove that, when they are eventually permitted. In Iran, 63% of students are now girls; society has changed completely. It has been another revolution. But it has happened in their own time.
Everywhere I go the first thing anyone wants to talk to me about is women's veils in Iran. And I ask them, if tomorrow we take off the veil, will the problems of which it is a symbol be solved? Will these women suddenly become equal and emancipated? The answer is no.
'The Guardian' - 14 May 2003: Esther Addley
By the time she was six, Marjane Satrapi knew she wanted to be a prophet. Girls didn't become prophets, she knew, but there seemed to be so many things wrong with the world - the family maid had to eat in another room, for instance, her father had a Cadillac when lots of people didn't have a car at all and her grandmother's knees ached all the time. Growing up in Tehran, she had already drawn up her own prophet rule book: old people suffering, she decided, would simply be forbidden.
Then, in 1979, when Satrapi was 10, the Iranian revolution began. She was forced to leave her coeducational French school and attend one for girls only, and had to wear a veil at all times in public. Her beloved uncle was executed by the fundamentalist government on spying charges; her mother was forced to dye her hair and wear a disguise after protesting against the imposition of the veil.
Soon the family was dodging missiles when war broke out with Iraq. Satrapi's parents, fearful for the safety of their outspoken and rebellious daughter, sent her into exile at the age of 14, to live in Austria with a friend of her mother.
This month, Persepolis, her tale of this remarkable childhood, is published in English for the first time. It is an extraordinary book, outspoken and caustic on the suffering of so many of her fellow Iranians, but also funny and surprising and in parts extremely moving. It is told in graphic novel form, in stark monochrome drawings reminiscent of medieval woodcuts or ancient Persian murals.
Satrapi is now 33 and lives in Paris. She wrote Persepolis, she says, partly so that she didn't have to keep retelling the same crazy story. But it was also an attempt to put the record straight, she says, to correct assumptions about Iran that, despite all she had witnessed, she knew to be unfair: the notion that everyone was a religious fanatic, for instance, or that all Iranian women were cowed and submissive, or the assumption that her people in Iran were essentially different from Europeans.
Thus we see Satrapi and her classmates' bemused irreverence when first told they must don headscarves; later they are suspended en masse when someone greets their teacher's paean to the country's soldier martyrs with a muttered "Poo-poo". Her uncle, the family vintner, produces gallons of wine for clandestine parties with the help of his cleaning lady, who crushes the grapes underfoot in the bath while chanting furiously, "God forgive me, God forgive me."
In another episode, the teenaged Satrapi, dressed proudly in a denim jacket and sneakers that her parents have smuggled in from Turkey, buys two cassette tapes, by Kim Wilde and Camel, from an illegal street vendor. She is stopped by the "Guardians of the Revolution, Women's Branch", and interrogated about her "punk" clothing. The young teenager narrowly talks herself out of being arrested and beaten; later, back home and unable to tell her mother what has happened, she can only mosh furiously in her bedroom to The Kids in America, cranked up to full volume.
Such small revolutions are commonplace in her home country, she says, even if we never hear of them. "Do you think, in that society, if a woman has a scarf on her head she is not rebellious?" She scoffs. "Year by year, in Iran, women show a centimetre more hair, a centimetre less scarf. In my family I am the only brown-haired one now, because everyone, under their scarf, is blonde, they have bleached their hair. They have this bright pink lipstick, and prop their breasts up as high as they can, and that is their rebellion. I once saw a girl who shaved her head and wore a big jacket so that they would think she was a man - all so she could drive her car. That was her way of not wearing a scarf on her head."
She is captivated by the irony of her family in Iran telling her, a western feminist dressed in black T-shirt, flared skirt and wedge-heeled sandals, that she looks like a nun and should wear more make-up and dress less modestly.
Persepolis ends with Satrapi's anguished parting from her parents at the airport, but this is not the end of the story. Two further volumes are already planned, telling of her equally traumatic teenage years growing up in exile. She ended up living on the streets in Austria, then with a hippy community, before returning, aged 18, to her parents in Iran. But though she enrolled at university in Tehran to study art, Satrapi says that she realised almost immediately that she could not stay. Her life became defined by her small-scale rebellions.
"Take alcohol, for example. I don't like to drink, but in Iran at university, a friend of mine at noon always had vodka on her. So we drank vodka. I was prepared to die to do that. We knew that if they caught us they would kill us. The human is like that." She married her boyfriend - "because I couldn't do anything with him, we couldn't go to a hotel, it was forbidden" - but they knew straight away that it was a mistake, she says, and divorced soon afterwards.
Neither - it will come as little surprise - could she accept the hijab. "As a symbol it is something I reject completely, because by wearing a scarf you consider yourself to be half a man. You accept that the sight of your hair can excite people. And that makes women scared - the only subject you can think of is where is the position of the fucking scarf on your head: is it at the front or two centimetres further back? Can you think about the crucial issues, like what you want in your life? No, because you are under constant pressure." She wore it in Iran, however, because "it is better to be alive".
Eventually, in 1994, her mother told her to go. "She said, 'You came back once, I don't permit you to come back again. You just put this idea out of your head.'" So she went to Strasbourg to study art.
Satrapi is now married again, to a Swede she met in a bar at last orders. They are fantastically happy, she says, though she is anxious to stress that she doesn't believe in marriage as an institution. "I am anti all sorts of conventions. For me, everybody is free to do whatever they want to do. I can do whatever I want." Except, perhaps, return to Iran, even to visit - she is fearful of the authorities' reaction to her book.
But Iran remains her home, she says, and so she will not naturalise as French or anything else, even though when we speak she is having problems getting a visa for a book tour to the US: "We are the axis of evil, you know."
Persepolis, she says, despite everything, is a love story for her country. "I did it because so many people died in my country, because of politics, wars, internal policies. Nobody ever talks about these things. I couldn't live with that idea. I have found myself with a flat, a man, parties, a life of freedom in a city where I want to live, and the person I am now is the result of everything I have known. I owe something to the people who have given their blood in my country for freedom. So I had to do this book. I cannot leave their story."