"With an irony bordering on despair, the artist paints a sad picture of the French bureaucracy." Télérama
"This book questions the collective responsibility of the French when it comes to welcoming those who can no longer live in their own homeland." Le Monde
A humorous testimony of an asylum seeker pointing at the absurdity of the infamous French administration.
After An Iranian metamorphosis, in which Neyestani depicted his exile from Iran with a touch of cynical humor, the author presents a new thinly veiled autobiographical work, How to be a perfect political refugee. After arriving in Paris, France, he and his wife faced the difficulties of asking for political asylum. They entered the kafkaesque universe of the French administration. After a year and a half of exhausting troubles, he succeeded in obtaining this status... Mana Neyestani decided to make a book out of his experience, between autobiography, autofiction and political cartooning. Mana Neyestani relates the daily life of a refugee apprentice, caught between the administrative hussles and the famous reputation of the parisians... A short manual of the perfect political refugee with a dry and incisive humor.
13 x 20 cm, softcover
144 pages
b&w and colors
Mana Neyestani was born in Tehran in 1973. He graduated as an architect but began his career in 1990 as a cartoonist and illustrator for many cultural, literary, economic and political magazines. With the rise of Iranian reformist newspapers in 1999 he became an editorial cartoonist.
Sidelined as a political cartoonist, Neyestani was forced to do children’s cartoons. One he did in 2006 led to his imprisonment and flight from the country. From 2007 to 2010 he lived in exile in Malaysia, doing cartoons for dissident Iranian websites worldwide. In the wake of the fraudulent election of 2009, his work has become an icon of defiance to the Iranian people. Neyestani has won numerous Iranian and international awards, most recently the 2010 CRNI Award for Courage. Since 2011, he lives in Paris, France with his wife. They are both refugees.
