My best friend Ben is currently attending University of Pittsburgh in the United States. We frequently send letters back and forth across countries, just to check in and mail each other university gear or gifts, etc. This past week he sent me a letter telling me about a restaurant in Pittsburgh called the Conflict Kitchen. The restaurant only serves food from the country in which the US is currently in conflict with, and the country rotates every few months. Currently, the country is Cuba, and in the past they have done Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Iran. The Iranian version is what stuck out most to me because of our recent class readings of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Hillary Chute’s critical analysis of the book.

The restaurant organized a traditional Iranian menu and several events around the politics Iran-US conflict. The restaurant invited Iranians around the world to write part of a speech that they would like President Obama to deliver to Iran. The ideas were composed into a solitary speech which was then presented by an Obama look-alike around Pittsburgh. The introduction to the speech stuck out most to me:

“As President of the United States of America, I am well aware of the mistakes we have made in regards to your country. You struggles for you freedom and democracy for decades and when it was finally being achieved in the early 1950’s, we orchestrated, organized, and financed a military coup to overthrow your elected government and bring back the Shah who ruled the country with an iron fist for over a quarter of a century more… That is the legacy of the United States in Iran, and the main factor that led to your uprising in 1979.”

This passage provides context to the sentiments expressed in Satrapi’s writing. While Western culture was idealized and worshipped, I now recognize a sense of bitter irony when she wrote about parents’ involvement in the Iranian revolution. The United States has not only been involved in Iranian affairs for the past half-century, but also is responsible for the corrupt regimes that which internally destabilized the country for decades to come, including during Satrapi’s childhood. Perhaps Satrapi doesn’t explicitly blame the US, but the Conflict Kitchen’s Iran Speech provides some historical international background information that is left out in the graphic novel.

Relatedly, Satrapi maintains a very unique social position during the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. I can appreciate that the Iran Speech puts other voices into context, and perhaps dissonant ones in relation to Satrapi’s. Her childhood character idolizes Western culture and media and seems to have little knowledge of its political responsibility for the country’s dishevelment. In her teenage years, she left Iran to attend boarding school in Europe and was therefore absent from later international involvement and trauma. Comparatively, the voices expressed in the speech have a significant distrust and dislike for the United States because of its corrupt political intricacies with Iran from the latter half of the twentieth century until today.

Ultimately, not only is the Conflict Kitchen a tremendously creative and impactful idea, but it provides insight and context to current and past international conflicts by bringing forth real-time opinions to the public sphere. Most of what we hear comes from the news, but the Conflict Kitchen spotlights individual voices and their sentiments from the other side of the conflict and in doing so shapes an unconventional national identity.