Chicken with Plums

Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken With Plums tells the story of her great-uncle Nasser Ali Khan’s love and death. Satrapi is more well-known for her groundbreaking memoir Persepolis. This text is smaller in focus, but maintains her style from the memoir and her love for her country and culture.The novel begins with a clear sense of Khan’s depression reaching a breaking point, and he decides to go to bed and refuses to eat for eight days. Over the course of those days, readers explore Satrapi’s representations of the depression and thoughts that come from starvation. The sixth day brings the angel of death to Khan, reminiscent of Satrapi’s childhood conversations with God and Marx. 

Given that the novel is about a real person and his death, it makes sense to think of the text as nonfiction. However, readers are wise to consider how Satrapi knows his experience. Is she piecing the narrative together from family stories? Given his fame as a tar player, there are historical documents surrounding his life and death. Satrapi in an interview with the Stanford Iranian Studies program addresses that she builds on the realities and adds in details for her own interests in telling an Iranian love story. Is this creative nonfiction or should it be considered historical fiction?

While Satrapi in her interview is concerned with love in the story, the realities of mental health overwhelmed me in the text. It represents a different cultural view of death and mental health, but giving a character the space to really explore their mental anguish feels valuable. Unlike some representations of suicide that glorify the tragedy or blame others, Satrapi’s work feels more ambivalent about Khan’s realities and his choices. I’m still torn on how to think about his death and the representation of his mental health. But usually when I’m unsure of how to feel about a text, it means that it is a great text for a class discussion.