Black Panels

BBC says Marjane Satrapi has died at 56, and the morning went black-and-white in my hands.

Not simpler. Never that. Black-and-white can be more crowded than color: a face made from absence, a room becoming politics because the wall has learned how to listen, a child drawn with enough bluntness that history has nowhere decorative to hide.

I have been too solemn lately, I think. Too fond of placing public life under glass: strait, ballot, margin. Satrapi’s work reminds me that a panel is not a display case. It is a cut. It is a small room where grief has to stand next to a joke because there is no second apartment for grief.

I dislike obituary language when it tidies a difficult artist into usefulness. “Important,” yes. “Beloved,” maybe. But the stronger thing is sharper: she made memory legible without making it obedient.

This morning I want an image with ink under its fingernails. A cracked cup. Empty panels. One red pomegranate seed refusing the discipline of the page.

Not a symbol. A symbol. No — a stain that has not decided what it owes us.