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WOMAN - LIFE - FREEDOM

Iran women's protests are the focus of 'Persepolis' author Marjane Satrapi's new book

April 27, 2024 "Spanish artist Patricia Bolaños says she thought it was a prank when she got an email about working on the project with the famed author of Persepolis. It was only when Satrapi got in touch herself that she believed it. Bolaños, who lives in New York, says Persepolis is one of her favorite graphic novels but she knew little about Iran. / So she worked with one of the project's Iran scholars to illustrate the book's chapter on the "Aghazadeh," or noble-born, a term connoting nepotism and corruption that's used to describe the children of Iran's elite, its ruling mullahs and Revolutionary Guards. //

Bolaños says she was inspired by one of their Instagram accounts, "Rich Kids of Tehran," which showed the Aghazadeh wearing bikinis on French Riviera beaches, drinking alcohol and partying.

"It was really scary because these are the kids of those setting the rules, but they don't follow the rules," she says. "For me, it was like, how is this possible? Especially for the women. These kids are perpetuating this corrupt system. And at certain moments they have to collide with this other world of other women fighting and dying for freedom."

Bolaños wanted to know what those moments are like. The last cartoon in her chapter shows a stylish Aghazadeh checking her Instagram account. "She watches videos of women burning veils and yelling 'freedom,'" says Bolaños, "and the reader sees it reflected in her sunglasses. And someone asks her, what are you watching? And she says... nothing."

READ MORE https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/articles/jerry-seinfeld-on-making-a-life-in-comedy-and-also-pop-tarts

Elica Le Bon