Watching one of the nicest people in their team shout, “Hell is other people!”, with all her force day in and day out, had made nearly all of them think deeply about the very act of living in a world with other people.
In short, these young women were tired. A consensus emerged: Their next play should be “light”, perhaps even a comedy. Someone suggested an adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which had made both graphic novels and feminism a little more palatable to the mainstream — no ordinary feat. However, that suggestion was vetoed. After all, who had the budget for an elaborate production? All the women could manage was something sparse, like No Exit. That’s when someone had the brilliant idea of Embroideries, another graphic novel by Satrapi, which had feminism and womanhood as its central themes.
I hadn’t heard of Satrapi until then, but promptly fell in love with her at first panel. True, there was unrestrained rage and frustration in her work, but there was also space for humour and the warmth of sisterhood. Satrapi did not just recreate the act of being a woman in a setting she was familiar with.
She translated it into a universal language through her simple drawings that packed a punch, and, of course, through the sharp-as-a-razor accompanying dialogue.
Anyway, these college women, some barely out of teenage and some still there, set themselves the ambitious task of adapting Embroideries into the Indian context, starting with changing the setting from Tehran to Lucknow. Then came the finer nuances: What scenes would make sense in a typical Indian household; what needed to be tweaked; and what needed to be let go of completely.
The debates were intense, but not more than the introspection that came as a result of probing Satrapi’s text and images. I’m confident that even for a casual reader, the world she created resonated with the world within. For us, who were seeking to make her characters ours, it was a constant revelation of feelings and phenomena we knew existed but never had words for. For example, while writing and rehearsing the scenes where different generations of women come together over tea, we realised how generational trauma operates; we realised how the legacy of women who came before us influenced us, protected us, and made us stronger.
There were also epiphanies about sisterhood and about how easy it is to take on a world designed to keep us out if we have our support systems in place. Moreover, the process of adapting a Tehran-based play into one in Lucknow made us realise how women’s struggles — both the everyday and the revolutionary — are often the same everywhere. True solidarity can only come from a place of empathy and creativity, both of which Satrapi infused her pages with.
The webs Embroideries weaved around us unleashed a new kind of creative ambition in us, while teaching us lessons in a way no textbook could have (and trust me, they tried!). We ultimately never got to perform the play because other things got in the way, as they tend to, but the novel and our attempt to adapt it for stage became a canon text for all our lives.
Satrapi is no more. She passed away earlier this month “of sadness”, her family said, a little over a year after her husband’s death. The literary world mourned the loss of one of its greatest exponents of the graphic novel form, and also of someone who helped make Iranian literature more prominent in the English-speaking world. At a personal level, her women shaped women like me, imbuing us with the confidence and the curiosity to embrace life as it comes.
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