‘To live, it is not enough to be alive’: Marjane Satrapi believed one could die of ‘sadness’, just like her great uncle in Chicken with Plums
Twenty years before she died "of sadness" following the loss of her husband, the Persepolis author created a character who simply decided to stop living. He, too, died of sadness.
Marjane Satrapi's death was announced on June 4. (AP File Photo) Can someone die of sadness? Marjane Satrapi’s family certainly believe the Iranian-born French graphic novelist and Oscar-winning filmmaker died of a broken heart, a year after her husband of three decades Mattias Ripa passed away. While doctors weigh in on whether it is medically possible or not, anybody who has read her 2009 novel Chicken with Plums, which was also adapted into a live-action film, will know that Satrapi certainly believed that one could simply pass on after losing their raison d’être.
Much like Persepolis, her debut novel, Chicken with Plums, is a memoir, this time of her great uncle, Nasser Ali Khan, who upon losing his reason for existing simply decided to get in bed and die, and passed away through sheer will on the eighth day. They say a person’s life flashes before their eyes before they die, and so Satrapi takes us on a journey following her great uncle from the day he decided to die, to the day his wish was fulfilled, along the way giving us glimpses of standout moments in his life and in Iran’s history (especially the coup d’etat) , the ones that moulded his life and disposition. In the end, at least this reader felt he had truly died of sadness.
A vignette from Marjane Satrapi’s 2009 novel Chicken with Plums. (Marjane Satrapi/Pantheon)
The death of an artist
Why he was sad is another matter altogether. Most people who attended his funeral would have said that he lost his will to live after his tar, an Iranian string instrument, he was a renowned master of, was broken by his wife. He travelled far hoping to replace it, but it never sounded right. Others might have pointed out that as an artist he was prone to depressive episodes. Both would have been right, except Satrapi’s vignettes indicate that he died after his muse–a woman he had loved but whose father would not give her hand to a musician–abadoned him. In her retelling of this family chronicle, her great uncle’s musical prowess stemmed from his broken heart and the pain of an unfulfilled love story. But, as fate would have it, the day he went to replace his tar, he ran into her, only to find out that she did not recognise him!
‘To live, it is not enough to be alive’
The sadness was so intense that he lost all pleasures of life, including his music and his mother’s recipe of plum chicken. “I have lost my ability to taste, savour and enjoy,” he ruminates. Not just her great uncle, but his favourite daughter, his mother, and even a character in Persepolis, left their mortal coil wilfully smoking cigarettes on their death beds till their hearts gave up, because they understood that “to live, it is not enough to be alive.”
While her family has not revealed the physiological reason of the author’s death, some have interpretted death by “sadness” to mean takotsubo cardiomyopathy or “broken heart syndrome,” a grief-driven temporary weakening of the heart, others have pointed out that Satrapi was no stranger to depression. In Persepolis, she narrates an incident where she was almost successful in taking her own life.
Her final Instagram posts were a series of heartfelt, fragmented updates, a tribute to her late husband, that spelled out: “Because I have lost the love of my life.”
We lost Satrapi too soon. She was only 56.
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