Against against Satrapi & Persepolis: Defending non-ideal criticisms of your oppressors
Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French author of Persepolis (comic book + film), recently died. An occasional criticism of Satrapi and/or Persepolis is that she oversimplifies and strawmans the nature of the sexism she faced in Iran, a country which is frequently subjected to allegations of barbarism as a pretext for Western imperialist intervention and warmongering. While I think this is less-than-ideal, I’m not convinced Satrapi did anything wrong or blameworthy or unreasonable.
Satrapi’s society was taken over by extreme sexism and Islamic fundamentalism! The significant role of the US, the UK, and Israel doesn’t change this fact or make it okay–it might make it even worse. Satrapi was victimized by it as a woman and a non-fundamentalist. Why shouldn’t she depict things as they appeared to her, and as they happened to her? Why shouldn’t she express how she feels about it?
Americans who are subjected to oppressive religionism, such as women and queer people and nonbelievers in religious communities, also often oversimplify and even strawman the ideologies behind oppressive religionism. American victims often fail to give full credit to the intellectual sophistication of (say) the patriarchal and anti-queer New Natural Law Theorists or the complex sociological history of how traditionalist attitudes have been culturally interwoven into broader religious perspectives. But, while I personally may recoil a bit as a weirdo philosopher who wants to be gratuitously charitable to the nuances of oppressive ideologies, still, surely these people are doing nothing wrong in simply depicting the ideologies which oppress them as they appear to them in their own lives and experiences.
And if American queer people and women are morally entitled to exercise less-than-maximal interpretive charity in depicting and attacking the ideologies that oppress them (e.g. neglecting to painstakingly put them in proper cultural-historical-intellectual context on multiple levels of analysis, etc.), then why shouldn’t an Iranian woman get to do the same?
If Satrapi somewhat strawmanned or caricatured Iranian sexist ideologues who subjected her to sexist mistreatment, failed to be charitable toward their sophisticated rationales for patriarchy and fundamentalism, and failed to maximally safeguard her depictions against Orientalist appropriation, is this really so bad? Note that Persepolis is primarily an autobiography and does NOT purport to be a work of sociology or anthropology or history or other scholarship. Also note that her style caricatures pretty much everyone, not only Islamic fundamentalists or hardliner hijabis or what-have-you.
Suppose a Black American woman or gay man wrote about their own experiences with Black sexism or homophobia. Some scholars, like Tommy Curry, have compellingly argued that Black American sexism and homophobia have been exaggerated, as well as weaponized toward racist ends, including by colonialist feminism. Yet surely Black women and gay people are still morally entitled to speak to their own experiences, even if this entails a non-zero risk of bad-faith or biased actors weaponizing their stories. Similarly, an Iranian woman, or a minority from any colonized or imperialized community or society, is also entitled to speak to their own experiences. They are under no obligation to self-censor for the sake of the anti-imperialist movements.
This does not mean they are above scrutiny or criticism, however. Nobody is. I can buy that maybe Satrapi should have more clearly condemned Western intervention in the modern day or avoided some objectionable statements. However, I note she did condemn the Iraq War, and many of Bush’s statements. And I note that in Persepolis, she did condemn the West (the US and UK) for overthrowing Iran's democratically elected leader Mossadegh. And she condemned the West for selling weapons to both Iraq and Iran during the Iraq-Iran war, indeed in fairly strong terms (iirc).
Maybe she should have still made more condemnations of Western intervention. I also think it’s worth asking, how much does someone who has been oppressed have an obligation to condemn unjustified attacks on their oppressors? I don't think this is obvious. If Satrapi's politics were sufficiently bad then it would merit re-analyzing Persepolis, but I haven't seen reason to think this is the case.
